xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths by Kate Bernheimer
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book is a collection of stories by authors i have read before, authors whose books i own but have never gotten around to actually reading, and authors i have never heard of before.
and like all anthologies, this is a good way to get a crash course on the lot of them. but also true of anthologies, it is a mixed bag in terms of “their appeal to me,” of course keeping in my mind that when authors are asked to write within a particular theme, it might not be a true introduction to their general work. but i get the gist.
the theme of this anthology is NOT authors rewriting the orpheus myth with their own spin, as i had assumed it was when i did the old netgalley “gimmie” click, but rather it is an exploration of how classical myths can be used as commentary on modern society, and how they function in our current climate. it is a companion book to the earlier (owned-but-unread by me) book, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, which did a similar thing for fairy tales.
in the introduction, bernheimer proposes that classical myths endure because they harken back to a time when gods were very much a part of the daily lives of the populace, and as we became more “godless,” myths echoed back to us from a place of lost power and transcendence. How far had we fallen? How lonely we were in a world without gods!
however, in our current “age of the anthropocene,” we have ourselves become like the destructive gods, transforming our world and our ecology, and not for the better.
With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we’ve managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature.
these stories, then, are our new myths, for the new age “with humans as gods.”
and it’s mostly a bleak outpouring.
Oh, you may find a whimsical story here and there in the bunch, and you might be struck by the violence, too. Yet “XO” Orpheus wrote to his beloved, and “good-bye” this book says to the old relationship of literature and myth to the human. Even the whimsical stories in here, even the most violent ones, reveal a gaping anxiety, a primal fear, leading to sadness about what we have done.
some are takes on familiar myths like icarus, and some, like baucis and philemon, were entirely new to me.
i’m not going to go too in-depth with my opinions and assessments of each story, because that would be a really long and probably boring review, but i do want to just jot down a couple of pithy impressions from each for my own purposes
Anthropogenesis, Or: How to Make a Family by Laura van den Berg
a lovely and surreal story spotlighting the more destructive and problematic aspects of love and parenthood.
Argos by Joy Williams
this one is about odysseus’ hound. an absolute heartbreaker of a story, and i loved it to pieces.
The Sisters by Sabina Murray
this is basically girls gone wild with emily dickinson. not with-with emily dickinson, mind you… but i do like a good girl-gang story.
Sawdust by Edward Carey
this story is haunting and actually quite lovely. it is exactly the right balance between the two, and was what i loved when i read Observatory Mansions. he is so very good at tone and atmosphere. this one came a little close to “too surreal” for me, but it is a myth, right? that’s to be expected. i would love to see this published on its own as a children’s picture book. i would so pay for that.
Friend Robin by Maile Chapman
this was more like a slow-drawn psychological horror story, and another great one for the mother-adult daughter dynamic.
The Veiled Prophet by David B.
this is the only sequential-art piece in the book. i have never really responded to david b’s illustrations, but the story was nice and creepy, with a really solid ending.
Henry and Booboo by Elanor Dymott
oh my god, kids, right?? they are little monsters. this is a sharp little coming-of-age piece that makes me super-glad i just bought her novel Every Contact Leaves a Trace and i am really looking forward to reading her long-form.
Modern Coyotes by Shane Jones
super creepy. i’m not sure what else to say about it. it is very good, and very surprising – the threat does not come from where you think it will and it ends with an astonishingly visual episode.
Devourings by Aimee Bender
pssssh – i had already read this story in her new collection The Color Master: Stories, but while it wasn’t my favorite in that or this book, it is still very good. she does the magical realism stuff really well; keeping it very human and grounded even when writing about ogres.
Labyrinth by Ron Currie Jr.
a bleak little story about fathers and sons, and that frequently problematic but so profoundly affecting relationship.
The Last Flight of Daedalus by Anthony Marra
this one i was not crazy about, although i love the idea of following the icarus myth through to “what came next?” it’s a perfectly good story, and the ending is very touching, but for some reason, overall it didn’t leave much of an impression on me.
Daphne by Dawn Raffel
this one is great – and it is a perfect explanation-story for a particular urban phenomenon. loved it.
Demeter by Maile Meloy
this is the first of two persephone-retold-as-child-custody stories. this one is from the mother’s perspective, title-duh, and is about loneliness and the distance between younger-self expectations and present-day realities and reminded me of my favorite parts of Cat’s Eye, which to me was always better as an aging and “betrayal of the body” story than a “bullying/girls as social manipulators” story. this was one of the more hopeful stories, and i really liked it.
Kid Collins by Willy Vlautin
yeah, i really gotta read more of this guy. this is exactly the kind of stuff i like when i am in “grit lit” mode. i don’t entirely see it as a reverse-persephone story (oh, so i guess that makes it three stories that riff off that myth, i had forgotten this one) but the story itself is just the right mix of downtrodden and possibility with no supernatural element whatsoever. very very solid.
Sleeping Beauty by Gina Ochsner
i think how much you like this one depends on what kind of a person you are. some might read this as a pure love story, but i’m a little cynical and i found it unstable. it starts out as a story of orphan outrage and ends in love? maybe? there’s something about its surface-prettiness that i mistrust, so i am choosing to read it darker than it might actually be.
Galatea by Madeline Miller
a story of captivity and helplessness and motherhood and sacrifice that still managed to be funny at times.
The Hand Manuel Muñoz
i was not in love with this one, but i really liked what he has to say at the end, in the space where the authors get to talk about their inspiration or their stylistic decisions: Where I grew up, God and Satan were treated as real. They made frequent appearances in oral stories. Hearing about them was like a promise: sooner or later, they would prove themselves to be not myths at all.
The Dummy by Benjamin Percy
i feel like this would make a really good x-file. actually, come to think of it – a lot of these would. someone tell someone who can make these things happen. more x-files, but the good standalone ones, none of those long-form alien colonization storylines that take up too much time.
The Girl with the Talking Shadow by Kate Bernheimer
this one would make a terrible x-file. but it is still a good supernatural cautionary tale with a tinge of madness and each and every one of the real horrors that girls endure.
Wait and See by Edith Pearlman
i wanted to like this one, but it just kind of left me cold. the idea of human pentachromaticity is pretty interesting, though. just… not to my taste overall
An Occasional Icarus by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
same with this one. these were both well-written stories, but i just couldn’t get into them for whatever reason. oops. karenfail.
Killcrop by Victor LaValle
ah, but THIS one. this was probably my favorite in the whole collection. just really freaky-creepy, and so helpless-feeling with the most chilling final line ever. much love
The Squid Who Fell in Love With the Sun by Ben Loory
this story is pretty much in keeping with all the stories i have read of his – they are great little fables that do the sad/happy blend really well. i would like a stuffed squid, please.
Birdsong From the Radio by Elizabeth McCracken
another quiet little piece about the hunger of motherhood. i particularly liked her line in the notes that
grief contains both prey and predator, fear and rage.
The Lotus Eaters by Aurelie Sheehan
this one showcases that wonderful-terrible state of teenage invincibility and self-importance and freedom and mysticism, frequently assisted by outside substances.
Slaves by Elizabeth Evans
a peculiar little story which i didn’t really get, but the atmosphere of it was evocative at least – sexual submissiveness and that grasping for escape/rescue that feels like slippery small-town dreams without really knowing what they are dreams of.
Drona’s Death by Max Gladstone
this one feels the most traditional of all the tales – it doesn’t seem to be trying to speak to the modern age at all, but i liked it, and i appreciated the true-myth feeling of it.
So Many-Headed Gates by Sheila Heti
this one was very slight, but i think it is relatable in its narcotic unspooling of hindsight and missed opportunities and living doggedly, mechanically, with our choices. human condition, indeed.
The Status of Myth by Kelly Braffet and Owen King
this is a bunch of different stories flowing into another, and they are all really good, the “hunter” sequence in particular, playing with the diana/artemis myth. i dunno who is responsible for what, but since braffet’s new book, Save Yourself, has been on my interest-radar for a while, and i do have her other book just sitting here… somewhere, i think i will start there.
Narcissus by Zachary Mason
i liked this story, but i loved his reason for the choice and the manipulation of the source material. this feels like something oscar wilde would appreciate, but it doesn’t have that wilde-wit, it is just a really solid story that is, like so many pieces in this collection, ultimately heartbreaking.
Back to Blandon by Michael Jeffrey Lee
a little prodigal son/odysseus story which again focuses on the father-son relationship and the way we mangle what we mean to say and the fear of disappointing but also about growing up and apart and the experiential divide. with some serious coldness at the end.
The Story I Am Speaking to You Now by Davis Schneiderman
robots. wordplay. humanity. not so much for me.
The Brigadier-General Takes His Final Stand, by James Butt by Imad Rahman
a sort of modern take on the picaresque which is apparently a mash-up of oedipus and icarus, although while i was reading it, i didn’t make that connection, really. mythology is so filled with unhappy families…
Dark Resort by Heidi Julavits
i liked this one a lot, even after i read at the end that she had put a self-imposed constraint upon herself – to not only work within the confines of the orpheus myth, but to also employ the dogme-rules for filmmaking in the story’s construction, if that even makes sense since so many of those rules are for visual and auditory limitations. but whatever, art school nerds, i liked the story a lot, and i loved the energy and even though i roll my eyes at dogme (despite liking a lot of the films), i can’t argue with a sweetly polished story.
Mystery Spot: 95065 by Karen Tei Yamashita
this kind of choppy stream-of-consciousness sensory overload piece is just 100% not for me. next!
Lost Lake by Peter Straub and Emma Straub
this is the other-other persephone-inspired child custody myth, this time from persephone’s, or here, eudora’s perspective. this is one of the longer stories in the collection, and i love the father daughter team-up to write a story that is largely about fathers and daughters. but it is also a haunting coming-of-age/lost-innocence story, and i liked how slowly it unfurled and how densely it was written for a short story.
What Wants My Son by Kevin Wilson
i wanted to like this one more, because i have been wanting to read this dude for a long time, but i am slow on the draw. the story itself isn’t bad, i just didn’t warm to the subject matter – sullen teen meeting for the first time with the ultimate absentee father: helios, and the “i’ll show you!!” attitude of the young. it’s not badly-written, so i’m definitely still going to read his books…eventually.
Thousand by Laird Hunt
same thing here: another author i have been really interested in reading, but the story itself just wasn’t my favorite. this one is really short, too, so that might have contributed to my lukewarm reaction. still going to read him, though, just not into this story.
Belle-Medusa by Manuela Draeger
yeah, this one wasn’t for me, either. am i just getting cranky as i plow through this anthology?? am i just getting too much of the theme? i don’t think so. this one was just very fantasy-styled, and i haven’t gotten into fantasy, really. it’s magical realism without the real. the names, the situations, the atmosphere. for people with those interests and backgrounds, this is probably really great, but despite the often-beautiful phrases spoken into the water, i was not in love.
i got cut off by goodreads. review continued in the comments. not pithy enough, i guess!!
The Swan’s Wife by Aamer Hussein
this is a gorgeous story of male-female friendship with possibilities but also impossibilities. sad and lovely, like its female lead.
it also led me to GIS this painting
Between you and me there is no kinship
which is not at all the way i pictured it, alas, but which is a great phrase nonetheless.
Sanna by Kathryn Davis
family secrets with surprising consequences. deliciously spooky.
Madame Liang by Lutz Bassmann
this is where i realized that Brian Evenson was not a contributor to this collection, just a translator, so in my dismay, i will say nothing about this story except: birrrrrds.
Sissy by Kit Reed
man, this is a great story. cruelty-and-response and completely misplaced parental disappointment. the things we do to please. and the things we do to try to make up for the things we thought would please…
In a Structure Simulating an Owl by Ander Monson
at the start of this piece, i thought i was going to dislike it. it is made up of short, fragmentary paragraphs that seemed more like prose-poetry than cohesive story. but once this thing got going, it became a truly stand-out piece for me and so many of the individual lines were golden, but also the whole rolling conclusion. wow. it was one of those things you feel awful for relating to, like Notes from Underground.
Cat’s Eye by Donaji Olmedo
you would think i would love a werecat story the most! but it was just okay. i might like it more on a second reading.
Betrayal by Sigrid Nunez
wow – this one was perfect. it has all the elements of a traditional fairy tale or myth that are great, but makes it feel so fresh with a kickass o. henry-style ending that i must confess, i did not see coming. this one is a great ball of fun.
A Horse, A Vine by Johanna Skibsrud
a really great ptsd story of revenge and self-delusion from a pretty unreliable narrator about how we manage to fuck up the things that are most important to us.
The Hungers of an Old Language by Brian W. Aldiss
i wasn’t sure about this one at the start, but the ending was such a kick that i ended up loving it. plus, goats.
The White Horse by Sarah Blackman
this one is a kind of apologist take on all those zeus-as-animal-raping-girls stories. it’s both realist and fantastic. in the “fantasy” sense. but also in the “this is fantastic” sense, and it left me totally morally conflicted. a great way to close the collection, yes?
good lord, it takes FOREVER to write were supposed to be short, pithy points-of-reference for fifty stories. i am exhausted. and i have probably exhausted you, if you have made it this far into the review. good thing this book isn’t out until september 24th so you have time to recover.
and in the course of writing this, i realized i liked a lot more of the stories than i realized, so this just got bumped up from three stars to four. thank you, terrifically long review, for showing me my errors!
