Understories by Tim Horvath
My rating: 4/5 cats
tim horvath is an author who is enamored with language and conceptual gymnastics. i am in love with half of those things.
so, i did not get as dewy-eyed, or dewy-glansed as mfso, just because of my difficulty with abstractions. i have one. i am fine with magical realism, but some of the more philosophical abstractions and metafictional efforts just fray my patience. for example, Altered Native; 16 numbered paragraphs about paul gaugin, did nothing for me, apart from make me curious about walrus erotica. i am just a simple soul, and i didn’t understand what that story was hoping to achieve. it’s not bad, it’s just one of those things that is “not for me.” i am a fan of pure storytelling, where the writerly flourishes enhance the story, but are not standing in for the story.
however, Runaroundandscreamalot! was superb, and completely for me!
Her son inverts the chalk and begins a series of stabs at the dragon, yelling, “Die! Die!”
“Hanh, Hanh,” she calls out—he sees the kid’s tagged his name in giant letters next to the dragon—and she shoots Pete a look which he interprets as “Respect me in spite of and possibly a bit more for my son’s crazed rambunctious streak?” And he tries to shrug and nod in a way that conveys “Hey, just us parents in here, all figuring out this parent thing together.” Since becoming a dad he talks less and gestures more, and he wonders if this is the case for all parents, too fatigued to form words, but able to speak volumes in a shrug, a twitch.
also:
…he sees that her T-shirt exposes if not her actual nipples, then at the very least a brassiere that implies nipples in the sense that boarded-up windows in a building strongly indicate poverty or the aftermath of a fire.
this particular story is full of astute observations about parental love, post-divorce dating, and our perception of spam emails. and it is funny to boot. it is probably the least playful of the stories, structurally, but definitely the one most concerned with the verb/noun of “play.”
there are other standouts:
Urban Planning: Case Study Number Five, describing a city of gourmands which has fallen on hard times. it recounts their glorious beginnings,
An ethos began to take hold with unspoken rules. Don’t try to compete with your neighbor—don’t try to one-up him on his most popular dishes, steal her secret recipes, mimic their decor. Be different, strive for uniqueness, and eventually people will line up at your door. If offered the choice between Cerignolas and Luganos, it is human nature to choose one type of olive on Monday and another on Tuesday, but if faced with seven brands of Kalamata, they’ll gravitate toward one jar and cling to it. Hence, you had to be nonredundant. This ensured that you could get not only Chinese but also Mandarin, Szechuan, Guayadongian; not just Indian but Navratan, Gujarati; not merely Moroccan but that indigenous to the town of Tafroute; the cuisines of Tasmania, Ganzoneer, Tibet, Raedmeon, Argentina, El Salvador, Vitamora, and Morrisania were all readily available.
it is heartbreaking to witness the decline of such a perfect-to-me sounding city.
but they will not go gentle:
At first, they attempted to occupy, but this proved impractical. Their soldiers came in with their bland tinned rations, and we fought back the only way we knew how, with spices we’d stockpiled for generations. Hot sauces, so far off the scale of Scoville units that the word atomic wasn’t mere hyperbole, found its way into their meals. Prunes that seemed to explode in the intestinal tract. Glass noodles containing actual bits of glass.
this is why i love this book; he has a knack for creating these worlds wherein strange and beautiful occurrences exist alongside social commentaries and recognizable observations.
The Conversations might be the best of these—the difficulties of communication ramped up a notch where fear of death-by-explosion stifles even the most basic of conversations, and the final page is just a wonderful explosion of words itself.
many of these stories are treasures, which you should discover, even if occasionally, for me, the ideas got ahead of the story.
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