A German Picturesque
Selected and Introduced by Ben Marcus
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Haunting in their tone, brilliant in their images––very like fantastic presences moving across glass––the twenty–one fictions in this startling debut collection seem both inexplicably familiar and like no writing we have seen before.
The opening story leads us through a kaleidoscopic series of thoughts and memories around the act of writing a letter. Another, an intricately structured document of documents––household inventories, daily calendars, property deeds, an announcement––suggests the reality overflowing these mundane markers of our lives. Yet another traces the histories of five artifacts, while at the same time slyly assembling five miniature biographical portraits.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reading the 21 runelike stories that comprise Schwartz's debut collection is a bit like eavesdropping: you may not follow the conversation, but you'll certainly overhear something interesting. In these fragmentary, oblique vignettes, unnamed narrators mention mostly unnamed characters, and the relationships among the various theys, shes and hes are often unspecified. Replacing the structure of narrative are some of the pleasures of poetry: cadence, precise and suggestive details. Certain words--"curl," "crease," "hobble"--are almost fondled throughout. Others, such as "veng," "dath" and "pendill," to say nothing of "the rall is toof," seem to be products of Schwartz's imagination. Grouped loosely around the themes of ancestors, boyhood and history, nearly all of these fictions, even those concerning an American childhood, evoke distant times and places, and often the narrators assume the manner of the historian, calling attention to artifacts (coins, manifests, tunics) and reminding us that the past can only be surmised. The title story opens: "The goblet, to begin with." It continues with descriptions of a flag, a confession, a will, a map. The heart of the tale lies in oblique references to a murder in an earlier century, and the possible massacre of a family. In the mysteriously titled "Killies," maiden sisters holiday too peacefully in Spain. "A Grammar" records the sensations of a child in a sickroom. Often the quotidian surface of these stories is broken by a tragedy conveyed as an aside. Clearly this collection is not for those who want a take-charge narrator, but it may intrigue those who prefer their fiction through a glass darkly.
