By relentlessly piling on common slang to describe the approach and eventual explosion of the physical violence and sex it denotes, Melchor makes us see it all at once, in constant winking multivalence: like a taut ribbon of sense flashing in the wind. When combined with the incantatory rhythm of her prose, the effect is a force field of language and text, sound and image, history and politics, desire and pain, that really does feel like coming into contact with an undercurrent of human life. It is a marvelous trick of art, albeit a trick in the same sense that a microscope is a trick of optics. I reckon the best judgment on Fernanda Melchor is still that of her contemporary Guadalupe Nettel: “She makes magic when she writes. She activates, like one who knows a secret code buried in our memory, the primitive cadence of language.” Why would anyone who has lived in this world expect that experience to be anything other than overwhelming, violent, frightening, and leavened if we are lucky by a dark sense of humor and brief flashes of beauty amid ugliness and self-destruction?
Chaon creates a daring irony in the disconnect between the road warrior’s self-deceit and the reader’s skepticism. The mystery, the moral audacity, the sense that anything is possible in these early pages refreshes not only the hit-man trope but also the world itself. Chaon taps into the prurient thrill of riding shotgun with the unpredictable, and the question dawns: Just how lawless and unhinged will the world of “Sleepwalk” get?
Niyi Osundare’s newest collection of poetry, Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet, lets the earth speak. He shows us how the planet is ailing—cutting through all the tricks that the powerful play to continue to milk the land—via the direct address and the personification of the environment, forcing us to consider how we might help protect Earth from those who are killing it. Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet is thus a plea to save our planet, our homes, our lives.
The last entry in the collection is a short essay, part paean to books and to a life of reading, part aesthetic manifesto. In it, Tuten has some choice words for “likable” or “relatable” protagonists, “the expected staples of standard-issue fiction,” and he holds up Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” as a model for the way it “sidesteps the rules of normative — and predictable — fiction.”
Tuten could easily be talking about his own work. “The Bar at Twilight” is neither normative nor predictable, and it bears the firm impress of the soul.
The house is in Chatou, a southwest suburb of Paris.
It has proper French tree lined streets and stag beetles
noisily hovering under a fretted iron street lamp.