#698 An Invocation of Incuriosity- Neil Gaiman

#698 An Invocation of Incuriosity- Neil Gaiman

Another fantastic, fantastical tale by Neil Gaiman. This world is coming to an end. The sun is burning out and all will soon be engulfed in nothingness. Farfal the unfortunate—so called because: “He had spent his life in a one-room cottage at the end of time, at the bottom of a small hill, surviving on the food his father could net in the air…”—witnesses the end of all things from his cottage he sometimes shares with his father.

Balthasar the Tardy lives two lives. One with his son Farfal and one in a world a million years in the past where he is known as Balthasar the Cunning because he brings amazing spells and technologies from the future. Farfal is unaware of his father’s second life because he is under a hex, an Invocation of Incuriosity. But when the world ends, he is whisked off to his father’s other life and loses his place at his father’s side.

“I have spared you from death, my boy…I have brought you back in time to a new life. What should it matter that is this life you are not son but servant? Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative.”

In a fun mind experiment, if you could travel back in time and meet your brothers from this time, some of which have been alive less years than you, but who were born a million years in the past—who is older?

His father makes a mess of his duel dimension dealings and is lost to nothingness. No longer unfortunate, Farfal finds a way to a different time, our time, the reader’s time and is telling this story to a kind man he meets while selling ancient carvings at a flea market over a free Denny’s Breakfast. Only Neil Gaiman can make this stuff work.

Rating: 9-9-9-8 Total= 35

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

This is an indescribably beautiful piece of writing. Doerr has a quality in his writing, a quality found in very few writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind as perhaps the only equal) where you stop reading and it feels like you’ve woken from a day dream. The emotional depth in this story is at once strong enough to feel like a thick blanket keeping you warm against a blizzard and still so fragile that by even mentioning it, it might blow away in the wind. It’s magical, and yet grounded-in-the-earth real. Particularly strong is Doerr’s descriptions of the natural word (a quality we saw in his story, The Deep- (#39 in this blog).

The Hunter’s Wife is a seer, one who can tap into the eyes of dead beings, see where they go and what they feel. She lives with the Hunter in his cabin deep in a Montana Valley.

“Both of them lived in the grips of forces they had no control over—the November wind, the revolution of the earth.”

“When he looked out the cabin window he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under the roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.

            With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.”

Being stuck in the snowed-in Valley all winter (for five years) she was able to hone her skills by touching animals either in hibernation or frozen by the cold. She can see their dreams. By Spring, she gets bored with the wild, as all the animals wake and she can no longer see their dreams.

“More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn’t exist.”

She is a woman living in the winter, while he lives in the Spring and Summer. Yet, he is the one that seems frozen, solidly set in one place at one time, never changing and never thawing. She must leave the Valley and explore the world and share her gift. He stays behind to tend to his hunting and dreaming of wolves.

“He had given up on finding a wolf in that country although they still came to him in dreams and let him run with them, out over frozen flats under the moon.”

Read this story!

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total=40

#435 The Miss and Sylvia and Sam- Sheila Heti

#435 The Miss and Sylvia and Sam- Sheila Heti

This is definitely an outlier in the type of stories I’ve been reading for this blog. The collection is The Middle Stories, they are short, a kind of fantastical/mythical group of imaginings.

The Miss is a flitty, little woman hopping through the market asking over and over “How much is this, how much is this?” She is approached by Sylvia the vendor who claims to know Miss from a former life. Sam is Sylvia’s brother (so she says) and is marrying Miss in three weeks.

It feels like nothing sticks to these characters, like each moment is barely connected to the one before. An emotion can change just like that, and be forgotten in the next instant. This is a kind of bizarre way to live in the moment. Just be careful not to get struck by lightning.

Rating: 6-8-6-6 Total= 26

#429 Custom-Made Bride- Kurt Vonnegut

#429 Custom-Made Bride- Kurt Vonnegut

Krummbein designed his wife. She was his secretary a shy, dowdy, brown-haired woman with a different name, Kitty Cahoun, when they met. Then, he began to “design” her, one by one changing the things about her until she became Falloleen, the perfect woman.

“It’s a Krummbein original…Kitty Cahoun didn’t go with the décor.”

Hal has been hired to take care of Krummbein’s financial woes. He is an incredibly successful man but impractical. He treats his life like he treats his wife, like something is always to be fixed, so now he is broke. Having to face his situation makes his wife’s façade crack, and now his life is in danger of turning upside down. Nothing a little moonlight makeup can’t fix.

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27

#390 A Calendar of Tales- Neil Gaiman

#390 A Calendar of Tales- Neil Gaiman

What a tremendous story! This is told is twelve tales, each tale is a month of the year. This could be something out of Grimm’s Fairy tales. It is a battle with time, or a representation of spiritual limbo, a crossing, or it could be something else entirely. Whatever it is, it is what story telling is all about, and with it, Gaiman's creativity is peerless.

The story can turn from the utterly fantastical:

“I slept in my igloo made of books. I was getting hungry. I made a hole in the floor, lowered a fishing line and waited until something bit. I pulled it up: a fish made of books—green-covered vintage Penguin detective stories. I ate it raw, fearing a fire in my igloo.”

To the deeply philosophical:

“I heard distant thunder, and in the night, while we slept, it began to rain, tumbling my igloo of books, washing away the words from the world.”

The tale for October should be it’s own thing, a parable of great simplicity and elegance.

Notable Passage: “She spoke the truth, and the March winds blew madness around them.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#356 Adventure Story- Neil Gaiman

#356 Adventure Story- Neil Gaiman

This is a fun little piece. The narrator’s mother seems a bit addled, or maybe just extremely naïve. For her, going down the wrong aisle in the super market and running into an old friend would constitute a “full-blown adventure.”

So when her son asks her about his deceased father’s curious trophy he brought back from the war, the tale she tells seem like much more than any grocery-store run-in. Of course the story includes Pterodactyls, Aztecs, a tony race of men and a kidnapped princess, it all seems too fantastical to be real.

Don’t worry about it, just sit back and drink your tea.

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27

#355 The Cat Lady’s Kiss- Jerome Charyn

#355 The Cat Lady’s Kiss- Jerome Charyn

I appreciate the attempt at fantasy and originality in this story, but I think it falls a bit short. The style is inconsistent and jagged. What starts out as a straight forward story about a shy, troubled woman caught in a patriarchal battle for her love, morphs into a story more befitting a fairy tale (kind of).

Angela is a Latina woman who has never had a real relationship with a man. Her mother was crazy, her father disturbed, and she ended in a juvenile detention center. When she comes out, she and a co-worker begin seeing each other, but a local gangster has his eye on her and sends him to the hospital. Then, kind of out of nowhere, the writing turns into something else:

“But she didn’t understand Bronx mountain lore. No woman, descended from the Dukagjinis or not, could demand a kiss from Lord Leke, the baba of the Bronx. It was Leke’s right to appear in a woman’s bedroom and ravish her, even with a husband at her side—it brought luck and long life to copulate with their lord, and husbands often delivered their own wives…etc.”

Then it kind of alternates back and forth between realism and fantasy. Perhaps he’s illustrating Angela’s unsound mind, but if he is, it’s a bit unclear. I absolutely love using fantasy, or skewed styles in a real setting. However, if you do, it has to be fully used…all or nothing. Here we are left in a no-man’s land of styles.

Rating: 6-8-5-5 Total= 24

#326 The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains- Neil Gaiman

#326 The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains- Neil Gaiman

A dwarf is on a quest. He seeks the help of Calum MacInness to be his guide. Together they will travel to the Misty Isle, if they can find it:

“That is hard to say…For there are some who say it does not exists.”

“The Misty Isle is not as other places. And the mist that surrounds it is not like other mists.”

Travelers to the Misty Isle often seek its gold, but to get that gold they must sacrifice much, give up more than they know. The more gold they take, the more they will give up. The dwarf, is not looking for gold, he is looking for truth and revenge.

“Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

OR:

“Truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

What do we give up to gain truth? You come to expect great intricate plot, engaging characters, and meaningful symbolism within a Gaiman story. So far, this is my favorite of the whole collection, Trigger Warning.

Notable Passage: “There are many for whom the lure of gold outweighs the beauty of a rainbow.”

Rating: 10-9-10-9 Total= 38