Now that’s more like it! Yesterday, I wrote about Asylum, the 2008 novel from André Alexis. I didn’t have any great enthusiasm for it. Although Asylum is a big, well-written novel, I found its dry, conservative earnestness left me feeling indifferent. Its sincerity seems out of step with our times. On the other hand, we have Despair, etc., a collection of short stories that comes from a younger Alexis (1994) and has a very different feel. I’m reluctant to plug the stories into strict categories, but, for the sake of convenience: there are hints of magic realism, paranormal absurdity, satire, and a round skewering of suburbia. The stories are entertaining, unselfconscious and artfully written.
A sickly wedding guest tells a boy about his encounters with a Soucouyant and, as one might expect, the story does more than simply haunt the boy. A man with beautiful hands makes his way in the sordid world of hand-porn, but is undone by his fetish for hand deformities. A grieving son leases the upstairs floors of his mothers house and unwittingly becomes the subject of the tenant’s mad experiment. And so on.
Along the way, I was struck by a number of curiosities. First, this Tom Swiftyish passage:
Once again, Mr Taylor called for silence. He tried to stand up on a chair, failed, tried again, one hand on his wife’s head for support. Mrs Taylor was stoic under pressure.
Next is the recurrence of the street address number 128. For some reason, Alexis appears to have a numerological obsession. What can it mean? Two to the seventh power? So what? A secret message to a particular reader? Who knows.
Finally, I stumbled over the word “infundibulously” which appears in the following sentence:
A few steps and he would be there by her mysterious and infundifulously sensual side …
What is an “infundibulously sensual side”?
If you liked Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, or Etgar Keret’s Suddenly A Knock On The Door, you’ll probably enjoy Despair etc.