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Comatose

July 2, 2012 in books, online, poetry, reviews by Stephanie
Comatose by J.A. Tyler(Patasola Press, February 2012)Laura Brun
A Scatter of Words, a Scramble
Reading J.A. Tyler’s Comatose is like being lost inside someone else’s head. Or maybe not like being lost but like being along for the ride, inhabiting the world built between the waking and sleeping mind, being on the brink or verge of everything. It is a narrative that takes place in the (usually distorted) real and the (sometimes nightmarish) imagined worlds at once. It’s not a summertime beach read. It’s kind of trippy. It’s one of those novel-length poetic narratives that are hard to categorize. But it’s a book that is worth reading (and rereading and rereading) as soon as possible because it will make you uncomfortable and uncertain in all the right ways.
Comatose tells the story of a narrator trapped in a coma who overhears the goings-on in the hospital around him, but who also recalls his painful life before the coma, and who builds around those memories a myth-like world that is captivating and frightening, expansive and entrapping, feels at once like the past, the present, and all possible futures. Tyler’s verse starts up and falls in and comes back, submerges and emerges into and out of the waves of memory, of dream, of sensory experience, and of myth.
I can’t remember her name. The name Ihad for her is long lost. Yesterday Iremembered that the trees out of thiswindow have spines of tiny leaves andpeeling, blistery bark. Yesterday Iremembered that a tree like this is alocust. Tomorrow I will believe a locust isa bug. The day after tomorrow, when Isee a woman go up the stairs, I will thinkthat I have seen a man go that way too.There are questions that don’t haveanswers. There are questions that makeghosts in trees. (35)
Tyler moves between voices familiar and unfamiliar, moves from the bold to the questioning, moves in and out of childhood and consciousness, moves continually so that it’s not a direct narrative to keep tabs on, but the rocking, lilting, sweeping world that comes into being. And, because the narrator is in a comatose state, that motion takes place imaginarily, in a world of memory and myth braided together, without the narrator moving bodily more than the blink of an eye or the twitch of a toe.
Tyler’s tone here wends just as the narrative does, from world to world, from that of third-person myth-making to familiar, childhood-recollecting first-person. This chameleonic narrative voice, despite Comatose‘s taking place almost solely within the head of the narrator, keeps the narrative writhing and spitting from page to page, following “The woman in this myth, she hears/it, the guttural splatter of clouds, and she/dreams of bears in her womb, of how she/is a forest,” with a sucker-punch on the very next page like, “I am a scatter of words. I am/a scramble. Moving my toes is supposed/to have meaning, but for me today, it is/nothing, because they only smile and say/in a manner of disbelief we see that you/are still here. All of the small things I do/on these days, they are strapped to me like/a bed.” (24) Yowzah.
If dreams and myth and memory come in waves in this narrative, then those physical details of the hospital are what float on the surface of Comatose, in the foreground of the action, but are only a fraction of the depth that the narrative contains. Comatose is the story of the brain’s busy whirring, populated with the footsteps of nurses and doctors or the IV drip but also with clawing bears and pine tree forests, windows, walls, and winding paths. It is completely inside and outside of the mind at once–a fever-dream that questions how one constructs reality.
We are not living. We are dwelling inwalls we built, a path worn by myths,conversations going nowhere, lists of whatto do to keep us going. This cabin fraughtwith ideas and no execution. This uselessroom that takes my voice from out of mymouth. (79)
What kept me reading Comatose was the imagery and the changing tone, yes, but was mostly that way in which I wanted to put together an idea of reality, to piece together which world (that of myth or dream, that of memory, that of overheard sensory detail or comatose stuck-ness) was real, which layer of the palimpsest was dominant, which layer of the ice cream cake was the chocolate crunch. And in the end? I’m still unsure. But that’s what I like the most about Tyler’s Comatose, is that it wears the reader down and it hurts, that the repeated images get mangled, any discernible timeline gets tangled, and that by the end you’re generally uncertain, maybe shaking, and left with the idea that you’re (everyone is) in the same existential boat as the narrator, trapped between worlds physical and mental, between now and then, between the concrete and the imagined, all of it somehow real and unreal at once.
Laura Brun is a poet who received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She just completed her first year in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh and she likes the way pigeons kind of waddle.
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You Might Have Missed… Half-Blood Blues

June 17, 2012 in books, fiction, online, reviews by Jonathan
?Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan(Picador, February 2012)Nicole Bartley
A Resonant Blues Performance on a Literary Scale
For the characters of Esi Edugyan’s award-winning novel Half-Blood Blues, little else matters when compared to the horrors of the concentration camps. Except, perhaps, the events of one confusing night in 1940 when Nazis abduct Hieronymous “The Kid” Falk from a Parisian bar, and Sidney Griffiths just watches.
Edugyan unfolds circumstances surrounding this abduction by following a jazz band, The Hot-Time Swingers. It is composed of a mixed collection: Sid, the narrator and an African-American from Baltimore who plays the bass; Hiero, a young African-German trumpet prodigy who is hated by the Nazis because of his mixed race; Chip Jones, Sid’s childhood friend who plays the drums; Ernst von Haselberg, a clarinet player and heir to a vast German fortune; Paul Butterstein, a tall blond Jewish man who plays the piano; and “Big Fritz” Bayer, who plays the alto saxophone. During their time in Berlin, a young woman named Delilah Brown invites them to Paris to play with Louis Armstrong. But by the time they get there, only Hiero, Sid, and Chip remain, and a love triangle has formed between Sid, Delilah, and Hiero.
Parallel to this plot is a future timeline of 1992. According to Chip, Heiro is alive and living in Poland. This comes as a shock to Sid, who thought that Hiero had died. He becomes dubious when Chip pulls him on a trip to visit The Kid and neglects to mention that Sid hadn’t been invited. As the reader follows the band from Berlin in 1939 to Paris in 1940, and from Baltimore to Berlin and Poland in 1992, the novel presents a string of uncertainties. How could the past’s plot possibly end up the way it began? Is Chip telling the truth? Is Hiero actually alive? How did he get to Poland? Did Sid betray him because of a rivalry over Delilah? Contrary to Edugyan’s initially revealing prose, these questions are not answered until the final two chapters.
Edugyan excels at narrative voice in Half-Blood Blues. Each character is recognizable by his or her unique dialogue; they do not sound as if Sid’s voice is carrying over, as sometimes happens in first-person stories that include reflections. The narration and dialogue convey jazz-like linguistics. When Sid meets Armstrong, he thinks, “A man ain’t ever seen greatness till he set eyes on the likes of Armstrong. That the truth.” In another section, when the band creates a jazz rendition of a German anthem with Armstrong, Sid finally hears Hiero’s talent, despite playing with him for months. “It wasn’t nothing like before,” Sid narrates. “It was the sound of the gods, all that brass. It was the old Armstrong and the new, that mature distilled essence of a master and the boy he used to be, the boy who could make his glissandi snap like marbles, the high Cs piercing.” This passage and others like it reveal both the narrative cadence and the significance of music in Half-Blood Blues. Music is the essence of characters’ beings—music and love. The love between childhood friends, between band members who call each other “brothers” and “blood,” between a young man and a young woman who are like siblings, and between a young woman and an older man who “adopts” her. Each relationship experiences downfalls and windfalls while relying upon music to help survive a war.
The cover of Half-Blood Blues looks like a record, which is apt because Half-Blood Blues is a resonant blues performance on a literary scale. The structure of the novel mirrors a blues song, which commonly follows a twelve-chord progression. There are only ten chapters in Half-Blood Blues, but the lyrics of blues songs generally end on the tenth bar, which is similar to the end of the story’s narration. Blues songs also follow a “call and response” cycle, which Edugyan incorporates by bouncing the narrative’s timeline between the past and the future. The past introduces circumstances, the future recollects and comments on them, and then the past elaborates.
As the winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and a Man Booker Prize finalist of the same year, Half-Blood Blues explores issues of race, blood, comradeship, and family, particularly as they are affected by harrowing situations. Its ending may be anticlimactic, but it leaves readers contemplating their own actions, wondering whether they, too, “weren’t nothing.”
Nicole Bartley is an escape artist. Her specialties include writing and reading science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, and folklore. She received a bachelor’s degree from Slippery Rock University for creative writing and journalism, and is an MFA candidate in the fiction track at Chatham University. She is determined to maintain a career around books.

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Monstress

June 1, 2012 in books, fiction, online, reviews by Stephanie
?Monstress by Lysley Tenorio(HarperCollins, January 2012)Jason Sattler
A Perfect Misunderstanding
Lysley Tenorio may be the only writer ever to have two stories appear in The Best New American Voices series. Monstress, his debut short story collection, includes both pieces—“Superassassin” and “Save the I-Hotel.” The former story, from 2000, is about a teenager who uses his fascination with comic books as a means of coping with the world around him. The latter, from 2009, is about an unrequited gay love affair that takes place over five decades.  What the stories share is Tenorio’s sly wit, careful characterization and insight into the unique dislocation Filipino Americans experience.
The world of Monstress is a world divided by an ocean and united by shared history and dreams. From a B-minus movie actress who moves from Manila to outside Hollywood, to the only English-speaking resident of a leper colony adrift in the Pacific, Tenorio’s characters are always unexpected yet grounded in the familiar ways their desires conflict with reality. The result is a collection of eight memorable stories held together by the inventiveness of their premises and the stark realism of the prose.
In the title story, “Monstress,” Checkers Rosario is a Pilipino Ed Wood and the story’s narrator is his girlfriend Reva. She performs as a creature in his films (playing Squid Mother, Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen, Werewolf Girl, Two-Headed Bride of Two-Headed Dracula) and helps keep his flagging dream alive by working as a secretary in a dentist office. When Gaz Gazman, a wannabe director from America, falls in love with Checkers’ movies, he volunteers to fly Checkers to America to work on a film. Checkers insists that Reva must come, too. She does, and in Gaz’s mother’s basement in Pasadena, the American tells Reva how lucky Checkers was to find his “monstress.”
“I am not monstrous,” Reva says; it’s a perfect misunderstanding. Fantasy crumbles under the burden of two languages—and the impossibility of creating a self that’s comfortable in either is revealed.
In “Felix Starro,” which first appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, Felix is the grandson of a faith healer making his first trip to United States from the Philippines. Felix shares his name with his grandfather and finds out that his grandfather hopes he will soon share his profession. While Papa Felix’s business is all about sleight of hand, Felix’s plan is to magic the profits away in hopes of buying a new identity that will allow him and his girlfriend to disappear into America. The chicken livers and carefully concocted fake blood (“Like ketchup and water mix-mix.”) lend believability to the ceremony Felix performs: the Holy Blessed Extraction of Negativities. But as the luminaries Papa Felix healed in the Philippines learn, Felix knows the beneficial effects wear off quickly. The decisions Felix must make—betraying Papa Felix and taking a new name—weigh on him until his grandfather performs a ceremony on a pregnant hotel maid that Felix cannot abide.
“Save the I-Hotel” is the one story in the collection told in third person. The story utilizes flashbacks and flash-forwards to take us from 1930s to the late 1970s in San Francisco. Here Tenorio’s gift for dramatizing exposition reveals the intricacies of a friendship that lasts five decades—from a world where a non-white male could be arrested for just walking down the street with a white woman, to the last days of the hotel that was their haven from bigotry for so many years.
The humor in the story, as in most of Tenorio’s stories, is saved for the character’s dialogue. When the two friends meet at a taxi-dancing club, Vincent tells Fortunado, “Never pay for dances. That way, you find out which girls want your dimes and which ones really want to dance with you.” From that first moment, Vincente is glib and free. Fortunado is neither. They share one kiss but Vincente can never fully requite Fortunado’s love. Violence and betrayal eventually erupt in a poignant scene:
Fortunado had never struck a person before, but there were times in his life he wondered what it might be like, and now he knew: the force of everything you are in a single gesture at a single moment; the hope that will be enough and the fear that it won’t. No different than a kiss.
Seven of eight stories in this collection are told in first person, a strategy that grounds each narrative and allows for the plot to crash against the characters in unpredictable yet logical ways. Delight comes from the shifting perspectives, the feeling that you have no idea where the next story might take you.
“My brother went on national TV to prove he was a woman,” the second story in the collection, “Brothers,” begins.
Once more, Tenorio is leading you somewhere you never thought you’d go.
Jason Sattler is a graduate of University of California, at Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies and received his MFA in Fiction from St. Mary’s College of California. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his two overly photographed beagles and his wife.

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