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May
09
The Bare Necessities—Timothy Schaffert (THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Timothy Schaffert’s new novel The Coffins of Little Hope is the latest on my list of a million and one reasons to love Unbridled Books. Schaffert has written the rare novel that succeeds in not only having something to offer just about every type of reader but does so without compromising on depth, language, or literary merit. It’s a fantastic read I’ll be saying more about soon.
At the heart of my novel “The Coffins of Little Hope” is a novel called “The Coffins of Little Hope.” The book within the book is the last book in a series of books, children’s books, and the enormous fuss surrounding the conclusion of the series propels the little town of my novel toward a frenzied collapse; meanwhile a child, a real child, may have gone missing among all the hubbub.
Though my novel belongs to its narrator, an 83-year-old obituary writer named Essie, I did find myself drawn to the characters in the children’s book series, and I began to write about them, creating their world, their villains, their ghosts, their perils. Most of this didn’t fit in my novel (though I did create an online novella, which is posted at http://rothgutts.com), but I enjoyed contributing to the body of “fictional literature” in the tradition of Borges and Orwell, and J.K. Rowling too (all those Hogwarts textbooks she has her characters studying). An impressively comprehensive list of fictional books within books is compiled at Wikipedia.
With this in mind, I recommend here books that are real… you just can’t read them yet. These are works in progress (or soon to be published) by contributors to the upcoming Brown Issue of the Fairy Tale Review, which I guest-edited. The issue will be out in the fall.
Kate Bernheimer, “Goodnight”
I begin not with a Brown Issue contributor, but with Fairy Tale Review’s editor and founder. I’m hoping, in this blog post, to be the first and the last to proclaim Kate’s own writing neglected. (In other words, I hope I appear savvy in noting that her brilliant writing has not received its rightful celebration, but I also hope, and anticipate, that such neglect will expire soon.) While Kate tirelessly promotes the fairy tale tradition and the work of other writers, she has also written the stunning Gold Sisters trilogy. Each of the three novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, Merry Gold, and Lucy Gold) exists in a landscape imbued with the sensuality and poetic mystery of adolescence and young adulthood. Her current novel-in-progress, “Goodnight,” is a tragic, haunting love story about the power of fable, in which children’s books, and the hypnotic reading of them, become life-or-death, in a way. The characters connect and disconnect in a calm, steady, yet heartbreaking manner, reminding me of the marathon dancers in Horace McCoy’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” And the very design of the book proves as poetic and innovative as the story’s telling; but I won’t say anything more, so as not to give anything away.
Owen King, “Reenactment”
When Owen recently sent me a draft of his novel-in-progress, I wasn’t expecting it to have so much physical heft; I know Owen mostly from his short stories. For this, his first novel, he’s created something quite mythic, packing both a literary wallop and also one of stature, standing at 2.5 inches in height (manuscript pages). This height includes a 25-page appendix of “Special Features & Deleted Scenes” (the “features”: an interview, dictionary fragments, budget sheet) inspired by the aspiring filmmaker at the novel’s center, a man named Sam Dolan. Sam Dolan’s father is also a filmmaker, a B-movie titan named Booth. (The first sentence of the current draft: “When the fullness of betrayal was at last made clear, when he finally grasped the continental size of the catastrophe and the insolubility of his predicament—once he understood that he was ruined—Sam Dolan did something surprising: he called his father.”) The cast of characters includes a man haunted by an invisible documentary crew, a cuckolded baseball player, and a satyr. (It also includes the 2008 election, weddingography, and stuffed animals left at grave sites.)
Maud Casey, “The Man Who Walked Away”
I could probably write a book about Maud herself, such is my fascination. She’s blessed with beauty and an easy sense of glamour, which makes it quite criminal that she’s also a gifted writer But to call her a gifted writer is like calling Julia Child a gifted kitchen worker; as with Child, Maud’s particular and idiosyncratic insights into her craft allows her to dismiss convention with a gentle nod, and to gracefully and respectfully reinvent. I’m trying to think of just the right metaphor for Maud’s sentences. Are they like a ship in a bottle, the last word the slight tug of the string that pops the masts to elegant and dramatic effect? (Maud would be able to think of a better one.) But basically, you read along, delighting in the poetry of the words and rhythms, and suddenly the very right word appears to lift the sentence into flight. If you weren’t so engrossed in the story, you’d feel compelled to dwell on each well-turned phrase. But about that novel: with elements of magic and fairy tale, “The Man Who Walked Away” is the story of Albert, a mysterious figure lost in his vivid imagination. Madness or genius? Excerpts are forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, and have appeared in Forklift, Ohio (reprinted here at Fictionaut), The Normal School, and elsewhere.
Peter Kuper, “Alice in Wonderland”
For years Edward Gorey spoke of someday illustrating “Alice in Wonderland,” but I’ve never seen even so much as a sketch of such a thing, though the very suggestion of it makes me swoon. Fortunately I can console myself with the work of another of my favorite illustrators, Peter Kuper. Peter has worked in comics for decades (including co-founding the political comix magazine “World War 3 Illustrated” in 1979) and has created graphic novel versions of classics such as “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair and “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka. Peter’s every character is distinctly Kuper-ian—their faces often drawn, their square jaws slack, their eyes alive with blank stares. They seem animated puppets made of hinges and sawdust, against backdrops ornate. Even the swirls of the wallpaper in “The Metamorphosis” seem to eddy with the characters’ anxieties. I’ve cheated my theme here a bit by including Peter’s interpretations of “Alice in Wonderland,” and more recently “Through the Looking Glass,” as they are indeed available; just not in English. The images, however, translate. (“Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas”).
Elizabeth Crane, “We Only Know So Much”
Elizabeth’s short stories often have an absurdity that arises from those painfully familiar bits of ridiculousness we recognize from our own personal histories. (The title of her most recent collection was “You Must Be This Happy To Enter,” after all, which included the stories “My Life is Awesome! And Great!” and “Notes for a Story About People With Weird Phobias.”) And as much as I enjoy Elizabeth’s great comic timing and sly social commentary, I enjoy the stories’ inventive structures; she seems to approach narrative with one eye a-squint, giving our expectations a not-so-gentle elbow shove in the right direction. So I’m anxious to see what she does with her first novel, “We Only Know So Much,” which I’ve not yet read; we’ll all be able too, however, next year, as it’s to be published by Harper Perennial. It’s about four generations of an American family, everybody under one roof, all in crises of various kinds. I’m told it’s about loss, love, a little about god, and a lot about lost connections—the overarching question being whether or not anyone will get their acts together in time to rescue themselves.
Check out Timothy Schaffert’s website and follow him on Twitter for more.
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I could do nothing all year but read these books you present to us. I have yet to find a book you’ve supported that I’ve not loved. I will be waiting for your review of this one.
Sandy´s last [type] ..Sunday Salon- The most bi-polar week of my life
Yay Elizabeth Crane! Thanks for including her – she’s a fave of mine too (check your “too” BTW).
I just bought this book last week and can’t wait to crack the spine!
So, so, so good.