Saturday, June 14, 2014

Medardo Fraile: Things Look Different in the Light



Things Look Different in the Light is the first selection of work by the late Spanish writer Medardo Fraile to be translated into English, permitting Anglophone readers access to these unusually delightful, lucid, short, intimate stories, contemporary yet as resonant as old folktales. Though the book is but 220 pages long, it contains nearly 30 stories, some as brief as three pages. Despite their brevity, Fraile’s stories contain worlds, and are marked by a distinctive, singular style, a lightness of touch, and a sense of wonder at the marvelous strangeness of what’s around us. Fraile finds his subject matter in the quotidian, in the micro rather than macro (or so it might seem, anyway), in the delicate, nuanced interactions between people, whether intimates or strangers. Even the titles of his stories suggest this closeness to the everyday: “The Shirt,” “The Chair,” “The Car,” “The Lemon Drop,” “Restless Eyes,” “What’s Going On in That Head of Yours?” One feels in his stories the magnitude of the minutest event, how it can alter perceptions, directions, even whole lives.

One could describe Fraile’s stories as quirky, but their subject matter rests squarely within reality – or, on the occasions when they knock at reality’s borders, within the real, idiosyncratic musings of his characters. Had Gogol chosen to forego his absurdist elements and allow the day-to-day to work its own magic, he might have written stories like these. A telling passage in “The Last Shout,” a grandmother speaking with her grandson, seems to underscore this faith in the sufficiency of reality:

The thing is that miracles happen so often, they seem normal to us, the morning comes then the night, the sun and the moon rise and set, the earth gives us harvest after harvest, and we say, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow’ and tomorrow we’re still alive to do it. My dear, you’re right: reality is a miracle.

Without trumpeting any deliberately meta-fictional intention, Fraile nonetheless manages to make many of his stories about the fragility of language and texts, of all kinds of communications. In “Full Stop,” a teacher, having forgotten his dictation assignment, decides to have his students take dictation from a personal letter the teacher is trying to write. He then pauses at the end of the class when they want to erase from the blackboard those

words that only a moment before had been unknown to them and even distant and worthy of respect…They want to erase them, to erase me, to discard the tender, unctuous, white splendour of those words, to reduce them to dust, to cast them to the winds like so many dead cells hampering their growth...

In “That Novel,” a worker changing jobs bemoans leaving behind a friendship with a co-worker who, regardless of the topic, always mentions the single novel he once read, one that contained “everything important, or unimportant – in richer, livelier, more memorable form.” The departing co-worker finally decides to ask his friend the question he’s always wanted to ask, the title of the novel, only to be told that his friend can’t remember. In “The Bookstall,” a character is mysteriously drawn to the physical decay of books in a poor bookseller’s rain-soaked stall, and lives “in hope that one day a novel would simply crumble to dust in his hands.”

Fraile’s range is surprisingly broad, from stories of marital relations that called to mind James Thurber to fleeting encounters between strangers that underscore one’s fundamental solitude. There’s even a kind of oriental fable, and an exquisite evocation, in “The Sea,” of the phenomenological experience of being by the ocean. “An Episode from National History” brings a sudden intrusion of the “macro” world, with its piercing evocation of the Spanish Civil War, when “the offended parties on both left and right decided to improve Spain by destroying it.” One of my favorites in the collection is the first story, “Berta’s Presence” (“presence” is an operative concept in many of these tales), in which a young man, Jacobo, makes the obligatory visit to see his friends’ baby on the occasion of her first birthday and is brought up short by the child’s demands on life. He can see that Lupita, with her whole life before her, expects him to say exactly the right thing, and he remains silent while inwardly seeking the perfectly crafted words that will meet the child’s rigid expectations:

Lupita was momentarily ignored and she remembered that, before Berta had arrived, someone else had been about to speak to her. And she turned her head, looking at everyone there, one by one, until she found him: Jacobo. Eyes wide, gaze fixed on him, she urged him to say his sentence.

It’s a story that offers tremendous deference and respect to children – and to the importance of communication.

One emerges from Fraile’s small stories with an amplified awareness of the impact of one’s smallest actions, of the myriad ways a word or gesture, a glance, an accidental sighting of something or someone, can transform a moment, often without our knowing exactly what the consequences may be. These are deceptively simple, slyly penetrating stories, full of charm, full of traps. You too may find yourself changed.

Things Look Different in the Light, by Medardo Fraile, is translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published by Pushkin Press, 2014.



9 comments:

  1. I love it previously untranslated when writers become available in English.

    Sometimes such short, short stories leave me a bit unfulfilled, however, based upon your commentary it sounds like Fraile uses their brevity to convey meaning.

    The description of "The Novel" sounds deliciously amusing and ironic.

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    1. Brian - Given their brevity of Fraile's stories, I found them remarkably fulfilling. I neglected to mention the nicely conceived arc of the selection, which begins with a first birthday and ends with an elderly person's death, with a tremendous amount of life in between.

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  2. I'm not familiar with this author, Scott, but it's certainly encouraging to hear such nice things said about a writer who's a bit of an afterthought in the grand scheme of things in terms of Spanish literature popularity and whatnot. I can't say I'm a big fan of that cover illustration for the book, though: does it represent the Fraile vibe or at least a scene from one of his stories well?

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    1. Richard - While I'm not usually a great fan of short stories, I thought this was a terrific, subtle, unusual collection, and I find a lot of the stories lodged firmly in my head. I don't know quite what to say about the cover illustration. It is not a scene from a story, but I think it's a rather clever choice in that a lot of Fraile's stories are very much like small fish bowls in which we can see characters circling one another within a confined space, with the great world just there outside it.

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  3. Great review, Scott. Even without knowledge of the author, the Margaret Jull Costa translation brand recommends the book too. (Notwithstanding that she translated Paulo Coelho.)

    The cover gives off a Cortázarian Axolotl-vibe to me.

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    1. Thanks, Rise. I guess I'll need to read Axolotl and brush up on my Cortazar!

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  4. I wasn't particularly impressed until I read this line: “the offended parties on both left and right decided to improve Spain by destroying it.” Okay, that was a good one.

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    1. One of the aspects I like best about these stories, I think, is the restraint with which Fraile keeps the larger world of politics and history, social and economic forces, just outside the scope of his small stories, with the exception of an occasional intrusion by a line like that. The deliberate microcosmic quality to the stories suggests an acute awareness of a great deal that's not being included.

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  5. Great review. This book is very firmly on my 'to buy' list. I like the way you've described the style of these stories with their lightness of touch and delicate, nuanced interactions between characters, all of which appeals to me. It sounds as if these stories enable the reader to glimpse brief yet significant moments, small yet telling gestures.

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