Fantastic Metropolis

I read Argentine Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, tr. Ursula K. LeGuin (Small Beer Press, 2003), as a collection, only to be informed when I tried to recommend the story titled “Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities” for the Nebula that the book is in fact a novel. I am convinced that given the will, one can read almost anything as a novel and therefore suspect I could assemble these stories into the shape of a novel in a second reading; however one reads this book, it teems with fascinating stories and beautiful images. Rebecca Brown’s The End of Youth (City Lights, 2003) voyages into a territory of memory and perceptions that comes into existence only after the deaths of both one’s parents. Sheila Heti’s The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books, 2002) variously startled, unsettled, and delighted me. Home, in these stories, is often a place that is not; I can only describe them as Raymond Carver meets Franz Kafka meets Muriel Spark. On the last day of 2003 I purchased Michael Swanwick’s Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (Tachyon Publications, 2003), carried it a half-block to the Café Allegro, and devoured almost all of it with my first caffe latte. I loved every word of it, as I imagine most habitués of Fantastic Metropolis would, too.

I read (or reread) a number of good novels this year. Nalo Hopkinson’s magnificent The Salt Roads (Warner, 2003) towers above all of the rest.

Blues sister
                 soul
Throwing W
                 O
                    R
                        D
                            S
Sharp
         As vinegar to the tongue (305)

Honest and vivid, joyous and grieving, formally innovative and erotic, Hopkinson’s prose bursts upon the senses in full four dimensions; as all great novels do, this one shows us something profound about the human spirit. The novels I reread this year include Deena Metzger’s The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them (1981) (my essay on it can be found here) and Anna Kavan’s brilliant work of surrealism, Ice (1967). I loved Shirley Jackson’s haunting Hangsaman (1951), which I refused to read as a story about a young woman’s descent into schizophrenia (as most critics insist on doing). I enjoyed David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), though afterwards I found myself grumbling a bit about some of the narrative choices Markson made. Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination (1991) is the voracious reader’s dream (or perhaps nightmare)–a delicious, frequently hilarious romp in which thousands of fictional characters from works by Homer through Brooke-Rose (imagine Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary as seatmates on a plane) flood into San Francisco for an event resembling the MLA intended to bolster the existence of literary characters in a world infatuated with television.