Throughout these nine stories, the sadness of loss swerves between desire, guilt, remembering, secrecy, forgetting, mourning, horror and invention combining imaginary surrenders, survivals and rescues. The stories are set mostly in New York City and New York State over nearly a century that begins in the 1930s and extends past the turn-of-the twentieth century millennium into a dystopic future. Among them, the once hidden manuscript of a writer living in hiding with his four avatars (Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Marinus Van der Lubbe and Georgi Mikhailovich Dimitrov ). Also, evocations of an adolescent midsummer New York City night to the sound of humming air conditioners in the streets. In addition, there are memories of exiles in upstate New York that seem like lifelong bail with an electronic bracelet around one’s ankle with recollections of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s reprieve before the firing squad. In another story, a hero experiences a secret pleasure in contemplating past and present doomsdays and months of errancy from San Juan’s lower depths to jail with the ghost of Pedro Albizu Campos and then from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City across the border to Canada. The collection concludes with variants of a dream about dancer Vaslav Nijinsky dreaming more than one dream at the same time and about a dream dreaming him on the edge of a precipice thinking that God did not want him to fall.
This book features nine short stories of literary fiction in a quirky mix of genres that swerve between introspective compositions containing social commentary, fantasy, dreams, confessional reflections of imaginary autobiographies, and elements of dirty realism. The stories contrast outward experience and the interior self, the mythical and the elegiac, within a time continuum that encompasses future anachronisms with real endnotes that are part of the overarching fictional narrative.
Polgar’s writing is intelligent and this is evident across all nine of the short stories in the collection. His historical and socio-political knowledge is vast and attuned to the human condition; these stories explore the headiness of love, base human desire, our past and the way it defines us, fantasy and the future.
Not every story spoke to me, nor do they make grand statements about life and living. They are honestly human, even tediously at times. I soon drew parallels between Polgar’s Maurice with Fante’s Bandini or Salinger’s Holden (only a good few years older), as there are moments in all three writers’ works where as a reader you ponder the point of reading further; you are lost in the writer’s intelligence and undeniable ability to craft but you are yet to feel something. Despite this, you stay.
You stay because we are fascinated with human nature; with how normalcy is wrapped up in fantasy. Like Maurice, we imagine ourselves elsewhere or acting some way different, in a different time, whilst still trundling along with our, quite often, inconsequential lives. I believe writers who aren’t afraid to broach this are brave; with the wrong reader, these stories could very well fall flat on their face.
For me, a few did. But, the clever yet meandering structure of The Path of Least Time and Michelle’s storytelling in The Ballad of Argos Penitentiary reveal and celebrate Polgar’s talent, and make trusting the writer all the more worthwhile. Thus, this is not a book to easily assign a rating to; like all literary fiction, every reader will find and take away something different from these stories. At the end of the day, is that not the beauty of good storytelling?
REVIEWED BY Kristiana Reed
