Fiction

Raimundo is a tileman. His rubberized black knee pads and his white rubber mallet are tools of the trade. Raimundo has been laying tiles for more years than not. His trademark goatee is now all gray. It started out as a mustache a la Goose Gossage, his favorite Yankee when baseball was his religion and the nearby stadium his church. The facial hair spread to his chin in his late twenties when he thought he needed a new look.

Most people, including many of his clients, assume there’s not much skill to putting down some tiles. His geometry of diamonds…

PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE: Transcendence of Witnessing: An Immigrant’s Odyssey Reaches the Last Stop at Intervenxions. A funeral evokes childhood memories of Astoria, Queens, as a small group of Colombian immigrant families say goodbye to one of their last remaining patriarchs. Intervenxions is an online publication of The Latinx Project at New York University.

BOOKS I READ: Piranesi (2020) by Susanna Clarke. Piranesi lives alone in a labyrinth of unending halls. The sea rises in its lower level; clouds roam the upper level. Birds nest among the many marble statues that adorn the halls in the habitable middle level. Piranesi calls it the House, an entity that provides him with everything he needs to survive. Piranesi spends much of his time exploring the House. He even cares for the bones of a few departed souls he finds. …

BOOKS I READ: Not For Nothing: Glimpses Into a Jersey Girlhood (2018) by Kathy Curto. In this memoir, a series of vignettes, Kathy, the youngest of four by ten years, becomes the chronicler of the idiosyncratic lives of her Italian American blue-collar parents. Her father, Freddy, works hard at his Texaco station, but expects to be treated like a pasha at home. He’s demanding and tyrannical, all to be excused because he puts food on the table. Her brother, Jack, turns to drugs to escape the dysfunction. …

BOOKS I READ: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (2016) by Adam Hochschild. The stories of Americans who volunteered to stand against fascism and Francisco Franco. This prelude to the Second World War, is an engulfing tragedy of how a dictator begins his reign. Key to Franco’s Nationalist’s eventual victory over the republican democracy was the patronage received from Mussolini and Hitler, who provided thousands of soldiers, arms and ammunition, and hundreds of war planes, and the support of the Catholic Church and Texaco. Generalissimo Franco would rule Spain for 36 years.

The reader encounters…

BOOKS I READ: Collected Stories I (1967) by Muriel Spark. Twenty-one short stories, each one engaging from the first paragraph. Some continue to rise through to the end. A few fall a little short, but each ride is worth it. My favorites were, “The Portobello Road,” “The Twins,” and “The House of the Famous Poet.” All have in common a haunting supernatural presence. Many of the stories have a musty, mid-twentieth-century feel, some have the malodor of colonialism.

Astute yet solitary women (and girls) are central to many stories, antagonists in some, as in “The Dark Glasses,” a story about seeing, really seeing.

NB: using Medium’s shortform posts to chain my recent reads. Go to previous book:

BOOKS I READ: The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead. The harrowing tale of three generations of women snared in slavery’s degradation and misery. Cora, the granddaughter, prodded by her friend, Caesar, decides to escape the Randall plantation in Georgia. He’s the one with a connection to the underground railroad. Thus begins her life on the run. Unfortunately for Cora, her adventures lead to oases that turn out to be mirages obscuring violence and heartbreak. Besides slavery, the book’s other villain is Ridgeway, a blacksmith’s son who becomes a slave catcher. His hunts for runaways rotting him from the inside out.

NB: using Medium’s shortform posts to chain my recent reads. Go to previous book:

BOOKS I READ: Dissipatio: H. G. (The Vanishing) (1977) by Guido Morselli (translated by Frederika Randall, 2020). The digressions and philosophizing of the last man on Earth, a flawed character who somehow survives dissipatio, the Event, when all other members of the humani generis vanish. The narrator goes into a cave near his mountain home intending to commit suicide. When he is unable to act on his plan, he comes back out, discovering everyone else is gone. Much of the book is spend trying to answer his question, “Me: chosen one or outcast”?

Upon having this, his seventh novel, rejected by publishers, Guido Morselli committed suicide. His books were published posthumously.

NB: using Medium’s shortform posts to chain my recent reads. Go to previous book: