SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: March 16, 2022] In the Jaws of Life
The version pictured here is not the one I read–there’s no pictures of it online! My copy was translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim.
This book is a collection of short stories from throughout Ugrešić’s career.
The book has three (or 8) stories in it. I discovered Ugrešić through The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar (story #2). “Lend Me Your Character” was weird and cool and was probably my favorite story in the collection (it’s here as well).
When I read a little about Ugrešić, I found that she was born in Croatia, but left the region when the war in Yugolslavia broke out, saying she was post-national and refusing to acknowledge her Croatian heritage. She currently resides in Amsterdam.
Her stories are wonderful mash ups of fairy tales, feminist theory, “traditional women’s writing” and a lot of sexuality.
“Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life (a patchwork novel)” (1981) [trans C.H.]
This story has so much going on that it’s easy to overlook that it’s a fairly straightforward story, just with a lot of filigree tacked on. The story opens with a “Key to the Various Symbols” and includes things like — dotted lines with scissors (cut the text along the line as desired); slashes (pleats: make large thematic stitches on either side of the author’s seam); four equals signs (make a metatextual knot and draw in as desired). And so on. And the contents is actually listed as “The Paper Pattern” which lays out each section according to a sewing pattern. Each section heading is given a parenthetical comment (tacking, padding, hemming, interfacing).
When you start the story you see that the symbols are indeed throughout the story, although honestly after a few pages I gave up trying to figure out what they might mean.
The story starts with the narrator saying that her friends told her to write “a women’s story.” The author looks at several lonely hearts letters in the paper and picks the fifth one as the basis. Steffie, aged 25, is a typist by profession. She’s lonely and sad and lives with her aunt.
Then as the story begins properly, each section has a paragraph (with the scissors icon, meaning you can cut the text out) which includes sensible advice for the homemaker (presumably this is what Seffie the typist is writing).
Ugrešić has a ton of fun and I assume that translator Hawkesworth did as well with the aunt character who constantly loses her teeth and so speaks with a serious impediment. She also tells wildly apocryphal stories.
“Thomeone in our town…ate all the raw peath he could, jutht like thith, uncooked, for a bet, and died.”
“Of raw peas?”
“Yeth.”
Steffie has a terrible love life and asks for advice from her friends and they give her different (not very helpful) suggestions. She eventually meets some men. A Driver, a Hulk and an Intellectual. They all promise to sex her up real good but something happens each time. Then she goes to the theatre and reads Madame Bovary (Ugrešić loves to interact with literature). Eventually she gets a budgie (an English one, which is bigger than American ones and can learn to speak). She is taken with the thing until it shouts something obscene about her lady parts that had me laughing out loud.
The author interrupts several times, including a section near the end called “The author’s darts” in which she asks “Well, what happened next?” And ends the story with “final touches to the garment.” There’s so much fun in this story–from little asides to outlandish observations–that you get easily caught up in what’s going on.
“A Love Story” (1978/1989) [trans M.H.H.]
This story has a similar meta-textual style, with the author being very present in the work.
The narrator met Bublik (not his real name) and fell for him. But when he announced that modern literature was dead, that the best sellers were memoirs, detectives stories and pornography, he then insisted that the narrator write a story. The two of them, with their literary sensibilities, can save literature! And so she fills the story with short pieces of fiction. Each of which Bublik hates. Every single one. He is very critical and dismisses every suggestion she has until he focuses on one word; hyperrealism.
She continues to write stories that are hyper real and he continues to dislike them. I admit to getting a little lost in these story fragments and trying to figure out what exactly she could have done differently. This story wasn’t my favorite, although I did enjoy the epilogue which takes place ten years later and shows that Bublik has written a story for himself at last.
“Life is a Fairy Tale (Metaterxies)” (1983) which is broken down into six short pieces
A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun [trans C.H.]
This story was hilarious. A woman walking to work buys a hot dog. But it’s not a hot dog, it’s a penis. Jump to a man who wakes up to find his penis is missing (even though he happily used it last night). The man tries to find out if he can still have a satisfying sex life–the way he does is bizarre and hilarious. The woman tries to find the owner of the errant hot dog by searching the lost and found in the paper. The final section begins. “Well, dear readers, now you see the sort of thing that happens in our city!”
Life is a Fairy Tale [trans C.H.]
This story is basically a fairy tale. Several characters with terrible problems (one is too fat, one has a small penis, one is flat-chested etc.) find their wishes to come true (in unexpected ways). The final section (ever metatextual) is called “The author feels something is cracking inside him: an incomplete (writer) becoming a complete one.”
Who Am I? [trans C.H.]
This story was a little frustrating and puzzling, although there was a lot of the same surreal humor to it. The narrator literally can’t remember who they are. He or she talks to a tram driver who drives up to the window, as well as a human sized pigeon (who drops off an egg). She is joined by The Temporary Lover who melts into a pool of tepid water. She visits her friend Bunny but is accosted by three (imaginary?) people at the table Doughnut, Dotty and Checks. Funny moments in this one, but overall not my favorite.
The Kreutzer Sonata [trans M.H.H.]
This one was great. Set on a train, a man tells a lengthy story about the horrible woman that he has attached himself to. She has treated him so badly. The listener is a writer and thinks the man’s story is so fantastic that he will write about it. Just as you think, my god, this man is the worst! The whole story shifts gears and becomes something else, something wonderful.
The Kharms Case (1987) [trans C.H.]
This is a strange piece in which we see the one-sided conversation from 1978 until 1988 in which a man writes to the editor to try to encourage him to publish a book by (deceased and unheralded) writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). He was a real writer, which makes this even more odd. The man writes every few months looking for updates and slowly getting very angry at the brush off he is clearly getting. Then the editor finally writes back and the original submitter gets it into his head that he could write an Afterward for the soon to be coming book. He then grows frustrated at the lack of response to this. Then suddenly, the letters take a sharp turn and the story becomes something else.
Lend Me Your Character [trans C.H.]
Originally I wrote about this story:
The story is a conversation between two writers. The man has written a less than savory story while the woman has written something with more literary merit. The man wants to know if he can borrow her lead character for his next story.
She reluctantly agrees.
But when she sees how he used the character–she gives herself to him “after a single moist glance,” she is disgusted by him.
As the story continues, their relationship metaphorically grows closer and they speak of the characters as if they are speaking about themselves. It’s unclear whether the relationship is real of idealized, and the cleverness is really great.
On a second read, I found a lot more going on. And while that basic summary is true, there’s a lot of subtext as well that really fleshes the story out and makes it worth reading at least twice.
***
Then there’s a couple of pages of Author’s Notes about these six stories [trans C.H.]
She gives (presumably true) background notes for each of these stories.
- How the hot dog story is a reworking of Gogol’s “The Nose” [“The Nose” tells the story of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own].
- Life is a Fairy Tale was inspired by a piece in the Zoom-Reporter signed by Jocko called How to Prevent the Growth of Your Member
- She says that Who Am I has more than 15 percent of the its text copied straight out of Alice in Wonderland.
- The Kreutzer Sonata imagines what would have happened if Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina from her husband’s perspective Then she found the novel The Sinner and decided she needed to “roll up her sleeves and embark on a project involving pure–copying.”
- The Kharms Case. She says that Daniil Kharms was a remarkable Russian avant garde writer, although he wasn’t published in the Soviet Union until 1989 (after this story was written).
- The last story is inspired by the author’s love of Gide’s assertion that great literacy characters win the right to eternity but also to an independent life.
These stories were weird for sure and I didn’t always love them, but there was enough going on in them that I found them really enjoyable at some point or another. I would certainly read more by her.
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