The Atheist ...

I do a random search on my Kindle for magical realism. All sorts of books come up. One of them is The Atheist by Gabriel Ruiz, translated by Monica Lanshorn.

The book's cover depicts a white stick cross centered in a child-shaped heart superimposed upon a pond of sitting ducks haunted by the ghost of a church. The predominant colors are golds and browns. I download the sample.

The book starts with questions. Few are direct. They are interesting enough to keep me reading. The narrative style is pleasant, matter-of-fact. The narrator himself is thoughtful and introspective. But not too much.

An englishman in a small spanish town with a dead friend, the Atheist. And now two graves are being dug. One just inside the cemetery wall, and one just outside.  His friend will have to decide which grave will be the Atheist's.

Then comes Maria who believes in God.

The story follows a path that reminds me of the streets I walked in Granada. Not straight, but paved with stones that are not flat.

And then there is the boy, so much like the Atheist himself. I know what you're thinking. I was too.
When I finish reading I smile.

Clever.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

I love the story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. So far, it is my favorite in Leaf Storm. It is the reason I bought the book, years ago, in the first place. Its seven pages drench us with:

Lyrcial prose-

...a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portugese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while wide awake...

Clever humor-

He seemed to be so many places at the same time that they grew to think he'd been duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.

And blistering indictment-

The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead.

We pray, ask, beg, and plead for the divine to reveal itself in our lives.

We bemoan, fret, and sigh that the divine eludes us. Yet if a very old man with enormous wings made a clumsy landing in our yard on a wet afternoon, what would we see?

Not even with an axe...

I finish the story Leaf Storm and think:

These are the memories of how we treat one another. 
Death, the final arbiter arrives for us all.
And then we smell...

Immediately, I begin reading the Gabriel Garcia Marquez biography by Gerald Martin.

I am shocked--why?--to learn just how autobiographical the story Leaf Storm is. I feel disappointed and satisfied. Disappointed because it wasn't imagined from ground zero. Satisfied because perhaps I did get the story, more than I thought.

Then something the biographer observes about Gabo's voice gives me pause.

Many years later, when Garcia Marquez managed to reconstruct those two ways of interpreting and narrating reality, both of them involving a tone of absolute certainty--the worldly, rationalizing sententiousness of his grandfather and the other-worldy oracular declamations of his grandmother--leavened by his own inimitable sense of humor, he would be able to develop a world-view and a corresponding narrative technique which would be instantly recognizable to the readers of each new book.

And I begin absorbing in a new way how there is no becoming who we are. It is always an undoing. An unveiling. A stripping away of flawed pretense. Useless affectation, that fools no one but ourselves, must go. Because we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots.

Not even with an axe.

Good and Bad Have Long Tails...

Of the three books I'm reading, Oscar Wilde's The Complete Fairy Tales feels the most prosaic. Qualification: I am not done yet. The allusion to christ in The Selfish Giant feels maudlin, while the inviolate boundaries drawn between good and bad in The Devoted Friend feel tedious.

Good and Bad have long tails. Tales that grab the middle, and attest only to the pendulum's extreme swings deny deeper truths. It's not so much that everything is relative....

It's much more that this leads to that and that leads to this, and addressing a partial continuum in moral absolutes feels hollow.

But Wilde wrote his fairy tales ages ago. Perhaps, I can forgive him for being a man, somewhat of his times.

When I was a child...

We had a Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tale collection (printed) and an LP of The Brothers Grimm. I wore that LP out. The book of fairy tales was more dangerous, and lingering. Things we were not allowed to discuss in my home--anger, envy, betrayal--laced those stories.

I kept quiet about those things. And held my breath.

Because those enchanted tales held out hope for a future where the truth might be set free, and I might be able to breathe.