Blood and Soap
By Linh Dinh
Seven Stories Press
Linh Dinh has the amazing ability to
make you laugh, then send you in the direction of a unanswered
question—all in the space of a sentence! Things are not “quite right”
in Blood and Soap, his new collection of stories from Seven Stories Press.
When I say not “quite right,” what I mean to say is, like Borges or
Calvino, the unknown and known are on the same plane, so the reader can
relax as if to say, “nothing is perfectly shaped, so let the story
breathe.”
The first story, “Prisoner with a Dictionary,” sets the
tone for many of the stories that follow. On the first page, a young man
thrown in prison finds a dictionary; not knowing what to do with it, he uses
it as a stool, pillow, then tears out pages to wipe himself. He will later
regret the missing pages. The first scene is an apt appraisal of the
approach Dinh takes in his poetry and prose. It is like he has constructed
his own world in which it is perfectly suitable that this guy uses his
dictionary to wipe himself, then turns to the
daunting task of trying to understand a dictionary in a foreign
tongue. The author uses the idea of language to show us how ridiculous it
can be to assume total knowledge. Dinh tells us, “His main virtue, and the
main curse of his life, was the ability to follow through on any course of
action once he had set his mind to it.”
In the fashioning of a fictional
world, we always have to ask: what is real, and what not? Is it possible that one reader’s fiction is another’s non-fiction, and
vice versa?
In
the course of “Prisoner with a Dictionary,” we see the prisoner
“reason that he understood these words because he knew their
definitions.” In this generously layered first story, Dinh sets out some
of the basic suppositions of fiction/story writing. What are we really communicating? And to whom really? Just ourselves?
Through
language, you can at least set yourself in another world, even if it is just
a world of your making. From the first story: “What is revelation, after
all, but the hard-earned result of an exceptional mind working at peak
capacity?" In the end, the prisoner only thought he had a new world, a new language, “But the truth is, the
prisoner had regained nothing.” Like the protagonist in Nabokov’s
“Invitation to a Beheading,” this is a case study in solitude and
imagination. Is fiction/imagination a function of reality, or the gentle
truth that we are all day dreamers in a virtual hell. In Dinh’s case, this
question is not mere intellectual fodder, but played out with humor
combined with
metaphysical doubt.
Like with Anselm Berrigan or Kenneth
Koch, the presence of humor can often be a major part of your work without
betraying the bigger questions. In “One-Sentence Stories,” like
“What’s Showing,” Dinh gives brief bursts of hilarity in his often
twisted scenarios.
“He ignored public fascination with movie stars, athletes, statesmen,
revolutionaries,
mass-murderers, and poets by writing well-researched, foot-noted, and illustrated
biographies of bus drivers,
cashiers, beauticians, filing clerks, plumbers, and roofers.”
In “What’s Showing?,” I found
myself laughing out loud in the waiting room of the operating room of a
hospital. I was waiting to have minor surgery on my arm and leg. I checked myself concerning the
laughter, realizing that some people might be going under the knife for more
serious reasons, or waiting for loved ones. At the time I could not help but
to think how hilarious and absurd it was that in a few moments a doctor I
barely knew was going to cut into me.
By
usurping the usual program of heavy metaphysical query in fiction, instead
by using humor, Dinh has the ability to re-frame things for us. Who needs to
read another heavy novel or short story about “the process of writing,”
or the narrator who has the same name as the author searching for the
meaning of writing? In “Key Words,” he writes, “It is often said that
grammar provides a sure index to human behavior. Who hasn’t noticed that
people who write in run-on sentences, are also prone to lying, to getting up
late, and to alcohol?”
The sheer ridiculousness of the narrator's claim here is enough to make us
disoriented and think about our own writing.
It is through Dinh’s work here that we
can realize that the world around us must be constantly questioned, poked,
and prodded. In the least, we may find that at the center, the biggest laugh
is on us. I won’t tell you anymore; get the book and read!
Erik
Sweet, 2005
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