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THE TWO LIVES OF EDWARD HOPPER
The thirty-odd stories in Ken Nash’s collection The Brain Harvest present
a variety of styles, themes and arguments. There are elaborate,
developed narratives with detailed characters and plots (as in “The
Cello Garden,” the fictional account of the life and fate of a beautiful
cellist Anna Leibowitz), and there are sketches in a few rough
brushstrokes (“Making Babies” and “My Lobotomy,” two very different, yet
eerily funny renderings of amorous failures). They feature real-life
characters and narrators trapped in surreal or unreal states and
situations (e.g. “Maurice Utrillo” who achieves an epiphany of space,
surface and depth when observing a commonplace wall); but they also brim
with completely fictional or even fantastic characters in equally
surreal situations (for example, “Anima Husbandry,” a three-page
description of a wife’s dismantling and packing her husband into a
suitcase for a trip to Paris). This blending has as its combined effect
not only the defamiliarisation of the real, but the equally unsettling
familiarisation of the unreal, ultimately posing the question of whether
one can or indeed should distinguish between these two in a fictional
world such as Nash’s. Equally unsettling is the basso continuo that
prevails underneath the episodic brevity and constant shifts in
narrative perspective performed by these tales: Nash’s preoccupation
with language and the bizarre names inhabiting and describing both the
natural and the corporate worlds. To take but two examples, there are
the “Cambodian Vine Rattan, Sinai Braided Sea Grass, Singapore Cane,
Burmese Celery Hemp, Uyghur Cave Moss” in “Baskets,” or “afternoons
watching Korean soap operas dubbed into Cantonese, and evenings watching
bootleg videos or playing high-stakes mahjong, while chain smoking Mann
Si Fat cigarettes” in “The Hostage.” Nash’s manipulation of the
particular and the minute has all the attention for the bizarre and the
ability of evoking the grotesque. In terms of analogues and precursors
to Nash’s “playful and quick-witted style,” Clare Wigfall’s cover blurb
speaks of the “maverick American greats like George Saunders and Donald
Barthelme.” To those one can plausibly add Nash’s avowed influence of
the labyrinthine structures of Jorge Luis Borges and the evident
presence, behind the eerie waft of the everyday turned into the
grotesque that hovers over the collection, of Prague’s chief literary
revenant, Franz Kafka. Described by the Prague Post as “an
eclectic, deceptively witty collection of short fiction that represents
the crystallization of one of Prague’s most resourceful and imaginative
English-language writers” and commended by Wigfall as a collection whose
every short story is “distinct and memorable in its jewel-like
compactness,” Brain Harvest is a richly imaginative and heterogeneous collection.
Read The Two Lives of Edward Hopper here
Read The Two Lives of Edward Hopper here
