Buzzed Books #81 by Drew Barth

Alyson Hagy’s Scribe

Let’s talk about magic realism. Magic realism is kind of odd and nebulous in how it behaves, but a reader always knows it when they see it. Magic realism gives off a feeling of being immersed,  being familiar and yet not. These senses all come together with Alyson Hagy’s Scribe, a novel that centers around an unnamed woman renowned for her ability to write letters. She’s asked by a man named Hendricks to write and deliver a letter for him, but this request, throughout the course of the story, is made more difficult by the machinations of horrible people around them. Scribe is a novel centered on wants and needs—of what can be given and taken by individuals before consequences rain down like angry locusts.

Hagy does something spectacular when she draws on an Appalachian loneliness to drive Scribe forward. Abandoned homesteads, dried riverbeds, old homes built by hand, and a constant sense of unease that permeates our main character’s soul. The loneliness and unease here are unique to their location. Myths and legends of the area, as well as the two sisters themselves, have already taken root and this informs the sheer believability and depth of Hagy’s world building. This is a world after some kind of civil war. Which one? Don’t worry about it. The war happened and this is the aftereffect. And this is a part of the beauty of the story as well: it’s very much rooted in a specific time, but feels timeless all the same. Hagy completely immerses us in the world she’s created, one that is foreign and absolutely familiar. And this goes back to the Appalachian loneliness, this unique blend of hearth fire smells and disquiet about what’s beyond the trees just out of sight.

This sense of unease that the setting reinforces only bolsters the sense of magic that permeates Hagy’s words. She’s built legends, yes, but legends exist in the past. She likewise mythologizes the present, letting the unnamed woman and Hendricks experience aspects of the world that are unbelievable but accepted. Trumpet horns from nothing, speaking in her dead sister’s voice, the presence of a group known only as the Uninvited. The world is informed by magic and myth; shaped by a chisel of realism. The story lets its magic flow freely, showing us with a lyrical eye the jarring and the beautiful in equal measure. The magic doesn’t save or delight. It is a magic that informs and heralds desolation as it rolls down our main characters.

Scribe is a novel of wonder and desperation. The story gives us a landscape painted in language both beautiful and uncanny while populating it with the kind of people who would murder for their debts. It’s a world that exists in a way only Hagy’s lyricism can show. Every page is a song sung by a blind man with a guitar in an empty train station. The words are raw, coarse in a way that is almost grating, but still billows with a beautiful sense of wonderment throughout.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #78 by Drew Barth

Edgardo Franzosini’s The Animal Gazer

Consider the elephant. Consider what you know about its form and presence, for that is the first thing the reader is asked to do in Edgardo Franzosini’s The Animal Gazer. We are given a picture of a sculpture by Rembrandt Bugatti, famed sculptor and brother of the known automaker. But what we’re being asked to consider here isn’t just the elephant itself. We may be familiar with Bugatti’s some 300 animal statues, but how familiar are we with the man who created them and ended his life at 31? It’s a question that Franzosini grapples with throughout the novel, and one that is rather difficult to answer. While The Animal Gazer is inspired by Bugatti’s life, we can only know so much from outside Bugatti’s thoughts. An internal examination of Bugatti is how Franzosini occupies the story. There are historical facts, but there are hidden truths among them that shape Bugatti.

For Bugatti, the precision of his sculptures was not his chief intent. Less anatomy and precision, more of the movement and mood of the animal. And this is something that Franzosini looks to replicate in his prose. This is historical fiction in snapshot. It is a novel that looks to capture the mood and the moment, not painstaking historical accuracy. As a result of this, we as readers are given an impressionistic tour through Bugatti’s later life that is genuinely beautiful. We breathe in the air at Antwerp Zoo in Belgium and feel the crispness of the mornings at the Jardin de Plantes in Paris for these were where Bugatti lived his life. His passion is Franzosini’s passion as the author brings us the animals that would inspire Bugatti’s works.

There’s an intricacy running through the novel in how Franzosini chose which moments of Bugatti’s life to highlight. The novel takes some liberties , as it must, with how events are portrayed or how Bugatti was thinking at the time. From his stay in Belgium to the executions of the animals at the Antwerp Zoo to his final days in Paris, Franzosini is able to create an arc of Bugatti’s life. He isn’t trying to theorize about his suicide or romanticize the moment. He only presents the suicide as a conclusion to the story.

And that’s what makes the story worth it by the end. Like the sculptures, this life story is a nebulous thing with half-remembrances and quarter-truths about large events and perfect snapshots of one salt shaker at a restaurant. Franzosini gives us this story how a friend would tell it: in pieces and filled with ideas about what may have been going through Bugatti’s head. And that’s perfect. We’re given a wonderful journey through what could be his eyes during small moments in his life. A journey through the zoo, antelopes in his studio, reminiscence of time spent with his brother, they all build into what we need to know about Rembrandt Bugatti.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #75 by Drew Barth

Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

There’s familiarity in a convenience store. Safety, even. We walk into a convenience store and have certain expectations about what’s likely going to happen. Familiar drinks, chips, candy, hot dogs rolling away.

It’s within this familiarity we find Keiko Furukura: thirty-eight year-old part-time convenience store worker at her local Smile Mart. We’re given a glimpse into the life of a woman with thoughts like:

It is the start of another day, a time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move. I am one of those cogs, going round and round. I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.

Simply the thought of remaining a dedicated store employee keeps her sleeping well at night. It’s a position that’s typically overlooked. But they are brought out into the fluorescent light for us to see.

As a character, Keiko Furukura is fascinatingly strange. She has worked in the same convenience store since eighteen and has no issue with this vocation at all. And it is through the convenience store that she has become a person. With each new employee or manager, she takes on aspects of them as a way to appear more convenient to them. A character, Sugawara, has a particularly boisterous way of speaking in the morning. As such, Keiko adopts aspects of it into herself. Another character, Mrs. Izumi, has a particular taste in fashion that Keiko then slowly begins to imitate after researching certain brands. These subtle mannerisms she picks up only reinforces her own character: Keiko is a blank slate without the convenience store. But as a character, that’s what she wants. Even if the world around her, namely her friends and her sister, scream and cry for her to change, she is incapable of doing so because who would she be without the Smile Mart?

At times, this book can be devastating. The interplay between individuality and conformity, work life and real life, all unwind as we question ourselves. Is my work self just a modified actual self? Do I make these decisions for myself or for the people around me? It’s this constant undercurrent in a novel that is fairly light in tone. It’s as though Keiko herself is so direct in her thoughts and actions that the Smile Mart self is the only self that exists for her. And that’s what makes this book devastating in a good way. We as readers can see something askew in Keiko, but does Keiko see it in herself? Possibly. Or maybe she’s just what she wants: a good convenience store employee.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.