The writers who most gratify me are those who return to the pawn shop to redeem what they’ve hocked. They pay a premium for what was theirs to begin with, even if it is shrouded in uncertainty. No, especially if it is shrouded. They behave in such a way that we are of two minds about them. One of my early poetry teachers said that a poem’s beats enact the passage of time – but then my physicist friend said “Nope, time doesn’t pass. Time continues.” I crave writing that captures the tension between – and sudden confluence of — timeless instants and temporal extensions. Charles Simic says that what is visible to the poet is only part of the story. In a short essay called “Some Thoughts About the Line,” he says the poet at work encounters “innumerable paradoxes – the astonishment of finding oneself living in two worlds at once” (italics mine). The writer behaves in such a way that we are of two minds about them.
All of these notions are revived by the work of Katie Peterson. There are a few lines in her second collection of poems, A Piece of Good News, that read like a signature: “My interpretation // meant my wild / translation. It would always / be inside and against.” When she speaks wildly, that is, with self-granted latitude, she gives in to an impulse – which is why a poet’s most stubborn resistance may look and sound like acquiescence. To revel in being “against,” one requires a world that also won’t give in. The pawn shop – unless you pay with your only-ness.
In her new book of lyric prose, Life In A Field, Peterson conjures a world of dualities, the freedom of discovery and the routine of labor: “In this story there is a girl and there is a donkey. The girl approaches the donkey because the girl has something to say. What is it?” Neoteny, the retention of juvenile features in the adult, is at play in the narrative voice, simultaneously child-like and sapient. As a story, Life In A Field wants to know what a story actually is, since “It is true that everyone lives in a story.” The girl-child begins to apprehend that her perceptions of the world are entirely her own; the donkey performs his tasks. There is also an “I” who offers asides, anecdotes, opinions:
“The girl has shifted her position. She’s trying not to scare the donkey. She’s trying to get closer to the tuft of white inside his ear. Has she put her arms around him already, and is this actually a friendly denouement? Or has their alliance not been secured yet, and does this dance still dovetail with courtship? It seems he received her words first as warmth, then as breath and sweat. I suspect that, if we get closer, our presence will startle each of them in opposite directions and the point is to keep their combination in the landscape, isn’t it? So we should stay here.”
In each moment, Peterson’s text wavers between telling and disavowing, clarifying and smudging – the halting motion of devising the nuanced story of one’s existence. The text itself, crisp and settled as if told before to oneself, embraces choice (elimination of all other alternatives) and fortuity (what drops in one’s lap) –
“How can you tell a donkey is unhappy? You can tell a donkey is unhappy because the animal exhibits stereotypical behaviors. The short list of these behaviors includes pacing in an approximate figure eight and repeating a high pitched bray, even with a mouth full of hay. The long list includes shimmying the neck in to any space of an available body. Each moment of a story is like that, a mistake made into a behavior. What if a story can only be the opposite of what actually happened? Each thing you don’t trust from your actual memory becomes a moment worth telling. One poet calls each word of a poem ‘a step away from chance.’ I have always thought that the opposite of chance was focus.”
Along the way, the girl is emerging from girlhood. At one point, she is in a church where “She imagined consoling a god so scared he hid from visitors in his own house.” And then:
“She didn’t feel much, but that wasn’t sad. What she felt didn’t hurt her. It didn’t sit upon her like a child on the chest of a father picnicking inn the grass. It didn’t weigh. It just was. The light came through the windows on either side of the cross, which, without a body, looked just like another window, without the glass. Inside, it looked like the worshippers were worshipping the reoriented crossbeams of an early stage of a house.”
Peterson’s field gives us a recognizable world – and the girl’s and the “I”’s reckonings give us another, slightly atilt. The shape of the story is constantly subjected to the test of maybe-and-maybe-not. And yet the choices Peterson has made, of diction and tone and pace, underscore her decisiveness. The limits she sets make way for freedom. Just as Simic asserted, time has a dual function in work like this: going nowhere while inspiring acts and speech. No wonder Peterson’s narrative ends by acknowledging that time is the “handmaiden of ruin” but also the provider of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”
The text is accompanied by photographs by Young Suh.
[Published by Omnidawn Publishing on May 1, 2021, 104 pages, $19.95 paperback. Selected by Rachel Zucker for the Omnidawn Open Prize.]
* * * * *
Pedro Mairal can’t or won’t get very far into an interview without addressing the psyche and behavior of Lucas Pereyra, the narrator of his new novel The Woman From Uruguay. Just a few minutes into a recent interview at Literary Hub, he acknowledges that some readers not only “can’t stand the character” but entirely give up on the book because of him. “Yeah, he’s an asshole,” Mairal concurs, “and his whole life falls apart – but he gets his lesson.”
Our high school English teachers told us about “unreliable narrators” –deceptive, often blinkered individuals from whom we learn to distance ourselves. The pleasure of such novels, we were told, derives from arriving at our own alternative visions of what’s actually going on. Later on, our pleasure becomes more textured and complex: we enjoy feeling off-balance, collecting evidence but suspending final judgment, recognizing the character’s faults yet responding to the intimacies on offer. This latter pleasure, I believe, is generated throughout The Woman From Uruguay, even while Mairal tests our patience.
Lucas sketched: A 44-year old novelist who owes his publisher new work but claims that his domestic responsibilities impede his ability to write. He, his wife Catalina and young son Maiko are nearly broke and rely on her salary. He complains that marital sex isn’t anything like the passion he and Cat once experienced. Is she seeing someone? Because advance payments from Spain and Colombia for his unwritten work have been deposited in a bank in Montevideo, he decides to travel from Buenos Aires to retrieve the $15,000 in cash. The payment went to Uruguay because the exchange rate there is more favorable than in Argentina. Also in Montevideo is a woman he met at a previous festival, Mogalí Guerra Zabala, 28-years old. So that’s his plan: get the money, spend the day with “Guerra,” then use the cash to stay afloat for the coming months while writing the novel.
The narrative takes the form of a long letter to his wife written several months after a separation. He explains (or rationalizes) everything – all of his “inexplicable idiocy” and the unanticipated results of his infidelities, petulance, and inattentiveness:
“I was going to have to get Maiko some kind of gift. Maybe in the duty-free on the way back. I was also going to get a good bottle of whiskey to celebrate. And a bottle of perfume for you, for putting up with me those past months. That was my rationale, my sensible decision: to be with you, tend our nest, our child. And yet sometimes you surrender to darker decisions, ones you make with your body, or that your body makes for you, the animal that you are. If you could see it, that would be one thing, but it can’t be seen, it’s a blind spot, outside of language, out of reach, and the crazy thing is that that’s what we are, to a great extent, we’re that beat that wants to perpetuate itself …”
In the LitHub interview, Mairal mentions that it took him ten years to develop his “colloquial” style. In the hands of a less talented translator, his prose could have easily degraded into facile idiomatic language. But Jennifer Croft, who amazed readers with her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, retains Lucas’ urgency and shiftiness as well as his more comic insights and travel observations. Lucas’ projected novel “was going to be my great novel. I could sense it. A guy who leaves his wife and kids and disappears in Brazil, transforms into somebody else.” The Woman from Uruguay suggests that such transformations may be illusory, at least for Lucas, and that our best chances for change lie in reckoning with our origins. But Lucas portrays very little of his life before marriage – and can’t see into the dynamics of infatuation. And what do we really know about Guerra? About as much as he does – and as with all infatuations, perhaps he doesn’t regard her as an actual person. And have we accepted that shimmery version of her? When he meets up with her after several months of texting, he says:
“For a moment I thought: Who is this person? She was a total stranger. It was hard to match her to my months-long delirium. I don’t mean she wasn’t good-looking – in fact, in those jeans and that t-shirt, which was kind of open in the back, she was hot as hell — but the ghost of Guerra that had been with me all that time was so powerful that I found it strange that this was really her, here, before my very eyes.”
“Everything had gotten very complicated for me,” he says towards the end. By that time, as Mairal unspools the final scenes, the results of Lucas’ actions seem inevitable. But even though our judgment may be severe, we also have to admit that we wanted to travel with him – and that Mairal’s prose, snappy and fluid, endears Lucas to us simply because he is, in his foolishness, utterly human.
[Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 20, 2021, 160 pages, $24.00 hardcover]