A few days ago, I checked out a DVD of John Huston’s 1954 film Beat the Devil from the local library. Peter Lorre, playing the crook Julius O’Hara, makes the following remark: “Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians want it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.” Time is a thief, an adversary, a mystery. But in her new novel, Time’s Mouth, Edan Lepucki gives us a Time who is intrigued with and concerned about the chasm of understanding between parents and offspring.
I’ve sometimes wished that I could rewind time to those Saturday mornings when I would take my three daughters out for the day – to find Betty and Veronica comic books and have lunch at the Pilgrim Diner. Lepucki’s Time says, “You close your eyes, and you can almost touch the past … This moment is gone and this one is too. It’s slurped away from you. I guess I do the slurping.” As if to make amends for its past behavior, Time gives us a lively story about “Those who can slip the membrane and visit those moments again.”
But uttering the slogan “Never forget!” may put us in company we would prefer not to keep. It is striking how often that cry is shouted by those we regard as dangerous demagogues. This brings us to Sharon who, on the night of her father’s funeral in 1955 (“The best day of her life”), “found herself … elsewhere,” an intimation that she was equipped to travel back in time. She takes off for California and rechristens herself Ursa. She meets Karin who offers her the job of caring for a family homestead outside of Santa Cruz. On arrival, Ursa realizes that her period is late. Soon she establishes a clandestine community of women – the Mamas, some with children, some pregnant – who bow to her strict authority and attend sessions in a private wing of the house – no children allowed! – where the Mamas fall into a swoon, sometimes oppressive, as Ursa experiences one of her “transports.” The Mamas sustain the commune by growing cannabis and selling it to students at UC-Santa Cruz.
Time as narrator isn’t analytical and its characters act within the strict bounds of their basic traits and desires. The maturation of lives here is speedy. Ursa’s disaffected son Ray and a young woman named Cherry, who toils away for the Mama cult, run off together; after giving birth to Opal, Cherry disappears, repeating her own mother’s flight from motherhood. Opal then discovers she can “tunnel” into the past just like her grandmother Ursa.
The theme of damage visited upon the children is overt. Lepucki isn’t interested in nuances and the novel is essentially plot-driven. So how does Time’s Mouth succeed? First, Lepucki’s prose is brisk and flows as fluidly as time itself. Second, she allows us to have ambivalent feelings about the time travel and describes those tunneling episodes with dispassion. Third, even as Time extends the narrative to Y2K and as the potential for some sort of generational confrontation seems pending, Lepucki keeps her intentions guarded. Will Cherry continue to tunnel even though both she and her father know there are perils? And what exactly is the pleasure of tunneling? Is it just an escape, a rejection of the present? Are there benefits to be gained from a capability that could allow us to test our memories?
Lepucki has pulled off a magical realist California morality tale about motherhood, the desperate search for safety, and generational strife with a rather light touch that avoids trauma-speak but doesn’t mitigate the predictable negative effects of selfishness. As for Time the speaker, I suppose what nudges it to speak out in the first place is Ursa’s and Opal’s precarious toying with time in their transports. But Time, notoriously never-ending, turns out to have a talent for wrapping things up.
[Published by Counterpoint on August 1, 2023, 407 pages, $28.00 US hardcover]
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In A General Theory of Oblivion (2012), the Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa created the character of Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese émigré who remains in her apartment for the entire 28-year span of the Angolan civil war that commenced in 1975. The tragic effects of the war are never disregarded, even as Agualusa’s unnamed, laconic narrator looks beyond Ludovica’s windows to the street urchins, intelligence officers, mercenaries, poets, tribal peoples, journalists and thieves who pursue their various interests and targets. But Ludovica, losing her eyesight while keeping a journal of her candid impressions, is the beating heart of the story. When I reviewed the novel in 2015, I noted that “the oblivion may be a tireless force or condition – but it fails to makes us oblivious.”
While taking up reports of precarity and violence, Agualusa attunes his humanistic voice to tales of the other side of life. Just as the novel comprises 37 brief chapters that quickly set up scenes and hasten to the driven, quirky, foolish, shrewd, generous or murderous characters during wartime, his post-war fiction extends his impulse to portray the habits of humans, often with a comic streak. Daniel Hahn, who has translated seven novels by Agualusa, now delivers his fluid versions of the 30 stories in A Practical Guide to Levitation (Manual Prático de Levitação, 2005).
Agualusa’s amused take on eccentric behaviors and unaccountable obsesssions – his tone of momentary acceptance of the weird or uncanny in ordinary encounters – reminds me of the crónica genre in Spanish- and Portuguese-language newspapers. Now living and working in Mozambique as a journalist, he writes stories with that here’s what I just encountered vibe of a crónica. (Agualusa writes monthly for the Portuguese magazine LER, the weekly Brazilian newspaper O Globo, and the Angolan portal RDP África.)
“The Interpreter of Birds,” a four-page story, illustrates most of Agualusa’s narrative impulses. It begins, “Emanuel Divino Tchimbamba learned to chirp during the years of the Angolan civil war. It was common practice among the guerilla forces, to fool the government troops. The small groups of commandos communicated with one another, hidden in the tall grasses, by imitating the songs of birds.” Tchimbamba, no ordinary birder, “took the studying of chirping so seriously that he was able not only to deceive the government troops, but the birds themselves.” Now, the war is over, and Tchimbamba hires himself out for various jobs and entertainments. Agualusa says he interviewed the man in a market in Luanda, the country’s capital. There Tchimbamba would set up a stall “where he would receive anyone who might be interested in talking to an old owl, who Tchimbamba claimed was the spirit of the legendary chief Caparandanda.”
I won’t divulge the rest of this charming tale – except to say that Agualusa won’t let us bask in the relief of comedy. The owl’s visions of the future, whether dreamed up by a swindler or not, speak out of our mythic psyche. From beginning to end, each story here sparkles with wit, empathy, and blunt honesty. At one point, Agualusa asks the owl, “Will we ever stop having wars in the world?” I suggest that you tune in to the owl’s response.
[Published by Archipelago Books on July 25, 2023, 256 pages, $22.00 US/ $29.00 CAN paperback]