BOOK REVIEW : Frightening Stories That Stretch Imagination

The Graywolf Annual Six: Stories from the Rest of the World edited by Scott Walker (Graywolf Press: $8.50; 208 pages).

Skip the introduction to these stories--a tirade by an angry man who trashes our country (“We, the citizens of the United States, are among the most poorly read people in the world”) and then subverts some of the very stories he’s collected: “If we perceive and are put off by stiffness in the plot, a static character, or clumsy language, we may entirely miss the music in these tales.”

Taking no responsibility for the clumsy language (“. . . Despite some temptation to ‘improve’ them, we finally thought it best to publish the stories mostly as we found them”), the editor forces readers to trudge through sentence fragments that might have been clarified by changing a period to a comma, through Arabic or Chinese characters saying “Scram!” to each other, and through cryptic references to “Emergencies” and “The Aggression of ’57.”

Still, none of that matters. As I say, skip the introduction, forget about the feckless editing, and head straight for these stories. Instead of finding out how humans “differ” through cultures, as the editor claims, you’ll see, once again, how similar they are: Whether in Bangladesh or North Africa, there’s bound to be a ruling class bolstered by a corrupt government. Sometimes, through headstrong bravery, a student or a journalist or even an untouchable can take on that corrupt ruling class. Sometimes fearless individuals win; more often, they lose, but the story is in the struggle, and the fact that over and over, a single brave human being makes the effort.

“So long as the authority provides you with bread and takes upon itself to care for you and look after you and protect you, it will certainly break your head in if you try to show enmity. It makes payment to you in exchange for your keeping quiet . . . But if you’ve taken your freedom then all you can do is have recourse to the desert.” This from a story by Ibrahim Al-Kouni, set in the Libyan desert, with the sun beating down, and the mysterious Taureg-Blu Men--a society safely out of the reach of governmental powers, partying and jabbering in the distance, dancing away from all the oppressions the rest of us endure. But the words apply to almost every character in these tales who tries to get out from under a stifling political system. Take to the desert! Become a prophet! Put out good words! Become a voice crying (or laughing) in the wilderness.

From Japan, China, Finland, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, these writers try to escape from material, emotional and political burdens. For the male character, the oppressor is usually the “system,” although Aino Jogi, in Finland, writes a story where a wife, with her concerns about “breakfast,” stifles the artist. (John Updike wrote this same story some years ago, in which a crass woman wrecks her husband’s poetic imaginings with the brusque instruction, “Eat your egg.”)

Women characters here experience the same sense of oppression and boredom, but since they are seen primarily as sexual beings, their revolts take erotic form. A Japanese housewife begins sleeping with strangers she neither likes nor is attracted to, just to keep from going home to her husband and her television set. A young girl in Iraq goes out in the streets, very properly veiled, then lures a young man to a secluded place, where, in a breathless moment of sexual defiance, she lifts her veil to reveal her face.

Some of these stories stretch our imagination in frightening ways. “What Should I Do” by Chen Goukai answers a rhetorical question--”I wonder how people manage to live in China’s Cultural Revolution?”--with a graphic statement: That Revolution was a killer! People barely lived at all!

And the last story, from Kenya, traces the fate of a chieftain’s daughter who is marked for human sacrifice to a Lake Monster so that her people may reign. This bears some resemblance to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” of course, but in the Kenyan story, the line between metaphor and reality has been completely erased. These stories erase that line often, so that again and again we see the roots, the beginnings, the templates, of all the narratives that hold our own civilization together. Buy this book! But skip the introduction.