Once Upon a Time
Leo is a writer and the story of his life is a complex twisting weave of events. Its lack of simplicity distinguishes it from the essential quality of fairy tales. And yet, at the same time there is a strange and undefinable quality of something like a fairy tale to his story. This aspect of the narrative is foreshadowed in the metaphors outlined in the not-quite-surrealistic narrative quality of the opening pages:
“Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.”
The Real Alma
Alma Singer was named by her mother after a character in a book given to her mother by her father. That book is titled The History of Love. The lack of simplicity in this novel is very much not like that of a fairy tale. And yet, the fairy tale quality persists if only in the struggle and desire to attain a happily-ever-after ending. Even in the face of tragic historical events which make such a thing all but impossible:
“She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away.”
The Human Cancer
Leo describes himself as a metaphor, calling himself a “human cancer.” And what, pray tell, makes a person carcinogenic? Attitude. Nothing but attitude:
“There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.”
Loneliness
This is a story obsessed with loneliness. Everybody is lonely in some way or another, although for Leo it is a state that attains a definition of the soul. He is a writer, of course, and so his descriptions of being lost in the dark grip of loneliness sometimes reach a state of metaphoric ecstasy:
“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust.”
The Death of Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel is the kind of person who is described as losing himself in the “commas and semicolons” and “the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence.” His is an obsession with the small silences of existence and it there he finds refuge. Until the moment he faces execution, and it is in that last little corner of silence before the big sleep that doubt inevitably must enter:
“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.”
