Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica is a book of short stories that might be better described as a book of premises. In a tight 154 pages, Bazterrica offers 20 horror stories, bringing the average story length to just under 8 pages, and that doesn’t count the blank pages between the end of one story and the start of another. Don’t get me wrong, short pieces can be moving and powerful, but a number of the stories read as concepts rather than fully fleshed out narratives.

Granted, short stories are not my preferred genre as a general rule, so Bazterrica is facing an uphill battle. Some of the stories have a compelling premise, but the condensed format seems to prevent the concepts from really breathing or building their emotive or thematic force. In some cases, the stories feel like they should be starting where they’ve ended. In others, the full narrative arc is there, but it’s glossed over too quickly to really hit.

One example of the issue is “No Tears,” which, despite its flaws, is one of my favourite pieces in the collection. The story follows Juan de Tartáz whose family has a long tradition of not crying. To them, tears are disgusting and vile and pathetic. His father’s dying words, even, were to never abandon the family tradition with tears. In the present, Juan goes to wakes for strangers and he tells jokes, sometimes distastefully, because he’s unaware of the circumstances of peoples’ deaths. His goal is to prevent as many tears as possible; yet, he starts noticing an eagle-faced woman at wakes for strangers whose sole goal seems to be to make them cry even more. She confesses that she is sad and refuses to be sad alone, and thus goes to funerals. Juan tries to force her to back off his territory, and there’s a scene where she bursts into tears, splashing him with the salty liquid, forcing him to flee. That moment felt so promising; in the hands of another author, I could see the story dwelling in his terror, his paranoia, his pain at feeling the tears of another. Bazterrica returns to the main narrative rather quickly and Juan notes the same woman crying at a website until her eyes have gone dry and notes: “I knew that this was her little hell, her private torment, because now she had nothing to cry about, because she was emptier than ever before, and her wings had finally dissolved into sadness. She needed me. She wanted me to stop the vultures, to wipe away the tears she no longer had” (110). The build-up to her catharsis seems unearned, and then Juan sees her smile, flies away, and sheds a single tear. This story, in my view, would have been worth fleshing out further in order to heighten the impact.

Other stories are probably the perfect length. “Unamuno’s Boxes,” for example, describes a ride in a taxi. The narrator describes all these small indications of the taxi driver’s murderous intent. She reads a bracelet on his wrist that reads AMANDA and imagines her his first victim. She describes the ritualistic practices he engages in when murdering, talks about playing his victims classical music and filing their nails, cleaning and lotioning these women in their final moments before killing them and collecting their fingernails in little boxes. What I like about the story is the twistedness of the narrator’s imagination; she pictures herself, even partially invites herself, being kidnapped, the cab taking a route not asked for. The self-destruction plot is unfortunately quotidian in reality. The cab driver charges her one eighty-four and she pays with exact change to punish him for not being a murderer. The final conceit of the story is that, as she’s paying, Unamuno places a coin in his box, which is full of nail clippers and nail polish—she leans back into the car and begs him to take her with him: “you know where” (18). It’s a twisted tale of imagining the abyss and willing your own destruction. The psychological framework of the story is enough of a justification for it, and it does not overstay its welcome.

Self-destruction emerges as a motif throughout the collection, sometimes in a frankly laughable way. “The Continuous Equality of the Circumference” is about Ada, who wants to be a circle. Not a sphere. A circle. Rooted in some kind of idea of perfection, partly as outlined by Saint Augustine, Ada wants to convert herself into a circle. She doesn’t want to be a “deformed rectangle,” so she tries to fatten herself up on spherical and later only round foods—grapes, cookies, etc. She develops a series of pulleys and creates a device to sever her own arms and legs to get closer to her ideal shape. She tries to roll towards a cookie—but her right arm blocks her. She bowls herself another way, rolling through broken glass, and is blocked again by her left arm. She dies by choking on a grape, “the mirror [too] far for her to admire the perfection she has become” (117). Honestly, the story is too outlandish for me. It’s a literalization of the harmful self-destruction of body dysmorphia and trying to meet societal expectations placed on women. There’s an essay in the literary theory world that essentially argues that neuroses in women are responses to societal expectations—women ought not to be seen, so they become anorexic to take up less space; women are not expected to be listened to, so they develop selective mutism. I’m not sure where that line of argumentation comes from, but I’d be amazed if Bazterrica had never heard of it.

There’s another story that involves gradual dismemberment (is it “Earth”? I can’t recall) and a number of the works in the collection involve body horror of some kind. “Roberto” is a more concise body horror piece with some genuine tension that gets undermined in the final lines. Narrated from a child’s perspective, the premise is that the main character has a bunny between her legs named Roberto. He’s cute and he’s hairy and he sleeps a lot. She coaxes another girl to take turns showing their vaginas to each other, but when she discovers her friend has no hair, she backs out of the big reveal. Her teacher hears the rumour and holds her back and tells her how pretty she is, and how she’s so much smarter than the other children, and how he wanted to see her bunny and teach it to be on its best behaviour. In just a page of dialogue, Bazterrica builds such a monstrous and disturbing scene. It’s a real shame that the final line of the story reveals there to be a literal bunny: “Roberto moved his ears and bared his teeth. Mr. García screamed and ran away. Roberto went back to sleep” (11). What a joke. It undermines the genuine tension with something so laughably stupid that the whole story feels like a waste. 

Contrasting that is the story “Anita and Happiness,” which also has a twist but one that lands much more effectively. The story is about a woman named Anita, whom Pablo suspects of being an alien. Everything she does feels too rehearsed. Pablo hates her, but falls in love with her, “if only to confirm whether her apparent weakness could be hiding a mastermind capable of conquering the universe, or a tireless predator harassing the human race” (33). She suggests that they should reproduce. When they have sex, it’s as if she’s studying his caresses “so that Pablo would notice she’d had an orgasm when she was supposed to have one” (36). Pablo’s anxieties provide a slightly comic tone to the piece, not only his concern that she’s an alien but also that she’ll tell all of her alien race how bad he is in bed. The twist to the story, though, is that she disappears. Pablo is proud because it confirms his suspicions that she is an alien that needed to return to her home planet. However, he sees her on the subway one afternoon and runs up to her asking how she’s doing. She tells him that she is not Anita. Pablo tells her to stop messing around and she says, “I’m not Anita, I’m Clarita” (37). Despite being identical, there’s something different about her: “She was prettier, if an alien could be described in that way” (37). The story ends with him introducing himself to “Clarita” and the thought that “The invasion has begun [...] and he felt a mix of terror and joy” (37). The story feels more satisfying as a narrative, but again, feels as if it could be developed into a more substantial and paranoiac doppelganger story.

The descriptive quality of the stories varies. Sometimes the sentences don’t really ‘pop,’ and I wonder if that’s a translation issue. That said, the story “Architecture” is rich with engaging turns of phrase. The story doesn’t really do much, but it describes dragonflies in a church: “The dragonfly of the night vibrates and engenders a violent void that settles into the walls, the architecture. It’s a great spiderweb of transparent threads that destroys the celestial breath” (132). What a wonderful cosmic image!

The closing two stories show some promise, but the endings simply don’t land. In “Mary Carminum,” we open with a compelling premise: two horrible men are competing to sleep with women during a night on the town; they rank them on numerical scales and it’s clear that they’ve drugged women before. We get these awful guys and see them getting into a situation where a woman has led them to a strange party. It’s a compelling reversal where the men can get their comeuppance. The few men at the party are essentially zombified and become the playthings of the Mother-Mary-worshipping women who also perform strange out-of-tune songs and make the men clap. It’s fine, but I think the lack of interaction and lack of self-awareness of the main character in his situation pulls away the dramatic tension. If only he started putting things together, trying to escape a little more dramatically, or resisting his capture, he might have been a more compelling character. Instead, he’s already a mindless zombie before he becomes a literal mindless zombie. The final story, “The Solitary Ones” is again a great premise but it ends when it should start. The main character is working late on New Year’s Eve and takes the subway to, hopefully, make it in time for the toasts. The power on the subway goes out and “you” find “yourself” having to walk through the unlit subway tunnels until “you” finally get to a room which, then, lacks an exit. There are mysterious white figures that turn. They have been waiting for you. The liminal space horror, vaguely intimating the afterlife, gives us something to work with, but there’s ultimately no impact. The psychological impact of the experience is cut short.

Ultimately, I think the selection is pretty forgettable. It isn’t overtly bad; it’s just flat. Bland. The style is fine. The premises are sometimes even good, but as a collection, the delivery is just lacklustre. The ideas need to be fleshed out, the suspense needs to be heightened, otherwise the payoff falls, at best, flat, and, at worst, laughable. I’m sure there’s an audience for these stories, but, sadly, it is not me.

Happy reading!

Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic

         Editors often give writers the advice to “kill your darlings”, meaning that all excess, no matter how much you like it, should be cut from the final version of the book. Privately, I’ve also always thought of it as being unsparing in your treatment of characters. You might love your characters, so you don’t want them to experience pain, but for the sake of the story, your characters need to experience conflict and suffer. Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic has a lot of positives, but stops short of sticking the landing, taking an otherwise very good book and ending on a “mid” note.

The premise of Sympathy is actually really compelling. Alice, an adopted Black girl with an absentee adoptive father, gets obsessed with a woman via social media: Mizuko Himuro, a woman about ten years her senior who is a successful writer and instructor at Columbia University. It’s one of those books where the characters are all frustrating and unlikable, though compelling. Alice is largely irredeemable, but Mizuko is also flawed, thoughtless, and self-serving with a kink for other peoples’ tears.

To focus on Alice first, she is far more outwardly egregious in her behaviour. She has some wonderful moments, like when she recounts a tutor that she loved and how the tutor told her “to ‘go have fun, go wild,’ and [she’d] burst out crying” (37). At the same time, she moves into her grandmother’s house and is meant to take care of her but is essentially useless. Meanwhile, she infiltrates Mizuko’s life, engineering situations for them to meet and spend time together. One night, Alice spends the evening with Mizuko while Mizuko is in conflict with her boyfriend, Rupert. Alice, also in a relationship, manipulates the situation to put distance between Mizuko and Rupert to insert herself and make Mizuko reliant on her. As she latches on, she is able to share a charged kiss with Mizuko and then share her bed—a high that she continues to strive for afterward. Meanwhile, she snoops through Mizuko’s phone, finding nude photographs and videos of her and Rupert and other partners, to which she self-satisfies. She lies about her intentions and lies about her life to keep Mizuko around, perpetually omitting the fact that she has stalked Mizuko on social media for ages.

The obsessiveness of the book is pretty compelling and there are a ton of wonderful features in the text. There are lots of great parallels and patterns. The motif of opposite atoms and the Higgs Boson speaks to Alice’s obsession. The aftereffects of a Japanese tsunami feature prominently, especially the detritus that remains afterward. The themes are developed with a great deal of clarity. 

One of the other layers to the text is the disruption of time. It’s a little bit difficult to follow the timeline of events; there were times that I was unclear which happens first, who is dating who when, and so forth. Alice reflects on this disruption to time a few times throughout the text. Mizuko writes a story about visiting Japan with her grandmother after the flood, which she also video recorded in full: “Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road” (217). Alice is that dark force from the future rewriting Mizuko’s history, which also makes sense given what happens to Mizuko a little later on…

Towards the end of the book, Alice becomes increasingly disassociated from herself. She describes writing as follows: “Writing in short bursts usually made me feel ordered and together, as if I had just taken a shower. If I did it for too long, it started to feel like I was having a nightmare. I would start to feel like it wasn’t even me writing it, like watching someone access your desktop remotely, or the drawing of the hands that are drawing each other” (405). Sudjic uses tech-based similes to explore the idea of not feeling in control of your own reality, but Alice also reflects on the idea of how actual experience becomes derealized through technological intermediaries. The passage continues as follows:

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her affect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her (405). 

The notion that time becomes totally derailed through her experience of this real-unreal person is a compelling way to reconceptualize the core of the story (and also justify why I found the timeline so confusing). While Alice is derealized and while Mizuko is derealized, Alice still seems to demonstrate some insight into her own ethical slippage: “I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn’t see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place” (405). There’s a little echo of the earthquake and tsunami loom under the surface.

In the end, though, the book reads as a message to someone who might not even read it. The book opens with Alice “unfriending” Mizuko in a fraught moment of uncertainty and the ending of the book is somewhat about getting her back, or at least giving her back to herself: “The purpose is no longer just to possess Mizuko but to give back what I took from her. The law of opposites says don’t send a message to your intended recipient if you want her to read it. So I am making it public. This rule has also been at work on me while writing. At first I thought I was writing to her, for her, about her. It is still all those things on the surface, but now it is deeper, wider” (405). It’s an effective closing statement for the book. 

For me, the book grows reasonably organically and builds its tension only to get derailed three quarters of the way through. Alice, through a series of bizarre coincidences, ends up going to stay in the Hamptons with Robin and Ingrid and various other friends and family. Robin and Ingrid are an older couple (60 and 40?). After doing a DNA test, Alice learns that Robin is Mizuko’s biological father, who she has never known. But, because Alice is a weird creep, she keeps the knowledge to herself. Incidentally, one day she takes a nap by the pool and awakes to find Robin touching her between her legs and they never address that ever again. Meanwhile, Alice’s boyfriend Dwight is a tech developer and works on an app called TriMe, which is a Tinder-like app designed for people seeking threesomes. At one point, Alice brings Mizuko to a masquerade play with Robin and Ingrid. Following the play, they go to dinner. In the washroom, Mizuko shows Alice that she has just matched with Robin and Ingrid on the TriMe app. Remember: Robin is Mizuko’s father. From there, Mizuko and Alice get separated. Alice ends up on drugs at an orgy where she is aggressively raped while she’s insensible (and consequently loses a fetus she had intended to abort the following day). It’s a bit excessive there. You might be thinking: Jeff, you told us people should be harsher to their characters. Well, here’s what happens next.

Alice gets increasingly obsessed about Mizuko, trying to track her down. Fearing she’s been ghosted, Alice sends increasingly desperate texts: WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU I NEED YOU and so on. Then, Alice goes on an ADHD med bender and gets hyper-focused, writing a lengthy confession letter to Mizuko. She explains all the ways she infiltrated Mizuko’s life, the betrayals she has hidden, and the secret she has kept about Mizuko’s parentage. The whole letter is a scorched earth letter and the tension is high for when Mizuko receives it. After not hearing from Mizuko for some time, it turns out that she had a brain parasite that made her have a public seizure and then she needed surgery. Alice arrives at Mizuko’s apartment and has found the letter has been opened (!) by Mizuko’s estranged mother, who has come to nurse her back to health.

At this point, I had two different endings in mind that I thought would be excellent extensions of the tension. In my first idea, Mizuko’s mother is primed to expose Alice. I could easily see it being a direct conflict or something more like blackmailing her out of Mizuko’s life. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Alice catches a break where, following her surgery, Mizuko is essentially “soft reset” and does not remember anything (time collapses inward again). Alice once again is able to nurse her back to health and keep her isolated from the world. She prevents her from contacting her ex, using her cell phone, or any other contact with the outside world. Alice encourages Mizuko to write a book in isolation. The second ending I had in mind is that, knowing that Mizuko is self-serving, it would have been excellent to see that Mizuko is the one that has actually engineered the situation to see how far Alice would go and to write a book about her. How desperate is this younger woman to care for her Misery-style? How pathetic is she? Instead of Alice being the one manipulating Mizuko, having a reversal at the end would have been a beautiful touch.

But none of that happens.

Instead, after thirty days in isolation, Mizuko’s ex shows up at the door. He bangs on the door and Mizuko wants to see him, but has to get ready first. Alice then sneaks out the window and runs away. She keeps pausing, hoping that Mizuko will follow her, but she never does. So instead Alice runs away, finds that her grandmother has died (she was supposed to take care of her), and then goes back to England and cries to her no-longer-estranged mother, starting a gardening business and then still creeping a now no-longer-available online Mizuko. It just felt that there were so many opportunities for the conflict to come to a boil but we missed every one.

We do get a revelation at the end that adds a dark twist to the book. As it turns out, Alice found out that Mizuko’s estranged mother had left a letter. Himuro reveals that she had never wanted Mizuko because she was a child produced by rape. Himuro gives the story of how Robin raped her in university, how she got pregnant, and never wanted to find him again because she was never believed and he claimed it was consentual. After writing the letter, Himuro walked into the river and drowned herself, leaving also Mizuko’s grandmother to care for herself (and die alone and unfound for some time back in Japan). It’s unclear whether Mizuko knows this information. So, there is another turn at the end but the central conflict is not the one that is most effectively developed.

One other thing that I liked about the book is the characterization of New York. Alice moves to New York from the UK to be with her grandmother and Sudjic gives a great description of walking in New York:

You don’t have to have any idea where you are going; you can advance without being aware of anything but the vague progress into time stretching out before you. In this way I discovered moments of light-headedness, which led to a feeling that my body was somehow becoming less and less material. The exact opposite of what had happened to me at home in England, when everything had become gloopy and masklike. I felt, after a time, like I could float upwards, into the air, as well as down. At its most intense, I felt like I was only a heartbeat inside my brain.
You can also cope better with strange things when you are slightly tripping out like this. It is certainly easier to fall in love with a stranger. You can answer the question “How you doing today, senorita?” in a way you never would in England, if you were asked, which you wouldn’t be. You can get talking to a woman who is wearing a smart grey suit but sitting on the sidewalk, begging. There will likely be a snappy dachshund parked beside her in a pram when you realise you have no coins in your purse, only dollar bills. This will not embarrass you; you’ll just give the bills.

You can wonder with detached amusement what a Philly cheese steak is and make your mistaken judgment based on the smell of spicy sausage in the air, which in fact comes from an adjacent cart you should have gone to instead. People will make comments about how slowly you count the change. Doesn’t matter. It’s novelty. It might as well be another language. You can pass a man holding something strange and highly personal in the street and look away because it feels like he is doing it on purpose to make people look. You can sit in a cafe downtown whilst a family holds in prayer and gives thanks because somebody graduated today, and you can watch them unselfconsciously because they are so deep into it. On the Lower East Side, you can count the ornamental cockatoos within dusty windows. In midtown you can buy something for allergy season when you see a warning about it outside a juice shop. You can do whatever you like—you can go completely mental—and no one gives a shit. (50-51)

I include that passage just as a taste of the flare in Sudjic’s novel. There are some details that really linger and standout, connected to a larger thematic framework. On the topic of New York, there’s a tense moment where Alice has to take her grandmother to the hospital but there’s confusion of where is where. In the cab, her grandmother gives the name of the hospital she is meant to go to, and Alice thought it was a different one. Her grandmother “sweating, eyes bulging” asks if that’s where she’s supposed to go. Alice narrates, “I thought Griffin wanted us to go to a different place—a hospital—but I didn’t know where it was, so I hoped I’d misremembered the address of the surgery the previous night and we were going to the hospital, because after a while the numbers and avenues all blurred into one. I hoped that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault for not intervening. I hadn’t because I didn’t want to be wrong. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be culpable for what might happen to her as a result of wasting time” (145). This ambiguity and tension and her resistance to taking definitive action reads as so relatable but also raises the stakes for the scene.

I also appreciate how Sympathy is deeply rooted in reality but at the same time exists in unreality. In one part, Alice discusses a plastic storage box that used to house memorabilia of her lost father, which she then fills with artefacts of her time with Mizuko. She describes it as a “mini-museum” and the heaviest thing in it is Mizuko’s copy of The Golden Bowl. Alice describes how Mizulo “often said that novels were dead because we have the Internet everywhere we go now and we can find out anything we want to know straightaway, which tends to kill a plot. That was why she wrote just about real life. It feels true in some ways. In other ways, I reassured her, stories must be more like chess, a game of perfect information in which all the moves that can be made are right there in front of you, but the problem is knowing what your opponent knows and what she plans to do” (79). In that way, I appreciate that Sudjic is trying to write a novel that incorporates technology as a device while also retaining the uncertainty and dramatic tension at the core of human existence, especially when it comes to love and obsession.

Overall, I would say that Sudjic has a good book here. There was a lot to like and the thematic and psychological exploration in the book is really worth the experience. It’s only slightly marred by the fact that the ending falls flat after such a build-up. If only the climax paid off more powerfully, I think the book would be one of the best I’d read this year—and yes, I leave the verb tense ambiguity in place intentionally.

Happy reading!