Dictionary of Modern Anguish

by R.M. Berry

Fourteen enactments of radical undoing by the acclaimed author of Leonardo's Horse and Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart. Reviews of unwritten novels, prefaces to fraudulent books, narratives of dictionary entries, and one interminable sentence, all written in a style as strewn with landmines as everyday speech. In "Samuel Beckett's Middlemarch" a scholar undertakes to reconstruct the deceased author's reputation after the discovery of a thousand page realist novel among Beckett's posthumous papers. The novel, about an idealistic young Englishwoman in a nineteenth-century village, is heralded by some as Beckett's broadest parody, decried by others as Beckett's dementia, but in the imaginary interval between modernity and tradition the scholar locates another Beckett of whom only Middlemarch can make an end. The spirit of Wittgenstein hovers low over these literary pratfalls where materiality proves the most artificial of abstractions and what goes without saying always leaves somebody up in the air. In "Knott Unbound" an office worker suspected of murder recalls feeling a pain but can't otherwise account for his time. "That the missing time should be missing from his life seemed, if you thought about it, the merest of accidents, like bad genes or rich parents, and the thought that Knott's well-being rested on nothing surer, nothing but the likelihood that his every second would follow the preceding with no break, all this struck him as fantastically irrational. How did humans abide it? But the world was a slave to such prejudices." In these fabrications reminiscent of Stein, Borges, and Sorrentino, Berry unsettles the grounds of narrating. In "Mimesis" a semi-literate surveyor struggles against metaphysical abandonment in a Florida swamp; in "Torture!" an anthropologist leaves his lifelong study of cruelty mysteriously unwritten; and in "A Theory of Fiction" a ruined man finds revenge in misrepresenting every injustice he's ever suffered. Nothing seems the matter. Everything appears to be wrong. From first word to last, these are fictions of impossible everydayness, where the telling of what's happening proves the unlikeliest feat of all.

Genres: Short Stories

199 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

Ralph M. Berry, Professor, Ph.D., MFA Iowa (1985), specializes in twentieth century literature, critical theory, and creative writing (fiction). In 1985, he served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tours in France. R. M. Berry is the author of the novels Frank (2005), "an unwriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," and Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times "notable book" of 1998. His first collection of short fictions, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and his second, Dictionary of Modern Anguish (2000), was described by the Buffalo News as "a collection of widely disparate narratives inspired...by the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein." Berry's essays on experimental fiction and philosophy have appeared in Symploke, Narrative, Philosophy and Literature, Soundings, American Book Review, Context, and numerous critical anthologies. With Jeffrey Di Leo he has edited the essay collection, Fiction's Present: Situating Narrative Innovation, (SUNY Press: 2007). From 1999 through 2007 he was publisher of Fiction Collective Two. He is currently chair of the English Department of Florida

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

A ragbag of metafictional stories and aimless experiments with form and voice. I lapsed into total indifference around p.92.

[Jim Elkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with the first reviewer on Amazon; it's a very uneven collection. There are many promising premises; one begins 'Among the novels I will never write...'And there are some wonderful prose poems, such as 'Pretense,' which are more or less in the manner of Barthelme (and, more distantly, in the manner of Borges (or, although this a long shot, in the manner of Lem (or, ultimately, even more distantly still, but really more plausibly, in the manner of Kafka's one-page stories))). But the anguish is unevenly distributed. Moments of anguish are glued together using a viscous paste of postmodern, North American MFA-style experimentation.