Babel

by Gabriel Blackwell

A man becomes obsessed with expanding his body, putting on weight and enlarging himself until he swallows his surroundings. Another man is imprisoned by his own reflection, a reflection that spawns countless new reflections without end. And while one man consumes the disembodied essence of his siblings, experiencing memories that aren't actually his, others lose their wives to imaginary gods or grieve the collapse of families that don't even exist.Part Borges, part Calvino, part Hieronymous Bosch, the eerie fictions of Gabriel Blackwell offer warped reflections of domestic lives in turmoil, relationships on the brink. In these funhouse mirror distortions of identity crises and lovers' disputes, entropy deforms reality and destroys the fragile bonds between people. As would-be parents struggle with the difficulties of conception, stories half-told gestate new stories within a miasma of yet more stories. As children survey the lives of their elders, dwelling on the paths not taken, they find their own identities fracturing into kaleidoscopes of unrealised possibilities.Reader, be Babel does not stand on solid ground. The abyss will open beneath you and devour your world. Enter at the risk of plunging in, with nothing in the depths to break your fall.

Genres: Short Stories

128 pages, Paperback

Published November 26, 2020

Reviews

[Gabriel]

The book I read most often in 2020.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld0rm...

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Is it better to feel unhappy with what one is doing but to be accepted as part of a group doing that thing, or is better to feel unhappy because one is pursuing what one wants to pursue but is alone in doing so?"

A delightful Davenportian, Lynchian, Borgesian experience. The most impressive book of short fiction I've read in some time.

[Gregg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gabriel Blackwell is a "difficult" writer for all the usual sins attached to that pejorative, (by those for whom difficulty is a pejorative): shifting or uncertain points of view, inexplicable occurrences, nonsensical plots, "unrelatable" or opaque characterizations, bizarre psychology, serpentine sentences, cabbalistic punctuation, genre bending to the point of messy snaps. This is clearly a book that many, in search of a "good read," will fling forcefully across the room with a Dorothy Parker arm. And therein lies the problem, not with the brilliance of books like Blackwell's newest collection of short stories, Babel (from UK publisher Splice), but with readers who want, who demand, books without language, (or perhaps in the unlanguage of Babel's polyglot proles). This is part of the power of Blackwell's stories in Babel, (and abundantly on display in his many other works as well): stories that do the difficult work (yet with style and wit) to restore the strangeness of language, of story making, of the imaginative worlds we trick out of tiny marks on a page, for a language-debased age. He does this without aliens, time travel, alternate dimensions or dystopian confections, but with an electrifying regard for language itself. In these stories we see it in a shock of awakening, like those leaving Socrates' allegorical cave (and sometimes with the same frisson of the scary sublime). With Blackwell, the many worlds of quantum theory, like Borges' library, has visceral counterparts: one entrance to this library is through parentheses. Follow them in the lead story "( )", the way a math equation holds nested brackets. (Math operations require we answer the problems inside-out). Translated to narrative, the story of a ventriloquist, Blitz, who catches bullets in his teeth fired by "that most famous of wooden noumena" Bobby, drops us through a vertiginous trap door of Matryoshka-dolls-within-dolls of story and incident, rich with often hilarious allusions to old movies, (ventriloquist impersonator "Clive Robertson"/Cliff Robertson played the Twilight Zone ventriloquist in The Doll), to European tropes of magical melodrama, philosophy and history, only to reverse course and pitch us up and out of the dolls, like a thrown voice issuing from the hollow dummy, (and the "hollow leg" of another doppelganger, Van Zandt, (North by Northwest?) whose Matryoshka-homunculus in reverse somehow includes Baron Von Munchhausen, Edgar Allen Poe and 19th Century Flat-Earth debunker Alfred Russell Wallace). Those of a certain age will remember ads on comics' back pages of "life of the party" tricks and books, including a guide on The Secret Art of Ventriloquism. As a boy the ontological mystery of throwing your voice into a hollow doll (or footlocker) only to have to it call back, sometimes as a plaintive cry for release, suggests a little of the oblique but heart-breaking beauty of Blackwell's voice throwing art.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories by Blackwell, a lot of what I've read about this book I can cosign-- these are stories of mostly NYer-esque figures, usually nebbishy men, who see things go sideways. But there are shades of Beckett here, too, as if the energy of the story is seeing how far you can go by exploring the implications of a single conceit or element of the story. That means that some of these progress toward exhaustion instead of rising toward a climax. Like anything that follows this scheme for writing, the results are varied (these are experiments, after all, and some experiments are meant to fail).

I really liked the title story, and Afterthought, and thought others, like Leson and the Before Unapprehended, weren't successful experiments. But I liked the collection pretty well.

[Travisimo5 · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a small percentage of people I know who read, a smaller percentage of those who read abstract work, and smaller yet who can handle the kind of anxious, accelerated and twisting prose that Blackwell drives with. I’m absolutely taken by all his works I’ve read, and I’ve a ways to go to catch up. I tell everyone to start with CORRECTION and go from there. But really you could start anywhere.

[JP Seabright · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inventive and eclectic collection of short stories. Ones that play with the idea of ‘story’ and narration where nothing is quite what it seems. Echoes of Borges and Calvino in the playful telling of tall tales (and use of parenthesis) keep the reader engaged and hungry for more.