Self Portraits

by Frederic Tuten

In these glittering, interrelated stories,a young boy barters with pirates for his grandmother’s soul; Death appears as a genial waiter in a bar across from the Metropolitan Museum; an ominous man interferes with honeymooners at a bullfight; an estranged couple glimpse God on a cliff on Old Mountain in Tangiers; a lonely man lectures circus bears on the history of art; miniature glaciers tumble from a refrigerator in an East Village apartment, heralding a voyage to Antarctica on a frozen schooner anchored in Tompkins Square Park; and two lovers meet, part, and reunite time and again in different guises, ages, and landscapes both familiar and exotic.

Love, and its mystery, is at the core of these tales, but love also for art, for adventure, and for the passion of being alive. Throughout Self Portraits the author appears as hero, bystander, artist, and ghost, revealing an enchanting autobiography of the imagination.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

250 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 2010

About the author

Frederic Tuten is the author of Tintin in the New World, The Green Hour, and Self Portraits, among other fiction. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York City."

Reviews

[Eilish]

DNF

I really liked the intro it felt sweet and beautifully written about how stories can separate and connect family and then it went sharply downhill.
Pretentious and overwrought.
I read a couple, flipped through to see if any of them were less disingenuous feeling and no luck.


Summary of the bit I read

Self Portraits : Fictions
Growing up in the Bronx, relationship with his Italian grandmother, translating for her when they watched movies recounting stories from his books and adding his own narrative flourishes. Listening to her stories of the past. “E poi” Italian for “and then” which is the fulcrum of all fiction.

Two lovers both traveling and having adventures or different sorts, writing letters and dreaming of each other. [pretentious and overwritten]

Man on train in Sicily/ The Bronx talking with men, man with hares who throws them out into the river
Very dreamlike. The man is his uncle?


Mother getting old, son is painting the essence of words. The feeling they give him

[SR · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the first two-thirds I was already over this; billed as Borges-esque, the tedium of a straight couple having cocktails in a restaurant after a day at a museum was a flat useless disappointment.

Then the last third got surreal and actually interesting.

[NC Weil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frederic Tuten's series of linked short stories, most titled Self Portrait (followed by such varied qualifiers as "with Bullfight", "with Cheese", "with Icebergs"), examine love and adventure in magical ways. The narrator, the I of these pieces, is variously a lover, husband, father, son, and a man spending time alone in a public place where he can observe those around him. Tuten makes frequent allusions to paintings and films, which must either alienate the inexperienced, or draw closer those for whom these arts are familiar.

His story The Park Near Marienbad, for example, refers to Alain Resnais' film "Last Year at Marienbad", in which at a spa a man approaches a woman with intent to seduce her, insisting on details of what they did "last year at Marienbad." She has never seen him before, and knows this, but though she puts him off, gradually his stories insinuate themselves into her thoughts. The narrator weaves his fondness for this film into his museum-going travels with his wife: they too are among the few who have the time to visit places for no purpose except pleasure. He watches his wife hoping to see a repeat of Delphine Seyrig's enchanting gesture, so singular in the film. If she can slip across the boundary between the closed reality of a story and the larger world in which they have wed, perhaps their marriage will touch him on that deeper level where he seeks consonance between artistic vision and life.

Often a story's setting is a restaurant or cafe; a newlywed couple's interactions with their waiter are key to the progress of Self Portrait with Bullfight:
"...[I]f you turn you may notice [the waiter's] appearance, accompanied by two guests."
"Just a coincidence," I averred, deigning not to seem amazed by two bulls, festooned with garlands of garlic and roses, being ushered to their table.
"It is the custom," our waiter explained, finally returning to us, "to host a banquet for those bulls who survive the day. Of course, they may stay the night, on the house, naturally, and leave when they want and return to their mothers, if they wish."

In this brief exchange we see Tuten's method: his mingling of familiar and fantastic in ways that challenge the reader's comfort with what we think we're used to, and also question whether the magical is as removed from daily life as we might prefer.

The cycle's progress takes us from a man recalling his grandmother, to the death of the narrator's mother, and his son's pursuit and rescue of her soul from pirates. In that first piece, stories are the binding skein that holds a child to his grandmother. In the last, the grandmother's fond final desire was to be alone through eternity with the Borges-sized library of stories she loved so well.

Tuten's spare precise language is a marvel, the stories he tells the more wonderful because of the delights of his prose. Seek, and enjoy!

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Self-Portraits: Fictions" is a book of 12 short literary stories by Frederic Tuten. Each story shifted around in time and place and between reality and fantasy with no warning, so it was hard to tell what was going on (especially for a linear thinker like me). The characters tended to say philosophical-sounding things, so I had the feeling that there was supposed to be some deeper meaning to it all. However, I couldn't make sense of it so I decided to simply read it as a series of quirky tales. While I liked the author's writing, I'm not a good match for his style.

There was a very minor amount of bad language. Sex was implied. Overall, if the short story descriptions sound appealing to you, then you'll probably enjoy the book.


I received this book as an unrequested review copy.

[Sara Habein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not going to lie — This book went a bit over my head. Though I did not feel dumb while reading it, I spent the entire time feeling as though I did not have the right points of reference. Filled with allusions to art and literature, Frederic Tuten’s Self Portraits: Fictions would likely be loved by a reader on the same mental trip, but that reader, despite some effort, was not me.

(Read the full review over on Glorified Love Letters.)

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had not opened this book in a long while and when I did, to re-read it, I was staggered by the physical structure of the narrative and the dreamy quality of the stories. But the best struck me like a hot stabbing blade, and that is the first story, “Voyagers.” It alone is worth the price of the book. It tells of a writer’s mind not always on the present planet, of those who dream and act on their dreams. The story opens a strange door on the book’s strange ordinary world. Frederic Tuten deserves vast prizes for that story.

[Tuck]

this is one of Publisher's Weekly top 100 books of 2010. some fantastic titles have come out this year. here is the complete annotated list:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by...

[bia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can’t remember anything except that the last short story was kind of interesting and promising. All of em of them were fully loaded pretentious canons but the last one where the pretentious prose was not drowning out the potential, he could really develop it more maybe

[James Space · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are sweet, lyrical, and bizarre. I would love to paint them. But I read them instead.