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What The World Will Look
Like When All The Water Leaves Us
by Laura van den Berg
Dzanc Books 2009, Paperback
First collection
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Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and
earned her MFA at Emerson College. Formerly an assistant editor at
Ploughshares, Laura is currently a fiction editor at West Branch and
the assistant editor of Memorious,
an online journal of new verse and fiction. She has taught writing at
Emerson College, Grub Street, and in PEN/New England's Freedom to Write
Program.Her fiction has or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch,
The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Best
American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010,
and The Pushcart Prize
XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications.
Read
an interview
with Laura van den Berg
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"I’ve lost the desire to
hold on to that last physical artifact of the life I once had, as
though I was buried and re-emerged as a person who doesn’t believe in
anything except the way existence rages on, furiously unconscious of
when one life ends and another begins."
Reviewed by Elaine Chiew
How amazing and ironic that these stories invoking vast bodies of water
– the Loch Ness, the Atlantic, the Mozambique Channel, Lake Michigan
(at its deepest, it’s a 1000 feet, did you know?) – should contain
characters with such deep thirst. In the title story, a mother goes in
search of lemurs while a teenage daughter tries to figure out what she
wants to do with her life. In Inverness,
a scientist tracking down near-extinct twin flowers (the linnaea borealis)
crosses path with another scientific team in search of the Loch Ness
monster. In Goodbye My
Loveds, a brother is convinced he's found a tunnel to the
other side of the world. Again, in Up
High in the Air, a woman researching misunderstandings in
etymology finds her husband increasingly obsessed with discovering the mishegenabeg
(etymology: water snake?) scouring the bottom of Lake Michigan.
These
characters' chronic, inveterate searches for the exotic, the
nearly-extinct, the mythological, the monstrous, the unknowable, appear
as heart-clutching and iconic proxies for that which cannot be so
easily searched or found: love that lasts, the answers to the
mysterious deaths of two parents, the avoidance of random tragedy, the
disappearance of a husband, the search to locate oneself in purpose,
time and place, our nameless fears.
The story that most tightly draws
this parallel is The
Rain Season,
where a disillusioned missionary escapes to the Congo in the aftermath
of her husband's sudden death in a house-fire. She's caught in a tangle
of wanting to leave and wanting to stay – and increasingly, the stories
of the mokele-mbembe, the monster that haunts the forest, takes root in
her imagination as those things we fear.
"The villagers say the
monster is noiseless, that it never roars or groans, that when it moves
through the forest, the sound of branches being snapped or water parted
fails to echo. If nothing else, I believe this. The worst things in
life stalk in silence."
The emotional power in these stories is
quiet. There's no word wizardry here, no flash-drama. Accidents happen
off-stage, tragedy has already stricken. The emotional power resides in
the quiet space before calamity hits. Akira Kurosawa once said, "To be
an artist means never to avert your eyes." In the story Up High in the Air,
a professor on tenure track studying the etymology of misunderstandings
is having an affair with one of her students. Laura van den Berg shows
us quietly how her husband probably already knows this. She shows us
the protagonist's quiet rebellion when she climbs up with her
student-lover wearing only a raincoat and nothing else up to the
rooftop of her building to witness an arcing meteor. She lets her
character speak to us about her mother who's seeing visitations from
her drowned husband and quietly going out of her mind with grief. Our
professor talks to her mother and quietly goes bananas herself, hiding
in the closet. All this before she ends the affair and the student gets
his revenge by calling the department head on her.
This is the stage
the story is set on. The storm is unleashed backstage. In a lesser writer,
I would call this "averting your eyes", but here, van den Berg
has just shown me a new truth, quietly. All that sturm un drang that
vents upon the news of her affair with a student made public, the havoc
in her marriage, etc – all that is just noise, noise that our professor
willy-nilly bears herself through. The moment when she's most in
possession of her sanity, the consequences of her actions, the honing
in on self and its quiet revelations, the actual act of not averting
your gaze -- all that happens in the quiet before the storm, and that
mindframe is captured in all its unleashed power here. It makes me want
to stand and applaud.
My favorite story in this collection is the first – Where We Must Be.
A semi-failed actress gets a job impersonating Bigfoot in a recreation
park. Apparently, "some people dream of being chased by Bigfoot". There
are echoes of TC Boyle and George Saunders – the same quirky, surreal
nature of some of people's desires, the mordant, underplayed dark
humor, the deadpan observations of our protagonist --
"I'm
watching her from behind a dense cluster of bushes. The fat man has
informed me that she wants to be ambushed. This isn't surprising. Most
people crave the shock".
In less skilful hands, the mawkish
storyline – falling in love with a dying man – might set the more
cynical among us groaning. But witness, in a rare selection of precise
peeled-back moments, the quiet death of the person who loves the person
dying, and you are silenced with sadness.
"I guide him to shore
and once he's on dry land, he crouches and begins to shiver violently.
I scold myself for not bringing a blanket or towels and try to get him
to at least put on his clothes. But he shakes his head and asks me to
help him wait it out. It will pass, he tells me. I'm being tested, I
realize, to see how long I can endure suffering in another person."
There
is much to praise – van den Berg's adept weaving of scientific
exploration and fiction, myth and magic, the tender psychological
subtlety and elegiac layering of emotional resonance, her bold forays
into dark thematic subjects (loneliness, disappointment, death, and
more death, the lack of answers to the greatest riddles that invade our
lives – why does a husband get up and suddenly leave, evaporating into
the rush of a metropolis without a proper explanation (still life with poppies)
– why does a daughter want to become a great long-distance swimmer, and
why does her mother leave her a postcard with a picture of a desert and
a notation on the back that says "what the world will look like when
all the water leaves us"?)
Despite my oft-quibble that some of
the exotic locales here are bleached of much of its character that
Scotland might as well be the Bigfoot National Park, and Madagascar
strikes as blandly as the Congo, save for the screechings of its Indri
monkeys, the stories here whet the explorer in all of us. Haven't you
once wanted to scale the unknown, discover the undiscovered? At bottom
these stories pose the question: why do we become explorers of our
natural world, go places that may cause our deaths? Perhaps to escape
our internal voyages. Her characters don't answer the questions they
ask, not because the questions are unanswerable (the desert is our
landscape when our children leave us, just as we had left them). No,
perhaps the questions aren't answerable because we do not have the
sanity to hold the answers they yield.
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