Master of twisters

It is a quiet afternoon in Düsseldorf and you step into the life of Rosa Schwarzer, the efficient guard at the museum who sits on an austere chair, watching the rain falling in the garden. Her eyes have taken refuge in the subtle pinks of Monsieur Perlenschwein, which is one of the paintings in the room that she zealously guards. If any visitor gets close to any of the paintings, she would ask them to please step back and not get too close to them as the sensitive alarms would go off. At the end of the day, she will go home to her husband and two sons.

A quiet life, you think, and Rosa should be a contented woman, but this is not so. We, the readers of this short story, soon realise that this is not so. Rosa is on edge today as she turned 50 yesterday. Depression has taken hold of her to such an extent that she has decided to commit suicide.

If that shocking bit of information is the startling twist in the tale for you, there is more to come. We see Rosa Schwarzer change from a skilled guard in a dull job to a virago at home, and a woman at the brink of desperation who is determined to take her own life. Will she succeed? What is the tipping point for a woman of a certain age? It’s questions like these that the author Enrique Vila-Matas creates in your mind and allows you to ponder upon. The author is one of the greats of Spanish literature, who is also a knight of the French Legion of Honour. He has won several literary awards over the course of his life, and his work has been translated into 30 languages.

In this excellent collection of short stories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Vila-Matas has used the human mind as the canvas on which to spin his tales. There is despair, as in the case of Rosa Schwarzer in the story Rosa Schwarzer comes back to Life, there is sorrow as in the case of the hunchback in Vampire in Love, anguish as in the story of the writer who is high on amphetamines in Sea Swell, some dark humour in the story of Tito in Greetings from Dante, and so much more.

Get ready to be enthralled as each story takes you in different directions, from an inner city bus to a dinner party and to the bedside of a dying man. The author’s brilliant sense of humour comes in flashes, like in the story Sea Swell where we cannot help but laugh out loud at the absurd story of one of the protagonists who keeps saying he is from the lost city of Atlantis, or the little boy who refuses to talk for no reason at all in Greetings from Dante.

In the short story Vampire in Love, which has given the book its title, there are no blood-thirsty monsters or Frankenstein-esque scenes, but there is the tragic tale of a hunchbacked man called José Ferrato, who is called Nosferatu, which is the Romanian word for ‘vampire’. He is called Nosferatu because he reveals two sharp vampire’s teeth when he smiles. And though he tries to make up for his monstrous appearance with his good manners and infinite kindness, people are always making jokes at his expense. What is more perplexing, however, is the fact that he is hopelessly in love with a young choir boy. When José finally decides that things will never change for him, he decides to say goodbye to everyone in his life, including the choirboy, while on his way to killing himself. Does he succeed? With Vila-Matas wielding the pen, the only thing you can be sure of is that there are bizarre twists at every turn, and no story ends as predictably as one would imagine.

In the story A Permanent Home, the author writes about a young man who is summoned to the bedside of his dying father. The father tells the young man that he had arranged the killing of the mother for many reasons. She had the strange habit of collecting bread rolls wherever she went, and though she was a docile and gentle woman during the day, in her sleep, she was like a crazy general who would order him around. Was this story true? Or was the father making up stories and bequeathing to his son “a house of eternal shadows”. Perhaps, only Vila-Matas would know.

In many of the stories in this book, there is an observation of life, a hint of darkness, thoughts of mortality, a touch of lightness, and a spectrum of strange ideas that hold you in its spell. You may never have thought of a lonely ophthalmologist or a man who looks like a vampire or weary people as characters with fascinating stories to tell, and yet, Vila-Matas manages to do that with his inimitable skill as a short story writer.

This is a must-read book not only because it’s a collection of the best short stories of Vila-Matas, but also because we can lose ourselves in a world of pure imagination for some hours and come away inspired, thoughtful or deeply delighted by the beauty of these stories, simply told and beautifully crafted.