| Tonino Benaquista is always a first person pronoun. What distinguishes a gifted master from a masterful one is that his intonation cannot be confused with anything else. Even if you get unmarked printouts, you'll expose Benaquista with reckless statements like: "When I grow up, I'll mow spaghetti, it's the most wonderful profession in the world" or "I bet you another whiskey that I'll stop the rain in less than two years." minutes."
“Everything for the Ego” (AST-Ermak publishing house, translated from French by N. Morozova) is a relatively recent, 1999, collection of short stories, united by one single intrigue, the secret of the pronoun “I”. There is none of the crazy intrigue that so turned on readers of “The Saga” or “The Hare Hunt.” The mature Benaquista is a genius of detail, a master of psychological arrangement. Each of the ten short (exactly enough for a cup of coffee) stories is suitable for making a short film based on it straight from the sheet. “Chance is much more inventive than human imagination” - guided by this simple truth, Benaquista puzzles his heroes with simple problems. A copier repairman struggles to decipher his own comatose delirium, accidentally recorded by a neat nurse. A happy father of a family ruins his family nest because of a porno cassette stuck in the VCR. A man unfairly accused of murder struggles to remember what he did on July 17 from ten to eleven. A young rake travels around the country in search of a mysterious “bird house” in which he is obliged to bury his beloved uncle. The husband constantly calls his wife by the name of his mistress; The only way out of the problem is to find a namesake girlfriend, and unfortunately, the missus’ name is Opportune...
Benaquista opens up a world of everyday absurdity for his heroes. To get out of a difficult situation, you need, bloody nose, to remember something about yourself. Something elusive that was previously easily accessible, and then somehow disappeared from memory. Stupid slips of the tongue, ridiculous coincidences, a blues melody in a roadside cafe, a broken VCR, an obsessive dream - chance constantly gives us a chance that we invariably miss. Oddly enough, “Everything for the Ego” turned out to be a collection of edifying stories. If you like, these are ironic moral teachings of a person who knows well how to live life in such a way that, even when you wake up, you can remember offhand what you did five years ago from ten to eleven. Otherwise, it’s the end, not life, but a real prison. “Don’t forget, baby, only romanticism is an absolute value!”
Almost simultaneously, the Eksmo publishing house published a collection of short stories “All God’s Children Can Dance” by another virtuoso of “I” intonation, the Japanese Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Andrei Zamilov). Fans of Murakami the novelist are not very welcoming of his performances in the short genre. It is true. Murakami's traditional hero is a talented slacker. He knows very well that nothing good can be expected from this world. Leisurely sipping his beer, he reluctantly extricates himself from the plot, which has developed, as a rule, against his will and wishes. His unsurpassed “gundezh” and lazy “stretching” take time; he feels uncomfortable within the narrow space of the novel. But this time Murakami betrayed his signature self. And the collection, it must be admitted, turned out to be much more vibrant and artistic than its predecessor, “Ghosts of Lexington.” Six short stories, two of which resemble short stories, are united by the theme of the earthquake of the late nineties in Kobe province. The story is recent, still painful and relevant for the Japanese. Thousands of people were crushed in a matter of hours by “a single breath of the Earth.” One could have assumed that Murakami would again ride his battered horse and curse the mining and metals industry, industrial society, transnational corporations, individualism, anti-ecologicalism, etc. But that was not the case.
Six short works about death are six indisputable proofs of the skill of this annoyingly industrious Japanese. Murakami does not let his heroes into the epicenter of disasters and passions. They are not onlookers, not witnesses, not helpers to the suffering. His heroes traditionally remain indifferent to the overall story. The world is collapsing behind them, like worn-out scenery for a meaningless performance. They are busy playing their strange and absurd roles. An electronics salesman goes on vacation to Hokkaido to deliver an empty wooden box and learn about the existence of bears and UFOs. A couple of Jack London admirers light daily bonfires on the seashore to talk about refrigerator deaths, substitutions and suicide. The son of a religious fanatic chases into the night a man without an ear who resembles his father who disappeared as a child, but only ends up dancing on an abandoned baseball field. A major financial official comes home to find a giant frog in his chair, drinking tea and croaking quotes from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; Friend Kwak has come to save Tokyo from the coming earthquake.
Murakami selects different genres for his short stories - here there is melodrama, fantasy, and absurd comedy. His crazy imagination either rushes after the “beautiful flying saucer” or descends underground to battle the huge Worm. Only one thing remains unchanged. In every story, in every conversation of the characters, there is a completely inappropriate optimism of despair. How does Murakami achieve this? How does he find the right key every time? He piles absurdity around him, and the same theme sounds from every corner of this magnificent dump. Accidental death has passed you by, which means you have time to prepare for it. A very Japanese approach. But as Druzhishche Kwak croaked: “Still, I have a slightly better chance of winning on my own than Anna Karenina in front of a rushing locomotive.” Natalia BABINTSEVA
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