Translated material
Anatomical Theater
After the Plague, Coraghessan Boyle's sixth collection of short stories, was recognized by American critics as an example of short prose and recommended for study by university students. In Russia, the writer is known for two satirical novels - “East is East” and “The Road to the City of Happiness.” In the first case, we were talking about a half-breed cook who escaped from a Japanese ship, who found himself in the company of American writers hanging out in a rest house called Thanatopsis House. In The Road, Boyle exposed the morals of not only the literary establishment, but also everyone in America, to public ridicule by twisting the plot around a new diet based on eating corn flakes.
Coraghessan Boyle is never satisfied with social satire alone, like his popular compatriot Christopher Buckley: Boyle needs relevant moments only in order to “bite” the reader more painfully, and then gently put pressure on the resulting pain points. Each of the stories in the collection “After the Plague” resembles a brief history of a disease, the individual symptoms of which only complement the characteristics of a large-scale epidemic.
Boyle deliberately chooses everyday life as building material in order, under the guise of standard structures, to pile up labyrinths of secret rooms, from which, as the plot progresses, picturesque skeletons will continually fall out. He motivates people's actions by the basic laws of elementary biology, which over time are inverted and turn into their own opposite. Thus, the instinct for procreation takes on very strange features in the story “My Love,” the heroine of which throws out a baby in the trash, convinced that she has given birth to a mutant who has defiled her romantic feelings.
Sometimes Boyle seems overly physiological, but we must remember that anatomy for him is the only way to identify a modern person as a representative of an ancient species. The heroine of the story “My Baby” is a fanatical athlete who can’t win the all-around competition, despite a strict regime, a carbohydrate diet, muscle gain and regular training; Only raped on the eve of the start by a drunken boyfriend does she finally finish first, driven by anger and a thirst for revenge. Boyle devotes several pages to describing how greedily the heroine eats food before competitions, how her jaw muscles work and how her tendons tense at the sight of her opponent.
Using the automatic rituals of everyday life (food, sleep, sex), the writer manages to raise such mutants that other science fiction writers could take lessons. The key plot of the collection may well be the story of people who survived an apocalyptic disaster and suffer from living together with their own kind of moral monsters. The basis is taken from the first biological law, according to which the strongest always wins, and as proof, a list of the elementary components of this force is attached. For Boyle, madness is born from banal everyday situations and ultimately returns to them. So, despite the general pessimism and naturalistic explorations, reading “After the Plague” is more funny than scary: the politically correct American skillfully balances on the brink of naturalism and black humor, clearly preferring the latter.
Marek Krajewski. Ghosts of Breslau. Translation from Polish by S. Sokolov. -- M.: Phantom Press, 2007.
Pole Kraevsky is another master of testing the reader’s nervous system, puzzling him from the very beginning with unpleasant anatomical details, and only then explaining why this whole circus is arranged. The plot of his historical detective story begins with the discovery on the embankment of the glorious city of Breslau (present-day Wroclaw) of four corpses, mutilated in the most picturesque way, with a note attached to the crime scene, which indicates the rules of the game. Somehow, local police inspector Eberhard Mock - an intellectual, a reveler and a womanizer - is involved in this story, to whom the criminal addresses his messages. As the plot progresses, the hero must unravel a complex charade, the key element of which is his recent past, and he can, if desired, discover the necessary components in his own dreams.
“Ghosts of Breslau” is tailored according to the now fashionable pattern of a historical-mystical novel, where fantastic elements are tightly linked with archived documentary texture. In a sense, Marek Krajewski is following in the footsteps of his compatriot Stefan Hwin, so that if desired, his novel can be used as a guide to the city of Wroclaw (tourists have been wandering around the outskirts of Gdansk for many years with Hwin’s “Hahnemann” in their hands). The black naturalism of the first episodes gradually gives way to the fantastic flow of the plot. And if you follow the chronology of the chapters correctly, you can take part in an investigation rich in intellectual and historical allusions. Reading of this kind is like an exciting game, which invariably leaves a feeling of slight dissatisfaction at the end.