Customer Reviews

Altmann's Tongue

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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While it doesn't seem to me to hang together perfectly as a collection, Altmann's Tongue is an amazing amalgamation of shorts and short shorts. It contains some of Evenson's very best stories, especially the title short short, which turns a sudden double-homicide into a reflection on mortal power, who gets the authority to wield it, and what happens when we begin to speak the very language of those whose violent means we oppose. For these reasons, and as its title suggests, it is useful key to many of the other stories.

Evenson's written style is remarkable, tightly bunched words and curt but beautifully suggestive sentences that make the prose at once alienating and very friendly.

Many of these pieces ground themselves explicitly or implicitly in attempts to understand or articulate specific historical tragedies such as the Holocaust. They last long enough to open disturbing possibilities, then recede quickly and leave the reader to ponder the pieces. No heroes, no solutions, nothing but the problems and the problems of communicating those problems. In this, stories like "Altmann's Tongue," "Munich Window: A Persecution," "Killing Cats," and others come much closer to the reality of the Holocaust and our need to remember it than dismissively heroic tales like Spielberg's "Schindler's List" can ever hope to do.

I've never read anything quite like Altmann's Tongue before, although if I had to describe it, the closest I could come would be to have you imagine that Cormac McCarthy wrote a collection of Edgar Allan Poe homages, but even that doesn't quite prepare you for the psychological and physical horrors within Altmann's pages. The stories here range from half a page long to a lengthy novella, but almost uniformly, they defy easy assessment. Evenson isn't interested in easy moral judgment or even understanding the brutalities he depicts here; even so, by juxtaposing the tales together, you get a sense of what he feels about the world, the point he strives to make about violence. But, oh, what surreal and fascinating tales. From the title tale, a brief and horrific tale of a man compelled to further and further violence upon a body, to "Stung", the tale of a young boy with, shall we say, complex relationships with his parents, to "The Sanza Affair," a brilliant novella about the difficulty of ever truly understanding an event, to "The Munich Window", the closest to Poe's hysterical, damaged narrators, to Evenson's darkly funny take on the book of Job, these are strange, unnerving tales, made all the more so by their lack of context or explanation. Altmann's Tongue is not for all tastes. This is brutal, violent stuff, and it's far from easily accessible. For those with a taste for the macabre and for the literate, however, you'll find much here to admire and - dare I say it - to chew on.

First of all, it was a great pleasure and honor to attend Brians Fiction Writing courses when I was a student at Oklahoma State University. I found him the most selfless instructor of the written word and took to heart the advice he gave to me concerning my work. If you want to write, study from a master.

Towards 'Altmann's Toungue', I would simply tell you that Brian is the thinking mans 'Stephen King'. There is no spoon-feeding of plot here. It is brutal, raw imagery. And it is clear that he is a true student of Poe and Kafka. If you are hungry for horror in small servings, you must dine on Altmann's Toungue.

I didn't like this much at all. I was frustrated by how infrequently we were given a context for the events of the stories, and I was frustrated by how undeveloped some of the ideas within remained to the reader (I'm sure they were well-developed to Evenson, but to me, they remained murky), and I was frustrated by the ugliness of the violence. His afterword explains his intentions in dealing with violence, and I can dig them, but that doesn't mean that I particularly enjoyed the book. One reviewer, in an otherwise positive review, noted that Evenson is a writer who "has trouble recognizing when enough is enough," and I'm inclined to agree with that, at least in this much earlier stage in his career. I also recently read his novel The Open Curtain, published a good many years later, and I loved that.

I enjoyed the novella, and I enjoyed "The Munich Window" a good deal, but I hated the triptych involving Bosephus and I disliked most of the shorter stories. Overall, a violent, senseless, often exhausting set of stories, with a few gems here and there.