Customer Reviews

The Wavering Knife: Stories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A few stories miss their mark, but otherwise THE WAVERING KNIFE impresses with its multiplicity of narrators and the astounding predicaments they get themselves into. He has the invention of Wodehouse, but a grimmer state of mind, though one story combines both modes of writing, the tale of the "Promisekeepers," a coterie of heterosexual rednecks who meet at a tavern with a man's name on it (so women won't distract them) to jaw over their problems with the opposite sex. When one of them confesses a shocking secret, the others react in amusing ways and the scene ends with a frightening shivaree. Though many of the stories are in the first person, he is often able to make these voices sort of different from one another. You wind up finishing the book with a great deal of respect for Brian Everson, as a writer and as a thinker--for there are some tales which ask to be judged on their teleology alone.

THE WAVERING KNIFE is a book so good it makes you wonder what kind of person Everson is. For more inspiration I turned to the jacket copy. Hey, he looks good all cleaned up. The line of darkness turning his nose aquiline, that cloudy mass of backlit hair in the photo on the back cover reminds us of Clarence Bull's photos of Joan Crawford, Garbo, and other MGM goddesses of the 30s. (I can't find the name of the photographer to credit, but he or she is darn good.)

Half of these stories are brutal, relentless, and cold. The others present a lighter fare. The latter and lighter group are about silly men and the dumb things they do and say -- from the Promisekeeper group that meets in a bar to the guy who tries to set up a church in Walmart, to the pair of redneck gravediggers who have so much trouble getting their corpse into a shallow hole in hard packed dirt that they chop him up, pee on him, eviscerate him, stomp on him, and eventually throw what's left of him into a ravine and pretend to cover up the grave. What happens next? The family and minister come over the hill, with the coffin he was supposed to go in, asking to "dig up" the body.

These stories are smart and wry. The other half of the book, however, is priceless. Evenson's great accomplishment, his genius, lies in these other stories: "The Ex-Father," "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette," "The Wavering Knife," "Virtual," "One Over Twelve," "The Progenitor," and my favorite, though it isn't the showiest story in the book, "House Rules." "House Rules" affected me the most, though it is quiet and drab, and the image of the velvet rope across the stairway will stick with me for sure.

Maybe these stories are evolved Kafka, or maybe they're perfect scifi. This is a fiery imagination kept rigidly contained in exacting boxes, let out in discreet units, each one perfect and with a strange serenity. These stories take you in utterly, and then truly reward you, like magic tricks that really work. I can't really give you any plot nuggets or summaries for these, because they don't work except in their own context, provided by the stern, rigorous language and the limitations of the prose. They're so strange and explosive in the ideas that drive them that they need Evenson's specific containers to make them conceivable. Story after story I would finish and then say, "That was so WEIRD. And FABULOUS." Then I'd hungrily go on to the next.

It's not surrealism -- everything is true within its own law. It's maybe alterealism. Whatever it is, it was enormously engaging and challenging to read and halfway through I was already thinking in my head of people I know who would love a book like this. Definitely read it. A small black rendering on a blank tablet, of something truly different, is more intriguing than a dense and colorful mural, six blocks long, of something we already know.

Brian Evenson, ex-communicated from the Mormon Church and his teaching position at BYU for his writing, is a literary portal into the dark corners of everyday life. In some of these stories he takes direct aim at his former church and its followers; a great example is "The Prophets", a tale of simple men empowered with a vision from god that includes the use of a shovel and the restoration of the dead prophets of olden days. But, in others, he finds an ample target in "The Promisekeepers", where a male bonding group under the banner of the title's namesake meets in a bar and shares moments of truth and honesty - which, when one member of the group reveals a little too much information, leads to a horrific outcome. Other stories such as "The Gravediggers" are interspersed for comic relief; in this laugh-out-loud funny story, two lazy gravediggers create their own misadventures and more work than they bargained for after deciding the dirt wass just too hard to dig a large enough grave for the latest subject of the effort.

Many of the stories in this volume take direct aim at our superstitions and religious beliefs; not in a direct frontal assault, but by association with the subjects of Evenson's brutal, but entertaining musings. I say musings, because even in their brutality, these stories take an amusing look at the darker side of ourselves.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

With this new collection from the author of the masterful ALTMANN'S TONGUE, Evenson brings his readers face to face with the same beauty and terror of his uniquely constructed universe that we've seen in CONTAGION and THE DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS. Only, with this book, Evenson has gone further into the emotional and phenomenological landscape of his characters, and this somehow makes his fiction even more powerful, more e/affective, more vicious. I feel that this is an improvement upon the work begun in ALTMANN'S TONGUE, that we are witnessing, with THE WAVERING KNIFE, a moment of astonishing growth. This from a writer whose talents were already quite formidable to begin with. Brian Evenson is on his way to becoming the most powerful and original voice in contemporary American fiction.

When I read Brian Evenson's Altmann's Tongue, I said that the closest I could come to describing it was to say it was like Cormac McCarthy wrote a series of Edgar Allan Poe homages, but commented that even that didn't prepare you for the psychological damage and insanity on display. The same description could easily apply to The Wavering Knife as well, but this time there's another facet to Evenson's writing I didn't expect: his bent, dark sense of humor. I'd never go so far as to call any of the stories in The Wavering Knife outright funny, but there's a dark glint to the satire in some of the stories, such as the self-righteous Promise Keepers who meet away from women for bonding time, one traveling preacher's increasingly firm efforts to bring religion to Wal-Mart, or the perversely difficult time two gravediggers have burying a body. The stories here aren't quite as abstract and disconnected as those in Altmann; Evenson seems to have moved slightly (but not entirely) away from that tendency to strip a horrific moment of all context. Instead, here he seems preoccupied with language, something that shows up best in an effort to analyze a deeply flawed and surreal mistranslation of a travel guide, or with an artist's attempt to set up a horrific art installation. Evenson writes horror for those who like their reading literate and intelligent, and his stories end up feeling like a David Lynch film, leaving you uncomfortable even if you don't entirely grasp the meaning of it all. He's a unique talent, and when he's at the top of his game - "The Installation," "Body," "The Prophets," and especially "Virtual" are all knockouts, even in the midst of tons of great stories - his work is unsettling, intense, and profound.

So many people focus on how morbid Evinson's writing is, but his style is what makes this worth reading. He's got a brilliant, yet subtle sense of humour which is all his own. Brautigan is the only author i know of to come close to such underhanded witticisms.