An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing
In fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most.
Whether set in Tuten’s beloved Lower East Side, Rome’s Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten’s exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.
Frederic Tuten is the author of Tintin in the New World, The Green Hour, and Self Portraits, among other fiction. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York City."
The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten was waiting to be read. I looked at the Contents and chose the shortest story, with the intriguing title L’Odyssee. Oh, the Odyssey in eleven pages. I can handle that.
I was reading about a sailor returned after a long absence. The woman demands proof that he is not another imposter. What comes out of his mouth had me laughing out loud. I was surprised, enchanted, delighted! This was Homer, reimagined through an iconic fictional figure. I was going to love these stories.
I was equally amused by The Garden Party in which a couple are waiting for caterers to arrive to set up their party, the man proffering his preference for the unexpected, the “the discordant” in art, which I had to look up. A series of, shall I say, unusual events ensue. And I realized the story was an example of the “discordant.”
Now, mind you, there are stories that struck me in a different way, that made me nostalgic for what I never had. People gathering at a local bar, sharing drinks and stories, bonding. Even if the patrons are horses or centaurs, their community was so lovely, dreamy, and reflective. It snows heavily in the stories, blanketing the earth. “Lets drink to the snow that keeps us here,” one proclaims, but in the end the party is drawn to the river and the open sea. I wanted to join them.
I loved the references to books and art, recognizing so many. One advises, “When you read a Russian novel, especially Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, you learn all you need to know about life.” Malamud’s The Assistant, which I read as a teen because Mom was reading it. A character is impelled go to Philadelphia Museum of Art just to see Cezanne’s The Bathers, a work I remember vividly from years in Philly. Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and Sunflowers.
What is it that moves me in life and in art? To the last, I answered, The Surprise.
from The Restaurant. The Concert. The Bar. The Bed. Le Petit Dejuener. by Frederic Tuten
As one character says, it is “the surprise” that I love, the unexpected that sets off the sparks in my head and the fullness in my heart. And the last surprise this volume held for me was the Story Dedications, and learning that each story was written with an artist in mind. I quickly looked up some of the names, and realized….I have to read these stories all over again, not naively this time, but armed with understanding their relationship.
I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.
The cover - a painting by the author, perhaps indebted in some ways to Chagall, but with aspects that catch my eyes and capture my attention. I like the use of colors, the sense of magic that it evokes, the contrast of the two heads, and the three candles in the lower right corner which create a sense of light, spirituality, and hope.
The snippet from a short play by Wallace Stevens which serves as an epigraph: "Let the candle shine for the beauty of shining." (I had to look up those words. I'm not a Wallace Stevens scholar.)
A friend had recently emailed me that he'd started reading Henry Threadgill's memoir, Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music. The next day, I picked up this book at the library, took it home, and opened it. The title story is dedicated to Henry Threadgill.
There's much talk and discussion of art, artists, and writing in this collection. I loved that aspect of it.
Many of these stories are imbued with a peaceful sadness or, perhaps, a sad peacefulness. I don't know if there's a difference between the two, but there may be for me.
Not all of these stories are perfect, whatever "perfect" may mean but, when I read them, I had the sense of an author who was attempting to write in ways that were out of the ordinary. As a reader, I appreciated that. Not all of the stories connected with me, but I'll remember the ones that did make a connection.
I was going to rate this book 4 stars, but any book that contains fine writing, as this book does, and is enough out of the ordinary, as this one is, deserves a five star rating. Thinking about this and another book about which I had similar feelings, I just upped my rating of César Aira's The Musical Brain: and Other Stories.
From "Delacroix in Love":
"Every other Sunday, Delacroix put aside his work, spruced up, and went to the Gare Montparnasse to meet the woman he loved. The little train from Auvers-sur-Oise always deposited her on time, and he was always there waiting for her on time. 'Your regularity amazes me. If I didn't know you were such a great artist, I would have taken you for an accountant or a bureaucrat.' 'I take this as a great compliment,' he said. 'I had always wanted to be a lawyer and arrange wills and divorces, but my parents forced me to become an artist.'"
Reassured, enchanted, blissful: That's how I feel after reading this one. It sneaks up on you, guiding a love for singular and universal stories and their audiences. Each story honors an artist, sharing commonality like wanting to be remembered, entrapment (by snow, relationships), and coping, often through a bar. I love how characters dodge in and out of chapters, allowing multiple timetables and perspectives, inserting ourselves in. Because what is art without its window and mirror? There's absurdity like centaurs communing with fish at said bar and aged Popeye and Olive; as much as there is truth: A dozen roses is vapid, surprise moves life more than hurrying through it, and happiness changes.
For the most part I consumed this during train rides, and it certainly proved to be a transportive collection of stories: my favorites were THE VERANDA and THE SNOW ON TOMPKINS SQ PARK for their contrasting elements of patience and surprise. Though the book as a whole blends into a gauzy, colorful landscape, each story has its own special charm, its own particular voice. Tuten's cover sets the intimate tone for his characters and the depth we experience of their lives. I was distracted at times by the more abstract, pretentious threads but couldn't help being drawn in by Tuten's passion for art and language. Definitely a book to continue pondering.
I don't remember how I found out about this book. Likely a review. Likely a recent one. If you have ever lived in the East Village, as I have, you find yourself back there, exactly as you remember it, or not, as you remember New York, from the placed mentioned in the collection. I bought a hard copy for my cousin, who still lives in the city, who still looks at art, knowing that he, too, will be immediately pulled in.
When Tuten grounds his fiction in reality his stories serve as beaming reminder of how beautiful, awful, and *all the rest* life is and can be. When he deviates from that reality, which to his credit is only 3 of the 15 stories in this collection, it falls flat. So many wonderful stories here just not the ones with horses chatting in a lower east side bar.
Some of these short stories are remarkable. Some feel derivative. But the ones that are remarkable are riveting. In either event I read as I hiked around the English Lake District and it was a great companion, one that I immediately passed to another friend.
I was lucky enough to have Fred Tuten as my teacher once, and listen--he is a real one. An artist's artist and a writer's writer with a rare and generous talent. There is no one else like him. The Coda is my favorite part of this collection; a mini life-affirming autobibliography.
3.5 stars. Some stories were so enjoyable - transporting me to various locations - whereas others, bordered on mystic realism and felt awfully pretentious. Clearly the author is well-traveled
I shouldn’t like these stories, but I do. I’m obsessed with them. “The Restaurant, The Concert, The Bar, The Bed, The Petit Déjeuner” was the fourth story I've read by Tuten, all via Pushcart, and it’s always the same thing – I start out thinking I'll never get through this, I end up, not always understanding, but entranced. Mesmerized by individual sentences, by the use of a word in a sentence. These are not my typical stories – they put lovers side-by-side with art, run off into surrealism – but they’re wonderful. FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.