These are all the short stories I wrote in my 'gap year', dating between October 2010 and June 2011.
The Painting on the Wall - A failed artists rampages against a reclusive millionaire surrealist. Having hunted out his mansion he finds that Oniri Jackson is very hard to find indeed... A comment and reflection on the ways art is represented on the canvas, in print and on film.
Lying on the turf, our hero contemplated how he could dispose the corpse...
Same Book, Same Bus - A post-modernist experiment, cyclically revolving around a bus where, mysteriously, every passenger is reading the exact same book.
The bus door opens and I walk inside...
The bus door opens and I walk inside...
False Beauty - A sect, backed up by a millionaire, aim to subvert the arts and the literary establishment by producing apocryphal books, hijacking newspapers and transgressing human behaviour. Caught up within this maelstrom, against his will, is Samuel who finds himself helping out the sect. A miniature odyssey taking place in North Africa, Brazil, Peru, Germany and Liberia.
The disarray of books cluttered on shelves occupies most of the room, disallowing me from navigating through it and muddling my memory as to where certain objects are stored...
Confessions of a Neglected Parasite - This is a short sketch wherein a character expounds his ridiculously lonely and isolated life, describing his difficulties with friendships, women, education and the arts. A black comedy which is my most personal story to date.
We fade into a room which is sparse and unadorned; there is nothing remarkable about it....
Deep Down in Talca - Three narrative strands - one in first person, one in second person and the other in third - revolve around cellar in Pinochet-era Chile, where an official tortures three tenuously culpable victims. An incongruous piece of fantasy bearing no relation to any actual facts or events.
I could not tell you why we were in that cellar, nor could I pinpoint exactly why we were in Talca, nor why we were of three different nationalities...
The Perpetual Death of the Composer - A famed German-Soviet composer dies, leaving behind an incomplete symphony... yet every individual who attempts to complete it finds himself at the mercy of madness...
My friendship with Alfred Kralitz harks back to my earliest childhood memories...
The disarray of books cluttered on shelves occupies most of the room, disallowing me from navigating through it and muddling my memory as to where certain objects are stored...
Confessions of a Neglected Parasite - This is a short sketch wherein a character expounds his ridiculously lonely and isolated life, describing his difficulties with friendships, women, education and the arts. A black comedy which is my most personal story to date.
We fade into a room which is sparse and unadorned; there is nothing remarkable about it....
Deep Down in Talca - Three narrative strands - one in first person, one in second person and the other in third - revolve around cellar in Pinochet-era Chile, where an official tortures three tenuously culpable victims. An incongruous piece of fantasy bearing no relation to any actual facts or events.
I could not tell you why we were in that cellar, nor could I pinpoint exactly why we were in Talca, nor why we were of three different nationalities...
The Perpetual Death of the Composer - A famed German-Soviet composer dies, leaving behind an incomplete symphony... yet every individual who attempts to complete it finds himself at the mercy of madness...
My friendship with Alfred Kralitz harks back to my earliest childhood memories...
Published in issue #16 of North American magazine 34th Parallel.
Planet Zhelanie - Igor discovers that it is possible to attain one's innermost wishes if one is able to unlock the coded secrets of 'Planet Zhelanie', but he finds that the path to attain what he wants is treacherous... His innermost wishes, he finds, are contradictory and illogical. He ends up spending millennia on the planet, while trying to master its ambiguous codes...
At dawn I found a stack of papers on my desk, with the mysterious titlePlanet Zhelanie inscribed on the cover...
Here is an audio description of each story.
ACCEPTING REALITY: THE UNIVERSITY YEARS
These are provisionally all the stories I will write whilst at university.
Eight PM in Buenos Aires - During a rendez-vous in Buenos Aires, this narrator attends a screening of Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris... and, very much like in the film, as he walks out, he meets all his literary heroes.. but they are literary heroes who dwell in the very city he is excursing through.
My visit to Chile is not complete without a five day excursion to Buenos Aires...
Francisca Franzen - Set in the context of the student protests currently taking place in Chile, this story features an upper-class girl and a lower-class girl, both whom are called Francisca and are each other's double... After encountering each other in a chance event, both their lives take an unexpected turn...
A profusion of drinks are positioned on the table – Vodka, beer, wine and a sorely neglected bottle of Coca-Cola – next to a diminishing row of paper cups...
Letters to Camila Vallejo - The leader and revolutionary of the student protests, Camilla Vallejo, divides opinions in Chile... This is a glimpse into her letter box.
Dear Miss Vallejo,
Stop. Stop now. You
are embarrassing yourself, your whole community of students and the entire
country... The Murmurings - Three characters escaping murder during the Mexican civil war find refuge in an abadnoned house... Yet mysterious murmurings haunt them, provoking unsettling and disturbing dreams.
It is a long interminable path my feet tire to tread on...
The Hermit and the Despot - Following the take-over of an unspecified South American country by a despot, a newspaper critical of the regime is shut down. A columist for the paper escapes on the open road and finds a large unoccupied mansion. Settling in, he finds unusual and exciting ways to pass his time...
Liberty is a far cry once you start crying in your sleep...
The Bridge of Time - In a rustic farm live a family who believe to be the only humans ever to have set foot on earth. The son of this family thinks and theorises but does not have the basic tools of written language in which to exercise these thoughts. He rejects his family's religion and their lifestlye. One day, he finds a note instructing him how to read and write and the indication that a Godless/secular civilisation lives nearby...
Vast plains covered the landscape...
Desperate Lives - An Italian count in the 16th century murders his wife and lover, catching them in the act. Although barred from prosecution, he escapes revenge, moving to a succession of castles. He devotes all this time to his music, which is very harmonically complex and progressive. As time wears on, he becomes more and more wracked by guilt.
Abhorrent actions have failed to tarnish my reputation...
The Second Death of God - Rudolf and Simon are frustrated by contemporary life and politics. A 'water phoenix' mysteriously appears to them and tells them that "God has died - again." They are told to shape a new "set of ethics" and to change contemporary society. They soon try, but in increasingly foolish and erroneous ways...
A television set, an ordinary television set...
Burnt Manuscripts - Writer Nikolay is pressured to burn all his literary works, which is priest considers blasphemous, so as to become a 'cleansed' Christian.
Nikolay sauntered past the derelict boulevards of his district...
Consigned to Mythology - Exagoras is a pre-Socratic philosopher with a his own doctrine and school of followers. His doctrine, a few centuries before Platonic philosophy and several centuries before the advent of science, deals with the 'perpetual flux.' This is where everything is subject to transition and change. The only property which does not change is fire, the source of all life. This story charts his final days, alongside his faithful follower Dinotas.
Exagoras (580-540 B.C.) is something of a curiosity among philosophers...
Quartet for the End of Time - In a prisoner of war camp during WWII, Olivier performs a piece he writes for three other prisoners (who happen to be musicians). The piece makes an irrevocable impact on the rest of the camp.
Beyond the field corn, beyond the dense foliage, beyond the enlaced barbed wire, dwell restive men...
Rose of the Fair State - A woman is institutionalised in a mental asylum. She soon develops an affair with the asylum's psychiatrist. Set in the English countryside during WWI.
The countryside is of such delectable serenity, and is of such aloofness from the high-octane chaos we call urbanity, that it hardly seems like a repository of madness...
Alone in the Cyber Age - Just as Adrian begins to introspect, the whole world around him turns away. Everyone, everywhere, is under the sway of their Smartphones and various other tech gadgets. He soon encounters an unexpected entity which forces him to conceive his world-view and stance.
Everywhere Adrian turned, technological paraphernalia abounded...
Hit the North! - Utopian (and inherently distopian) view of England in the future. The Tories have become so fundamentalist that the north of England is wiped out through nuclear warfare, as it never was a Tory stronghold. England becomes an isolationist state, so much so that no-one can get in or out. England thrives through private business (thus vindicating the 'Tory Project'). A mogul, J. Temperance, soon runs into a drug trafficker who reveals a disturbing secret...
J. Temperance sat alongside his friends and colleagues in a café...
The Sleep of Reason Produces Wonders - A former philosophy professor now writes articles and books championing humanism. A series of disturbing dreams, which exhilarate him, force him to reconsider his beliefs...
It can become taxing to be locked in the Ivory Tower, to be cut adrift from common people...
The Tea Boy - An editor of a right-wing British newspaper looks back on his career.
I have risen from the dregs to the most dizzying heights...
Here you can hear recordings of some of these stories.
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If you want to read them, email simoncangas@hotmail.com
Running themes/motifs/tropes etc. etc.: Insanity, obsession, humour, self-reflexivity, murder, art, music, coffee, failure, pornography, narcissism, cosmopolitanism, subversion, transgression, dreams, sensitivity, solitude, working with one's limitations, self-loathing, whiny losers, unsubtle speechifying, surrealism, the doppelganger, the word 'cunt', knives, duality, infinity, femininity, self-distance, reconciliation with political realities, immorality, mystery, circularity, memory, identity, beauty.
Influences:
Early Paul Auster
J. L. Borges
Julio Cortázar
William Faulkner
Franz Kafka
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
J. G. Ballard
Andrei Tarkovsky
Peter Cook
Marcelo Bielsa
