Barry Yourgrau, born in South Africa in 1949 and living in New York City for many, many years

A book of dozens and dozens of one and two page micro-fictions where you will encounter bizarre happenings of all varieties, casts, shapes and sizes: a man climbs inside a cow, gentlemen in tuxedos perch in a tree, a couple of girls are locked up in an aquarium, a man comes home to find his wife in bed with a squirrel, there’s a bathtub filled with rutabagas, it snowing in a living room, a man rents two brown bears, sheep graze on a supermarket roof. Welcome to the world of Barry Yourgrau, located at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealist art and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But wait, enough with the generalizations; here are the openings lines from three twisted Barry snappers:

HULA HORROR
It’s very late at night – very early in the morning. I’m in a thatched-roof hut. Earthen floor. Kerosene lamp. A girl – a fellow tourist – has gotten drunk and is now dancing just for me, lasciviously as she can manage, in the middle of the place. She sways and bobs, come-hither style. She’s stripped off her clothing and is attired solely in a ‘native’ grass hula skirt, colored pink.

I drink, as I have copiously all evening; the gramophone squalls, the lamp throws a melodramatic light, harsh, utterly black in the shadows. I keep time with my glass, thinking, Man, the brochures don’t tell you about this, and then a horrible realizations pops into my mind, like a window shade flying up. That pink skirt, I realize, my skin turning icy – that pink skirt is hideously evil: it’s an instrument of black magic, a voodoo booby-trap planted here on us two boozed-up, wooly-brained tourists.

VILLAGE LIFE
Country girls, red-cheeked and buxom, stand feet wide apart at a counter. They lean on it, elbows propped, forearms crossed. They chat. Their skirts are gathered above their waists.

An old man plods down the line of them with a bucket. He reaches in between the thighs of each girl and puts the fruit he brings out into the bucket. The girls laugh. The atmosphere is easy. They mock the old man, they make cracks and someone ruffles his few hairs.

ARS POETICA
A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent hatch in the man’s throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man beings to recite – a wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a forbidden voyage.

“So this is how poetry is made,” I think. “What are some other ways?
------------------------------------
And as a mini-tribute to my love of Barry’s wildly inventive fiction, I wrote this little prose poem:

THE QUAGMIRE
Barry is stuck in a real quagmire. He just performed his act which ended with his mounting a sheep and afterwards slitting its throat and hurling the sheep out a third story window. The women organizers of his performance, much to his surprise, found his act disagreeable right from the start. They went ahead and called the police. The officers could see blood smeared all over the walls and floor. “Sir, we invited him to perform his flash fiction. We never expected anything like this!” In his turn, Barry told the officers about a bog of emotion and a marshland of gut feelings that must be expressed in more than just words. The police didn’t buy a word of it and hauled him away. What an abysmal ending to his performance. Barry has landed himself in a real quagmire. He has a nut to crack and no sheep to crack it with.

( )

While Yourgrau's one and two page short stories - or flash fiction - are concise, poetic, and imaginative, they really didn't leave much an impression on me. Much like Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams, this feels more like a collection of revised notebook (or dream journal) entries than it does deliberate prose, and never manages to cross the line into successful experimental fiction. A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane doesn't necessarily fail, but it doesn't quite succeed, either. ( )

Barry Yourgrau, born in South Africa in 1949 and living in New York City for many, many years

A book of dozens and dozens of one and two page micro-fictions where you will encounter bizarre happenings of all varieties, casts, shapes and sizes: a man climbs inside a cow, gentlemen in tuxedos perch in a tree, a couple of girls are locked up in an aquarium, a man comes home to find his wife in bed with a squirrel, there’s a bathtub filled with rutabagas, it snowing in a living room, a man rents two brown bears, sheep graze on a supermarket roof. Welcome to the world of Barry Yourgrau, located at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealist art and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But wait, enough with the generalizations; here are the openings lines from three twisted Barry snappers:

HULA HORROR
It’s very late at night – very early in the morning. I’m in a thatched-roof hut. Earthen floor. Kerosene lamp. A girl – a fellow tourist – has gotten drunk and is now dancing just for me, lasciviously as she can manage, in the middle of the place. She sways and bobs, come-hither style. She’s stripped off her clothing and is attired solely in a ‘native’ grass hula skirt, colored pink.

I drink, as I have copiously all evening; the gramophone squalls, the lamp throws a melodramatic light, harsh, utterly black in the shadows. I keep time with my glass, thinking, Man, the brochures don’t tell you about this, and then a horrible realizations pops into my mind, like a window shade flying up. That pink skirt, I realize, my skin turning icy – that pink skirt is hideously evil: it’s an instrument of black magic, a voodoo booby-trap planted here on us two boozed-up, wooly-brained tourists.

VILLAGE LIFE
Country girls, red-cheeked and buxom, stand feet wide apart at a counter. They lean on it, elbows propped, forearms crossed. They chat. Their skirts are gathered above their waists.

An old man plods down the line of them with a bucket. He reaches in between the thighs of each girl and puts the fruit he brings out into the bucket. The girls laugh. The atmosphere is easy. They mock the old man, they make cracks and someone ruffles his few hairs.

ARS POETICA
A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent hatch in the man’s throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man beings to recite – a wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a forbidden voyage.

“So this is how poetry is made,” I think. “What are some other ways?
------------------------------------
And as a mini-tribute to my love of Barry’s wildly inventive fiction, I wrote this little prose poem:

THE QUAGMIRE
Barry is stuck in a real quagmire. He just performed his act which ended with his mounting a sheep and afterwards slitting its throat and hurling the sheep out a third story window. The women organizers of his performance, much to his surprise, found his act disagreeable right from the start. They went ahead and called the police. The officers could see blood smeared all over the walls and floor. “Sir, we invited him to perform his flash fiction. We never expected anything like this!” In his turn, Barry told the officers about a bog of emotion and a marshland of gut feelings that must be expressed in more than just words. The police didn’t buy a word of it and hauled him away. What an abysmal ending to his performance. Barry has landed himself in a real quagmire. He has a nut to crack and no sheep to crack it with.

( )

Little pearls of deadpan profundity, absurd the way life is.

Orkney Skull Splitter Ale
Oskar Blues Tenfidy Imperial Stout

Summary: Spellbinding flash fiction which is silly/fantastic/profound – take your pick.

Rating: 5 Stars.

Recommended if you like: Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, David Byrne, Erotica Flash Fiction, Rene Magritte art

This collection of short prose pieces (each about a page long) depict seemingly ordinary situations where fantastically absurd things happen. They seem less like like stories than cosmic jokes or Zen fairy tales for Americans. Each prose piece offers surprises and revelations. (“A man comes home and finds his wife in bed with a squirrel”, “A couple of girls are locked up in a big aquarium,” “I have the last pack of cigarettes in the world; but no matches.”) The characters themselves are less interesting than their situations; one page is enough for them to fall in love or meet imaginary creatures or feel some grand feeling. A lot of the prose pieces are sexually explicit but strange (in one a man finds a map of Greenland on the inside of a girl’s thigh). The prose style is compact and exquisite and easy to read (and suitable for being performed publicly). Now that I’m finished, almost none of the pieces have stuck in my head; all I retain is the memory of being dazzled by a rapid series of unreal images and events. On the bright side, I probably could reread these pieces and enjoy them just as much as the first time.

What is the aim of these koan-like stories? Should the reader notice the allegorical resonances or simply enjoy Yourgrau’s marvelous and whimsical sense of the absurd? With Kafka or Dino Buzzati, the initial situation may have been absurd (i.e., turning into a cockroach), but the author spent considerable effort expanding on the idea and giving it an air of plausibility. But Yourgrau’s stories are more playful than plausible. I am unsure whether to call this a profound literary work — you can’t have real character development or serious drama in a form so compact and whimsical. These kinds of stories don’t NEED to be profound — especially when the far-fetched imagery is so metaphorical. In the Soupbone story, the protagonist jumps out of an airplane while emptying a shoebox of letters from his old love; to his surprise he finds a falling dog also in midair helplessly trying to chase after a bone. Why a dog? Why a soupbone? Part of the fun of these stories is trying to relate the imagery to some universal feeling of dismay or anomie – if that is even possible. The stories grab and intrigue me, but they don’t really move me; that is not the point. Yourgrau has written sequels to this collection using this same innovative short form: Sadness of Sex (about sex) and the NastyBook (geared towards younger readers). This form breaks all rules and takes advantage of today’s reader’s short attention span and the magical possibilities of prose. Highly recommended.