Leaping Off the Scarp
The Making Sense of Things by George Choundas
The University of Alabama Press, 2018
Winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Reviewed by Alyssa Quinn
“It is a stupid thing to do. But there is a gland, perhaps part of a heart, that urges it.”
—From “Troth”
The cover of George Choundas’ The Making Sense of Things baffles and delights. Adorned with two hearts, one a pipe-smoking, fedora-wearing, yet otherwise anatomically correct organ, the other of the Valentine’s-Day-and-playing-cards variety and bedecked with carnivalesque images of animals, humans, and animal-human hybrids, the cover makes you a promise: read me, it says, and I will leave you boggled, confused in the most whimsical of ways. Open me, it says, and you will find absurdities, incongruent assemblages, fantasies that strain reason. You will laugh, you will grimace, you will shiver. You will not know what to make of it.
The twelve stories that follow fulfill the cover’s promise brilliantly. The imagination evinced in Choundas’ fictions is entirely original—a young boy excels at soccer by wrapping his body around the ball and somersaulting across the field; an infestation of woodpeckers carves a mysterious symbol into the front of suburban home; and Little Red Riding Hood’s piano teacher hatches a dark plot. The collection piles one surprise on top of the other; just when you feel you’re getting a grasp on what the book is, it subverts your expectations yet again, with a writer who chops off his thumbs, or an act of arson motivated by love, or a society whose members all have two hearts, an upper and a lower.
Not the least surprising is Choundas’ prose. His imagery is something you want to savor, similes and metaphors both so fresh and inventive and also so perfect you can’t understand why they aren’t already clichés. Sunlight streams through a window, “turning everything into a pastry version of itself.” A woman sits at a table with a book, “her shoulders perched small and round: handfuls.” And in the species with the two hearts, the lower heart “wore the liver like a sun hat.”
And here we are at hearts again—because that is what this book is truly about. I saw the cover and licked my lips in anticipation of absurdity, humor, strangeness. And I got those things. But I also got beauty, lyricism, and deep genuine feeling. I got a dog mourning his dead owner, a case of mistaken identity that blooms into love, and a tender eulogy for a man dying of AIDS. One of my favorite stories, “The Duplex and the Scarp,” meditates on the loss of loved ones. It posits a theory:
“Take the years you lived in love with your loved one. Take the years, months, days you spent learning how the smell of the back of her neck reacted chestnuttily to sunshine. Add these. Be meticulous. Because it will take you equally long after the loss, precisely the same amount of time after she dies, until you breathe again and notice the sky and let yourself do something so small as worry.”
The bad news, the story goes on to say, is that there is always a middle point—”a point exactly halfway between the moment you fall in love and the moment you die.” If you make it past this point as a couple, and then your loved one dies, you won’t recover; there is “simply not enough time.” The story then chronicles just such a pivot point in one couple’s relationship, the moment when “one of them without knowing has lived the point of no return, leapt off the scarp, innocent of how he has sanctified himself this day.” And sanctified is the right word. Again and again in this collection, I felt scooped out, pierced by tenderness, purified by tragedy. This book, like life, brims with love, with loss, with so much to make sense of.
ALYSSA QUINN is the Assistant Managing Editor of the Bellingham Review and a graduate of Western Washington University’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Brevity, Gingerbread House, Frontier Poetry, Punctuate, and elsewhere.
Featured image by Caroline Bertolini