Revise your summer reading lists, ladies and gentlemen, because this week brought us new issues of Guernica and Asymptote to bump to the top of the pile. Asymptote delivers more of its consistently stunning literature in translation, including a haunting story from the late Uruguayan author Mario Levrero about a very, very strange house. At Guernica, we get two features examining the intersection of technology and art, illuminating interviews with authors Helen Macdonald and LaShonda Katrice Barnett, and a new short story from Andrew Malan Milward that tells the strange, sad tale of a man known as the Goat Gland Doctor.
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Milward’s story, “The Americanist,” isn’t just one thing. It’s one of those stories that is part love story, part history, part flashback, part current events, but is somehow woven together seamlessly. “The Americanist” opens with the weird but true tale of the charlatan Goat Gland Doctor, John Romulus Brinkley, who transplanted actual goat testicles into actual human testicles in the 1920s (to cure impotence, of course) and later ran for governor of the actual state of Kansas. (This is all actually true!) The story of Brinkley is told to us through a recently laid-off historian named Michael whose romantic relationship is swiftly deteriorating due to intimacy problems. “Maybe I need a pair of goat nuts shot into my sack,” he says to his boyfriend at one point. And to add to the virility theme, Michael’s boyfriend, Will, works as a nurse at a women’s health clinic that is being picketed for providing abortions.
The crazy, true story of Dr. Brinkley could run the risk of overpowering the story, of becoming the most interesting thing about it, but the relationship between Michael and Will is so well-drawn and detailed that it balances the Brinkley side. We know how Will eats pasta; we know his new affectation of smoking fancy cigars. We know Michael’s strange, misplaced bitterness towards him at the same time as his protectiveness, and we can feel their dissolution coming as a sad inevitability. Take this scene from a Fourth of July party at a friend Ron’s house:
Ron and I rise from our lawn chairs and begin to waltz around the backyard, trying to avoid the croquet mallets and balls no one has used the entire evening, singing, as we always do, “You’re a Grand Old Fag” while the bombs burst in air above us. Grown men acting like children. Alex is amused, Will confused. He asks what the hell I’m doing. “I’m celebrating my country! Stop hating my freedom, you terrorist,” I say, and Ron cracks up as Alex joins us on the lawn. Will looks at me like, Do I even know you? then at Alex’s perfect ass, hermetically sealed in tight, dark denim. This is what Ron and I did in previous years with other men we loved longer than the ones watching us now.
And that’s what “The Americanist” is about at its core: trying to understand other people, trying to understand ourselves, and the likely eventuality that we never understand either one.
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At Asymptote, translator Frances Riddle brings us an eerie and beautiful translation of Mario Levrero’s “The Abandoned House.” As Riddle mentions in her translator’s note, the story is almost fifty years old, written in late 1966 and early 1967, but it feels like it was written just now, moments ago. The story seems timeless, perhaps because of its location in a house that seems a little bit out of time, and a lot out of reality.
One might call this house “haunted,” but the word really does not adequately describe the bizarre and fantastical happenings that go on inside this house. “Haunted” brings to mind ghosts, lost spirits forever moaning on the battlements, vengeful poltergeists throwing lamps around. But this house does not have ghosts. This house has hurricanes in the living room, eleven-centimeter tall women swimming in a sink, a garden that’s much bigger than its dimensions, something unspeakable in the attic, and a pantry full of spiders that are afraid to leave the pantry. (If the spiders are afraid, that tells you something.)
The story is not so much a narrative as it is a collection of descriptions of the house and its phenomena as told through the eyes of one of the house’s “fans.” Through short sections with subheadings like “The Unicorn” and “Earthworms” and “It,” Levrero creates a house that is part nightmare, part dreamscape, and completely enveloping. It’s even sometimes funny. By the end, you want to read more—not to solve the mystery of this impossible house, but simply to spend a little more time there, to see a few more of its horrible wonders. We’ll leave you with this, from the section “The Garden”:
We can’t come to an agreement on the size of the garden. We do agree that viewed from the street, or from the path that leads to the house, it appears to be about eighty square meters (8m x 10m). The trouble begins from the moment we step in among its weeds, its ivies, its flowerless plants, its insects, the lines of ants, the vines and giant ferns, the rays of sun that filter through the canopy of the tall eucalyptus trees, the bear tracks, the chatter of the parrots, the snakes coiled around the branches that raise their heads and whistle when we pass, the unbearable heat, the thirst, the darkness, the roar of the leopards, the falls of the machete that clears the way, the tall boots we wear, the humidity, our helmets, the luxurious vegetation, the night, the fear, the fact that we can’t find the way out, the fact that we can’t find the way out.
