Elegance and Suspense
Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Trouble
Stinging Fly Press, 231pp, €10.00, ISBN 978-1906539900
reviewed by Archie Cornish
Philip Ó Ceallaigh settled in Bucharest at the end of the 1990s, and since then most of his stories have taken place in eastern Europe. In deadbeat neighbourhoods and stifling apartment blocks, their protagonists eke out austere livings. His lauded first collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006) depicts Bucharest — ‘that terrible city which wears you down’ — as itself eroded, full of corruption and decay. The crumbling blocks are ruins of the Communist era, Ceaușescu’s brutal kleptocracy. Fifteen years on, in this excellent collection, the apartment blocks have come to stand also as capitalist ruins, symbolising the empty promises of the free-market policies which succeeded the dictator, their failure to deliver prosperity and order.
Ó Ceallaigh’s protagonists tend to be men, and they’re often drifters, looking in on life from the position of alienated outsider. They’re not alienated from sexual desire, though; it’s their abiding passion and often, comically, their principal motivation. Two collections later, the protagonists of these stories have aged a little, and seem more reflective. No one in Trouble has managed to find an alternative, liberating stance towards women, or a value system to replace the degrading materialism they suffer. If they preserve self-awareness, it’s simply by holding such attitudes at arm’s length.
Yet these disaffected men are also blindsided by love. The stories have little time for the notion that love ennobles and clarifies, but neither do they flatten it into straightforward, calculating lust. Thronging with animals (dogs, variously animated; sex-crazed, semi-hallucinatory monkeys; a hamster belonging to a little girl, herself nicknamed Piglet) they portray love as an animalistic state of intoxication by desire or attachment. A man walks an adopted stray, a wolf-like beast called London, round the block; while his master sleeps on the bench, London bounds with the ‘effortless velocity’ of a dream to the home of a former lover, to seduce and devour her. Yet love here is also what distinguishes us from a life of pure appetite: it’s a mysterious disruption that forces us to change cities, or remain in them for far too long, against our obvious interests.
Halfway through the collection comes ‘First Love’, a ‘semi-fictionalised’ translation of the diary of Felix Landau, a Nazi war criminal who oversaw the ghetto in Drohobych, western Ukraine. As ‘Judengeneral’ from 1941-2, Landau organised massacres of the enslaved Jewish population. But his diary is preoccupied with his mistress, Trude, and the pressure exerted on their relationship by long distance; she is, he reflects, ‘the only real thing that has ever happened to me’. It’s a sobering reminder of love’s ability to co-exist with evil, but also of the fact that eastern Europeans still live in the shadow of 20th-century upheavals and traumas. (In 2022, as more fascists inflict on Ukraine their imperial designs, that shadow looms more heavily.) Some of the collection’s more blackly comic stories depict lives warped or desensitised by modern experience: the narrator of ‘Bells in Bright Air’, trying to write in peace, picks off distractions — a barking dog, a member of the underclass with his ‘brutal diction’ — using a rifle, stored ‘along the top of the bookcase’. ‘The Book of Love’ describes an encounter with a millionaire obsessed by his own proficiency at cunnilingus, and in denial about the fact that his erotic experiences are also transactions.
When questioned about his priorities as a composer of stories, Ó Ceallaigh stresses sentences and form. Elegant and lively sentences, without which the story has no hope of coming to life, take endless hours. But he’s at pains to conceal the effort, and the result is sentences which seem worked rather than laboured, maintaining taut rhythmical balance with each other and an economy of figuration. Florid metaphor comes so sparingly it’s always striking: ‘I put on my diving gear and went underwater’, says the narrator of ‘My Life in the Movies’, as he zones out in a bar of dim, colourful light.
‘Form’ is the shape these sentences achieve, and like the sentences it’s a question of clarity, of finding narrative and perspectival structures that make experience intelligible. But Ó Ceallaigh also prizes spontaneity, a sense of unpredictability for the reader which originates in the writerly courage to proceed without knowing what will happen next. Taken together, these two senses of form — elegance and suspense — imply that the job of the short story is to make experiences meaningful without smoothing over their contingent shapelessness.
Throughout, the stories of Trouble imply links between the pleasures of form for writer and reader and the miniature triumphs of meaning-making in the tough lives of their characters. Domestic life is a ceaseless struggle to impose or maintain order against creeping chaos: jars furred with mould, a ‘ziggurat’ of unwashed dishes. Like Maupassant’s, Ó Ceallaigh’s stories have always been fascinated by eating and drinking, but Trouble is newly interested in cookery. Sometimes the preparation of food is just as banal as the washing up, as in ‘Graceland’, whose protagonist is at a loss in a ‘childless apartment’: ‘he cooked the eggs and ate them’. But elsewhere cooking is a way of concentrating the flavour of one’s experience, a humble exercise of the freedom to combine things. The protagonist of ‘London’ goes back to his wife, who prepares ‘a vinaigrette he liked, made with crushed garlic and cumin’.
In ‘Dead Dog’, the extraordinary final story, a man travels round his neighbourhood trying to make things right with friends and acquaintances. He goes to clean another property which he lets out on Airbnb. When he returns, he has to deal with an awful smell coming from the basement. As the washing machine spins he sits naked, ‘turning over’ the vagaries of his personal life. Trouble’s still points are moments of contemplation. Pausing to mull things over is in counterpoise with those humble acts of temporary improvement; it’s the other way of holding onto your dignity. Men stare out over the city, but their contemplation isn’t transcendent: they have a drink in hand, and the city is not heavenly Jerusalem but Bucharest, its skyline dominated by Ceaușescu’s gargantuan palace — in Catherine Gaffney’s cover design for the Stinging Fly Press edition, this absurd building juts rudely into the evening sky in silhouette.
Neither does this contemplation bring them any knowledge of what is going to happen, any quasi-authorial mastery of the line of events. But it does enable them to process what is happening, and thus gives them a shot at bringing things meaningfully into shape. Watching the rooftops from his balcony, the lonely narrator of ‘My Life in the City’ imagines himself ‘the one stable element in the ever-shifting world, there to give it wholeness by observing and remembering it’.
Ó Ceallaigh’s protagonists tend to be men, and they’re often drifters, looking in on life from the position of alienated outsider. They’re not alienated from sexual desire, though; it’s their abiding passion and often, comically, their principal motivation. Two collections later, the protagonists of these stories have aged a little, and seem more reflective. No one in Trouble has managed to find an alternative, liberating stance towards women, or a value system to replace the degrading materialism they suffer. If they preserve self-awareness, it’s simply by holding such attitudes at arm’s length.
Yet these disaffected men are also blindsided by love. The stories have little time for the notion that love ennobles and clarifies, but neither do they flatten it into straightforward, calculating lust. Thronging with animals (dogs, variously animated; sex-crazed, semi-hallucinatory monkeys; a hamster belonging to a little girl, herself nicknamed Piglet) they portray love as an animalistic state of intoxication by desire or attachment. A man walks an adopted stray, a wolf-like beast called London, round the block; while his master sleeps on the bench, London bounds with the ‘effortless velocity’ of a dream to the home of a former lover, to seduce and devour her. Yet love here is also what distinguishes us from a life of pure appetite: it’s a mysterious disruption that forces us to change cities, or remain in them for far too long, against our obvious interests.
Halfway through the collection comes ‘First Love’, a ‘semi-fictionalised’ translation of the diary of Felix Landau, a Nazi war criminal who oversaw the ghetto in Drohobych, western Ukraine. As ‘Judengeneral’ from 1941-2, Landau organised massacres of the enslaved Jewish population. But his diary is preoccupied with his mistress, Trude, and the pressure exerted on their relationship by long distance; she is, he reflects, ‘the only real thing that has ever happened to me’. It’s a sobering reminder of love’s ability to co-exist with evil, but also of the fact that eastern Europeans still live in the shadow of 20th-century upheavals and traumas. (In 2022, as more fascists inflict on Ukraine their imperial designs, that shadow looms more heavily.) Some of the collection’s more blackly comic stories depict lives warped or desensitised by modern experience: the narrator of ‘Bells in Bright Air’, trying to write in peace, picks off distractions — a barking dog, a member of the underclass with his ‘brutal diction’ — using a rifle, stored ‘along the top of the bookcase’. ‘The Book of Love’ describes an encounter with a millionaire obsessed by his own proficiency at cunnilingus, and in denial about the fact that his erotic experiences are also transactions.
When questioned about his priorities as a composer of stories, Ó Ceallaigh stresses sentences and form. Elegant and lively sentences, without which the story has no hope of coming to life, take endless hours. But he’s at pains to conceal the effort, and the result is sentences which seem worked rather than laboured, maintaining taut rhythmical balance with each other and an economy of figuration. Florid metaphor comes so sparingly it’s always striking: ‘I put on my diving gear and went underwater’, says the narrator of ‘My Life in the Movies’, as he zones out in a bar of dim, colourful light.
‘Form’ is the shape these sentences achieve, and like the sentences it’s a question of clarity, of finding narrative and perspectival structures that make experience intelligible. But Ó Ceallaigh also prizes spontaneity, a sense of unpredictability for the reader which originates in the writerly courage to proceed without knowing what will happen next. Taken together, these two senses of form — elegance and suspense — imply that the job of the short story is to make experiences meaningful without smoothing over their contingent shapelessness.
Throughout, the stories of Trouble imply links between the pleasures of form for writer and reader and the miniature triumphs of meaning-making in the tough lives of their characters. Domestic life is a ceaseless struggle to impose or maintain order against creeping chaos: jars furred with mould, a ‘ziggurat’ of unwashed dishes. Like Maupassant’s, Ó Ceallaigh’s stories have always been fascinated by eating and drinking, but Trouble is newly interested in cookery. Sometimes the preparation of food is just as banal as the washing up, as in ‘Graceland’, whose protagonist is at a loss in a ‘childless apartment’: ‘he cooked the eggs and ate them’. But elsewhere cooking is a way of concentrating the flavour of one’s experience, a humble exercise of the freedom to combine things. The protagonist of ‘London’ goes back to his wife, who prepares ‘a vinaigrette he liked, made with crushed garlic and cumin’.
In ‘Dead Dog’, the extraordinary final story, a man travels round his neighbourhood trying to make things right with friends and acquaintances. He goes to clean another property which he lets out on Airbnb. When he returns, he has to deal with an awful smell coming from the basement. As the washing machine spins he sits naked, ‘turning over’ the vagaries of his personal life. Trouble’s still points are moments of contemplation. Pausing to mull things over is in counterpoise with those humble acts of temporary improvement; it’s the other way of holding onto your dignity. Men stare out over the city, but their contemplation isn’t transcendent: they have a drink in hand, and the city is not heavenly Jerusalem but Bucharest, its skyline dominated by Ceaușescu’s gargantuan palace — in Catherine Gaffney’s cover design for the Stinging Fly Press edition, this absurd building juts rudely into the evening sky in silhouette.
Neither does this contemplation bring them any knowledge of what is going to happen, any quasi-authorial mastery of the line of events. But it does enable them to process what is happening, and thus gives them a shot at bringing things meaningfully into shape. Watching the rooftops from his balcony, the lonely narrator of ‘My Life in the City’ imagines himself ‘the one stable element in the ever-shifting world, there to give it wholeness by observing and remembering it’.