Ex Libris: A Synesthesia for Words

I suppose I'd better explain why I consider Kelly Link's short-story collection, Stranger Things Happen, as my best-read of the year.

It's simple, really. It's all about the words.

In Jeff Vandermeer's anthology Leviathan 3, Jeffrey Ford had a story called the "Weight of Words" wherein one character had managed to discover-- as the title goes-- that words have a physical weight that can be measured. I suppose that I suffer under a same kind of logic, a type of synesthesia in which I "see" words as having shape nestled as they are with other words. And in Kelly Link's sparse prose, I see the perfect "fit" of words. I don't know how else to describe this right "combination" of words but Link does this perfectly, choosing the right words time and again in writing her quirky, off-beat stories.

With her prose, Link tells you more than what the text is offering, a sub-text that complements or contrastingly is even more fantastical than what the surface words show.

Consider the story "Travels with the Snow Queen":

Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet.

Or from "Louise's Ghost":

Louise sits across from Louise. Anna sits between them. She has a notebook full of green paper, and a green crayon. She's drawing something, only it's difficult to see what, exactly. Maybe it's a house. Louise says, "Sorry about you know who. Teacher's day. The sitter canceled at the last minute. And I had such a lot to tell you, too! About you know, number eight. Oh boy, I think I'm in love. Well, not in love." She is sitting opposite a window, and all that rich soft light falls on her. She looks creamy with happiness, as if she's carved out of butter. The light loves Louise, the other Louise thinks. Of course it loves Louise. Who doesn't?

Or even "The Specialist's Hat", wherein Link somehow gives the appropriate analogy of my relationship with words:

When she has time to think about it, (and now she has all the time in the world to think) Samantha realizes with a small pang that she is now stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn't been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles maybe.

Do you see what I mean? As a writer, I could only dream to write the perfect words, the one that says all that I want and mean: the words that are perfectly weighed against each other like a balancing act is a defiance of gravity. I must admit that her use of postmodern narrative style is a bit off-putting but then, it also adds to the alienation of the words and, in its isolation, they gain more prominence.

Of course, it also helps that Link's stories are so off-kilter and strange: a couple discovers a gathering composed of survivors in "Survivor's Ball, or The Donner Party;" a deconstructionist look at female private investigators of yore in "The Girl Detective" (Nancy Drew, anyone?); or "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose", about a dead man who's lost his memory and can't remember the name of his loved one. As Link plays around with the words, her stories play also with the reader's imaginations.

In the end, the best way for me to describe Link's work is to let her words do it for me, like an outpouring of music straight to my ear and to my brain:

Rachel had straight reddish-brown hair that fell precisely to her shoulders and then stopped. Her eyes were fox-colored, and she had more small, even teeth than seemed absolutely necessary to Carroll. She smiled at him, and when she bent over the tacklebox full of noses, Carroll could see the two wings of her shoulderblades beneath the thin cotton T-shirt, her vertebrae outlined like a knobby strand of coral.

(From "Water off a Black Dog's Back")

Better yet, check her out yourselves as Small Beer Press has put out her book online for free. Read it and if you like it, go buy a copy (or two). You won't regret it.

Anyway, am off to the provinces so an advanced Happy New Year, folks!