Summer/Autumn
2005
Hymns to Millionaires
Soren
A. Gauger
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague
179 pp. $13.50
(Reviewed
by Jason Stuart Ratcliff)
If
there is a common thread loosely drawn through Soren A. Gauger’s
story collection, Hymns to
Millionaires, it is madness. “In a mad world, only the mad are
sane,” is the famous and now semi-clichéd quote from filmmaker Akira
Kurosawa—Gauger’s twist on this aphorism being (to summarize and
not quote), “To the mad person, it is the world that is mad.” By the last tale it becomes very clear that we have
not been dealing with a string of regular fellows narrating crazy
circumstances, but have made the mistake of taking our information from
the crazy fellows themselves.
This
collection contains three or four flawless and brilliant
gems, but for the most part it is hit-and-miss. This is a bigger shame when one considers that just about
everything wrong with it is a matter of either syntax or style. Gauger shines the most when he’s got his eyes open,
describing imagery and scenes, some of his descriptions vivid as can
be, as here:
“Man eating is man at his most misshapen and grotesque
man the pointless assembly of ligaments fatty tissues and gelatinous
organs bundled up in a swath of rubbery skin.”
But in other places, especially where he wanders into the
abstract wilderness of the conceptual, Gauger seems to struggle
against language more than utilize it:
At least everything started with Ms. Moore, as if she were a center
point from which my otherwise barren thoughts would drift in steady
elliptical orbits, always to swing back to the same invariable with a
magnetic irresistibility, a seemingly counter- geometrical veer towards
the heart of the matter, that is to say . . . it should be abundantly
clear at this juncture that I was losing control of the central
control mechanism . . .
Such
addling language is just one example of the bloated verbosity that
this writer can fall into in the quest for his better moments.
Then
there is the mannered style in which Gauger writes, which gives his
work both some of its greatest charms and its biggest failures. Using highbrow words like
masticate instead of chew, a sometimes ostentatious vocabulary, and a feeling of stuffiness in the characters
are stylistic consistencies here. This
works for the most part, giving his characters a kind of
straight-man-amidst-insanity feel, and where it does not become too
prominent it feels comfortable and hits the ear with a certain grace. But in several places it degenerates into bombast and
melodrama, an example being the following from the title story, “A
Hymn to Millionaires”:
“Enough!” I eventually cried, tears dribbling down my cheeks
and pooling on my outcropping chin, all my wagers lost, reduced to a
meager shambles, “I will bet the deed to my properties!” Clayridge raised an inquisitive eyebrow. He stood up from the table and stared down at me, a fallen
nobleman. “Perhaps I
had better wend my way home,” he said flatly. I shook with fury, my eyes flaming like coals, “Leave!” I
cried, “May I never again see your cadaverous frame in my
home!"
If
this is some subtle parody against the narrator himself (perhaps an
intended “bad writer narrator”?) there is not much to make us
aware of that fact. It
seems strange that passages this bad would end up in a published work
unintentionally, but all indications are that this simply slipped
under the editor’s nose. As I said above, Gauger’s mannerisms are consistent and usually
give one
a feeling of sympathy with his characters, lending them a sane
aspect in the extremely odd worlds in which they wind up. Abandoning the mannered style altogether would not be wise of
Gauger in my opinion, but he needs to be merciless when it comes to
editing out the over-the-top paragraphs that creep in during
composition.
Another
tip that would help shore up this collection’s faults is the concept
that there is a difference between using otherwise unimportant detail to create a
rounded picture of a scene, and employing random expansions
on every idea after the manner of a senile woman’s speech. These
passages are rare for the most part, and totally absent in many of the
stories; however, sometimes Gauger sounds like a writer with
ADD in his endless unpacking of every nook and cranny in each scene
and character.
Overall there are more virtues than faults to Hymns
to Millionaires. The
faults are mostly on the level of language and style, while the
virtues lie in the wholeness and singularity of idea in each
story’s significance. In
“Mr. Delfour’s Other File,” the story initially seemed rambling and
weak, but the meaning of the whole became clear in the last two
paragraphs; at that point it all came together—philosophically, not in some cheap plot twist. Many of these stories are illustrations of cognitive points
that we are given enough (and just enough) clues to tease out of them. Gauger seems to always know just how his stories will end (or
perhaps, more accurately, what
they will say) from the very first sentence. “Green Tea” is one example, where the opening paragraph
lauds the idea of human free will in strong, substantive language: “Men on the moon, for God’s
sake,” being proof that we are in control. It ends with
the narrator’s extramarital affair that is ambiguously either the
denial of free will or its ultimate outcome and proof, probably the
latter. Also to his
credit, Gauger employs the usually fatal “and it was all a dream”
device more than once, and manages to pull it off with more than
reasonable success.
Had
Gauger taken a more critical eye and a sharper pen in editing, rewording
and fine-tuning this collection, it could have been quite an
impressive book. As it
is, we can still recommend it, but not with an overabundance of
applause or enthusiasm.
– JSR –
