Simon Van Booy Gets Lost in Atget’s Paris

Instead of telling us about one of his favorite short story writers, as many Beatrice guests do when they have a new collection of their own stories, Simon Van Booy has elected to reveal another one of the inspirations that shaped The Secret Lives of People in Love. We don’t talk as much as we could about the visual arts on this blog, so Simon’s essay is a welcome surprise.

There is no greater comfort for a very lonely person than to see the photographs of Eugéne Atget. The first time my eyes fell upon the headless torso of a classical statue, crumbling in a winter park—then turned the page to an empty garden chair on a balcony of stray leaves, I felt the panic of an unexpected embrace. I closed the book and sat down on a small ladder. I was at The Strand; it was autumn. My hiding places were no longer secret. Someone else had used them a hundred years ago.

I was like an orphan who had accidentally unearthed an album of photographs that bore the faces of his lost family. Discovering these misty, black and white pictures mitigated the pain of a long loneliness. I no longer felt invisible. My vision of the world was shared—even celebrated. There were people here before me. People had walked in my shoes—had stopped to look at park benches softened by rain. They had left notes in the walls. I was a part of some ongoing love affair with overlooked details, an affair that had not begun with me and would not end with me. I was not the only person governed by feelings rooted in that most secret form of isolation: the ability to be alive and to be a ghost at the very same moment.

It’s not that I saw Atget’s work, which then influenced my work, but through Atget, I found the confidence to keep going, to take chances, to allow myself to explore the dark woods where the secrets of my characters lay buried. And so, I set one of my stories, “Some Bloom in Darkness,” within the photographs of Atget. If you look at the images very closely, you might even see my protagonist standing on a wall with his walking stick in the water, or on a bench sketching small birds. There are writers from whom we learn, and there are those who by some mysterious circumstance we come to know as members of our own family.

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17 August 2007 | guest authors |

Rebecca Curtis Delves into “Sea Oak”

In the first of three “Selling Shorts” essays we’ll be running this week, Rebecca Curtis takes a look at one of the best American short stories of the last decade, probably the last half-century really: George Saunders’ “Sea Oak.” As she reveals in the essay, Curtis has a special connection with this story, as Saunders was one of her teachers at Syrcause. Her debut short story collection, Twenty Grand, has just been published by HarperPerennial; she’ll be reading from it at the season opener of New York’s Happy Ending Reading Series in mid-September.

Last week on the subway, I overheard the man next to me tell the man next to him about a story he’d read. Both men wore well-cut suits of fine material. Both had short dark hair, were in their thirties, and held briefcases between their calves. “I don’t remember what it was called,” the man said. “It was published about six years ago… in The New Yorker, I think. It had a male stripper in it, and the guy was a waiter in some kind of restaurant, and there was a zombie in the story… and things got really bad for the waiter, and the zombie made him start showing his cock.”

The man’s conversation partner appeared nonplussed.

“Seems like a weird story,” he said.

“It was weird,” the first man said, “but it was hilarious.”

The second man checked his watch. The train whined in the dark tunnel, then yanked us round some curve, and all the passengers leaned. We were under the water, the long stretch between the Clark Street and Wall Street stations, headed into the city on an August morning.

The first man bent his head and rubbed the leather wallet on his lap. “I wish I could remember what the story was called,” he said. “It’s going to kill me.”

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15 August 2007 | selling shorts |