FICTION
A feast in the details
Felix
Calvino. So Much Smoke. Arcadia: Victoria, 2016. 143 pp. A$29.95. ISBN:978-
1-925333-99-2
Elle
Fournier
Washington
State University
Cigarettes,
cremation, and home cooking aptly engulf Felix Calvino’s short story collection
So Much Smoke. The result is a swirl of elements, of fire, of sea, of chicken
and onions, that gives the collection strength in feel despite its lack in
form.
The Spanish-born author, now living in
Australia, stays close to home with this collection, either revisiting
small-town Spanish life or examining the lives of Spanish immigrants in
Australia.
Like history, food also connects this
family of stories. For readers with epicurean interests of their own, the
detail that Calvino puts into relating food preparation is a delight, as in
“The Road”: “There was hare stew for Sunday dinner. It was a heavy and long
hare with thick gold and white fur. José had trapped it two days before and had
marinated it with two bay leaves and the last of his garlic stock” (19).
Beyond the pleasure in the gastronomic
details, food in this collection does a lot of heavy lifting, signaling home
and connection. At moments of emotional intensity, characters head to the
kitchen, making coffee, pulling beers out of the refrigerator, grilling steaks.
A connection to Spain and its land is also played out through food, as
characters pull ingredients from just outside their homes and consume such regional
fare as jamón serrano (8) and aguardiente (9), each representing one
of the few instances of Spanish language in the text.
Calvino also uses food as an
opportunity to examine death and death’s role in life. In “The Hen,” the young
protagonist reckons with the task of slaughtering a chicken for a family meal.
This task comes at a time in which the eleven-year-old boy is “desperate to get
out of short pants” (4). Like food, the theme of transition present in “The
Hen” works its way through the entire collection; Calvino investigates the
migration between childhood and adulthood, life and death, Spain and Australia.
The collection’s most memorable story,
“The Smile,” is also the longest and follows the Spanish immigrant Jose after
the loss of his wife, Consuela. Though told with sparse detail and a restrained
plot—the act of refinishing a table carries the story through a great deal of
the action—Jose’s quiet grief is haunting. The story builds slowly; however, it
succeeds because the longer page count allows the reader to get acquainted with
Calvino’s characters—on the whole, a reticent bunch.
Calvino’s collection works best when
focusing on the sensory, when he builds a palpable ambiance. For example, a
particularly short snapshot near the end of the collection, “Kneading the
Dough,” stands out. Like “The Hen,” this story focuses on the relationship
between a tween boy and his mother. “Kneading the Dough” adeptly uses
microdetail and repetition to reflect the sense of stasis enveloping the time
just before adulthood: “In the confined space of the stove oven, the fire, slow
at first, is now a furious dance. The red and yellow tongues turn on
themselves, embrace each other. He adds another bundle of dry hardwood and pine
branches, then another, and another” (132).
The strength of this two-page story is
that Calvino carves a path between adolescent angst and the process of
preparing bread but does not insist on dragging the reader down that path with
him. Too often writers underestimate the satisfaction for readers of sussing
out these connections for themselves. Here Calvino leaves enough hints that
readers are not floundering for an interpretation but also practices enough
restraint so that they can feel clever for drawing a conclusion.
On the flip side, issues in this
collection generally arise when Calvino slows down the narrative for the sake
of explanation. In the age of Google, there is little need for explanatory
footnotes, especially when presented in the dry, dictionary-esque fashion that
Calvino does in this book. As a reader, when I am asked to arrest the narrative
to glance toward the bottom of the page, I hope for a stylistic treat in
return. Calvino does not deliver. However, the real problem is that for most
readers, even those unfamiliar with Franco-era Spanish history, the explanation
is unnecessary to understand the unfolding plot and character arcs.
In a similar vein, “The Dream Girl” is
the least engrossing story in the collection because it is distractingly meta,
with the protagonist’s interests and backgrounds all but cross-referencing the
author’s bio page. “The Dream Girl” focuses a great deal on the protagonist’s
growing love of reading and his writing aspirations. While relating this,
Calvino does little to shake up the conventional artist’s journey narrative. If
he moved away from this story of a shy, precocious child finding freedom
through literature, Calvino’s use of biography would read as far less trite.
However, “The Dream Girl” has the opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to
the artist’s narrative with its focus on language; the Galician-speaking
protagonist is forced to negotiate Spain’s desire to homogenize the country’s
language. Unfortunately, the handling of the Galician language facet of the
story is far too direct, contributing more to authorial intrusion than to a
thought-provoking thread in the narrative.
In So Much Smoke, Calvino proves that
he is capable of leaving room for reader interpretation. It is unfortunate that
he gives in to the impulse to overexplain at the moments he does. With more
restraint, stories of oppressive language policies and echoes of tyrannical
regimes would be compelling and relevant. Instead, the departures from
narrative mostly serve to distract from the more entertaining and engaging moments.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.13110/antipodes.31.2.0447JOURNAL
ARTICLE
