Other Worlds, by André Alexis
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 9780771006241, pp. 288)
Short story or novel—which do you prefer? Other Worlds by André Alexis, the Trinidad-born Canadian author, powerfully reminds us that we need not choose. The stories in this collection come with all the narrative flair, scope and, in some cases, structural gestures of longer forms. Alexis’ devotion to the novel is clear. He is, unusually in modern letters, the author of a quincunx, which is a series of five linked books. These books are Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, The Hidden Keys, Days by Moonlight, and Ring – published between 2014 and 2021. But before all that, short stories were central to his aesthetic. His very first published work of fiction, 1994’s Despair and Other Stories, was a story collection. This latest book brings home that centrality while suggesting ways of reading the story form itself as being symbolically tied with diasporic Caribbean experience.
Right out the gate, the capaciousness hits you. The title of the first piece, ‘Contrition: An Isekai’, suggests its epic scope. Within Japanese tradition, an isekai is a fiction that revolves around a person being transported to another world. That subtitle immediately draws the reader in, much like a character in an isekai crosses margins, adding a layer of complexity to the text even before we begin to engage with it. Like a novel or novella, the action is divided into five sections or movements—the number five is significant within the author’s oeuvre—and the penultimate section bears the grand title “History Is Not What It Seems, It Seems”. This epic wrapping paper matches the gift of the story itself, which follows the reincarnation of a character named Tam Modeste as he moves between two worlds: the Trinidad of 1857 and the Ontario of 1957. Early on, the island setting is powerfully evoked with its own internal demarcation between competing realms under British colonialism:
And although he had encountered very few Britons in his life—only two, in fact— “British” was the name of a wall beyond which his curiosity did not venture.
This wall, however, was not static. It moved. It was alive, always coming his way, he felt. So, studiously avoiding places where Britons might congregate, Tam had explored—perhaps more fully than any of the Modestes before him—the interior of the land where he was born. He knew its hills, groves, grasses, rivers, minerals, and stones as well as he knew himself. He knew the cobos, mapipis, toads, howler monkeys, tatoos, iguanas, congarees, and bachac as well as he knew his own family.
This notion of a wall that is not static is really the metaphorical core of a series of antinomies in the rest of the piece, which will then involve a transgression from the world of science into the world of sorcery; a failed attempt to communicate between languages, which itself becomes the inciting incident that triggers Tam’s death and subsequent rebirth in Petrolia, a town in Ontario; and his inhabiting of a child’s body, a body thereafter uneasily divided into the youthful Paul Williams and the elder Tam. On paper, all of this might seem surreal, wild even, but in Alexis’ hands, that, too, is another line crossed: surrealism begins to feel like realism. His narrators deploy pared-down language. There’s a preference for short sentences, often broken by sub-clauses, and the use of the conditional tense (“It would be difficult to say…”, “It would have been ludicrous…”, “One would not have guessed…”), which qualifies the flow; diagnostic is the style of the storytelling. All of this makes me interpret the otherworldly aspects of the writing as a commentary on the very worldly experience of people who are profoundly transformed by the migrant experience.
The Kafkaesque ‘Winter, or a Town Near Palgrave’ works in a similar vein. A writer ends up in a town, only identified as “L—”, which has strange rules. People seem to hibernate in giant leather pouches. The writer is expected to accept these odd rules, just as the reader is expected to take the narrator’s words at face value. Powerfully resonant with the sense of alienation felt by anyone, immigrant or otherwise, who questions the ideological moorings of a space is all of this.
Also built on a scaffolding of sections are the stories ‘A Misfortune’ and ‘Pu Songling: An Appreciation’. The former story features a memorable first sentence, befitting a novel: “At the age of six, Amara McNeil shot and killed her father.” What follows is a Rubik’s cube of possibilities relating to that opening line, which mirrors the ways in which history, both individual and global, is subject to constant reassessment. That, too, is another subtextual link to the Caribbean experience, shaped as it is by competing narratives.
Other Worlds is Alexis’ most recent book but, in some ways, it echoes his first, Despair and Other Stories. A direct line can be drawn between ‘Houyhnhnm’ in the new work and ‘Horse’ in his oldest. In ‘Horse’, a narrator deals with the aftermath of a mother’s death. The story is at first grounded in the concrete details of the dead parent’s house but then takes a turn into the fantastic. A strange and sinister tenant, Dr Pascal (the epigraph of Other Worlds is, coincidentally, sourced from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées and reads: “We understand nothing about God’s works if we do not take it as principle that He wished to blind some and enlighten others”) arrives and begins a series of experiments on animal cadavers. In this odd bestiary, the final line of the story emerges as just one word, “Horse”, spoken by the narrator who comes to view Dr Pascal as “something of a father figure.”
‘Houyhnhnm’ – easily the stand-out story in the new book – similarly follows the aftermath of the death of a parent, this time a father. Like ‘Horse’, it is at first built solidly on the rational before taking a twist into the incredible: the dead father’s pet horse can, it turns out, speak, just as the intelligent horses do in the last movement of Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels. In both short stories, the bewildering experience of grief is, paradoxically, rationalized by irrationality. It’s a hallmark move within Alexis’ writing, whose characters change but whose narrator does not: he is the kind of writer whose style seems to have arrived whole from his very first book. ‘Consolation’, too, in the new book deals with the death of a father and is followed by a revealing piece entitled ‘An Elegy’ that could be taken as a key to Alexis’ writing.
If the short story seems like a form that is, in the author’s hands, pleasingly unstable, then that liminality makes it a fitting vehicle for lived experiences that involve the questioning of boundaries. At a time of crude oversimplification, this book contains a powerful reminder of the richness and complexity of that lived experience. It contains an author’s note from Alexis that, in relation to lines of dialogue contained in the opening story, states:
Garifuna, a language native to parts of South America and the Caribbean, was the language of my great-grandfather, John Modeste. The language, also known as Black Carib or Kalipuna, has fewer than 20,000 speakers world-wide and is endangered. To my knowledge, this is its first appearance in literary fiction, though the Garifuna transcribed in this book is the evocation of an echo of a tongue spoken in Trinidad, a hundred years ago.
Other Worlds is, ultimately, a testament to the boundlessness of the short story form and a major contribution to Caribbean and, thus, world literature.
∞
Andre Bagoo’s latest books include The Dreaming, The Undiscovered Country and Midnight Bestiaries. He is Moko Magazine’s managing editor.