Dialethetic Boasts

Page 19 November–December 2007 guide us through her stories or supply us with copious background material explaining her characters’ actions. The sense of mystery surrounding Milletti’s characters and her ability to move seamlessly between the real and fantastical often result in unexpected and delightful narratives. In this collection, religion is associated with food, slaughter, and music. In “Sweetbreads,” one of my favorites in the collection, Joachim is the owner of a butcher shop who dies and leaves his son Oskar, the “so-called novelist,” his inheritance, under the condition that he agrees to manage Hoeckel’s Meats for three months. Before his death, Joachim “had no god, that blood had become his bond, almost a religion.” Slaughter becomes associated with spirituality, and a mutually beneficial relationship is formed between the church and the butcher shop—the church agrees to educate Oskar and pray for Joachim’s dead wife in exchange for weekly rations of meat from Joachim’s shop. The experience of watching the slaughter of a pig becomes an almost transcendent experience for Mary, a friend and love interest of Oskar when he is an adolescent. In “The Religious,” the title story, a waitress describes toAmerican tourists a hard cheese, la religieuse, as a prayer “‘one makes of the past.’” In the realities Milletti has created for us in these stories, in which human connections are fleeting and life unpredictable, characters find spirituality in unusual and surprising endeavors—laying in ivy, slaughtering animals, or playing a bouzouki. In her best stories, Milletti’s characters retain a powerful sense of mystery, and miracles force her characters and readers to question reality. In “Retrofit,” the first story in the collection and one of the most engaging, a large-headed light bulb salesman invented by a cabbie’s unfaithful wife emerges as a very real presence by the end of the story. Furthermore, many of Milletti’s characters are enlightened by fleeting encounters with strangers. In “The Villa of the Veiled Lady,” perhaps the most poignant in the collection,Alice, anAmerican visiting Herculaneum, meets a mysterious man, Apollinaro, who guides her to a villa in which he exhibits an emotional attachment to paintings of a veiled woman. However, the nature ofApollinaro’s history with this woman is never discovered, either by the American tourist or by the reader. Apollinaro, like the veiled woman, defies explanation, and we ultimately focus on the momentary connection formed betweenAlice andApollinaro, two vastly different human beings, in the villa. The same is true of Mary in “Sweetbreads.” Though the adult Oskar attempts to make contact with his childhood friend and lover, he never receives the closure of reconciliation, and neither the reader nor Oskar can fully understand her disappearance. The mother and girlfriend in “Amelia Earhart’s Last Transmission” are similarly cloaked in mystery— both disappear from the narrator’s life in bizarre ways, but the women and the explanations behind their disappearances remain lost to the narrator and reader. In the worlds these characters inhabit, reality is entirely unpredictable and identities changeable. For example, in “The Search for Anna Boubouli,” Anna B., a musician and prodigy, seeks out Anna Boubouli, a bouzouki player and the source of a lovely and unreal music, only to take on her identity at the end. Milletti’s characters find spirituality in unusual and surprising endeavors. While the mysteries of these characters and worlds are frequently compelling, a couple of the stories are problematic or seem out of place in the collection. For example, the premise of “Letters from H.” is fascinating—a man mourning the death of his wife begins writing and mailing letters to himself and pretends they are from his dead wife. However, because the history, motivations, and emotions of the character are unstated, the story becomes somewhat puzzling as new information concerning the wife’s death is revealed and the veracity of the husband’s account is questioned. Furthermore, the story “The SmallestApartment,” a short-short story about 1,000 girls inhabiting the same room, is beautifully written but so fantastical that it seems out of place in a collection that works best when it brings together the sublime and the real. Even when her...