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Friday May 25, 2007

Bleak themes overwhelm collection’s strengths

by adina kletter
correspondent

If you are looking for a light, amusing read, Tamar Yellin’s new collection of 13 short stories, “Kafka in Brontëland,” would not be it. Yellin writes with lyric prose, fluidly portraying characters and their stories with careful word choice and deliberate writing — but the collection as a whole is hopelessly gloomy.

When she is presenting a character who has lost all hope, reason, and/or will to survive (and most of them seem to fit into one of these categories), her words take on a deterministic quality, lacking energy, enthusiasm, desire, hope, and life. While quite effective for conveying the message along with the mood, the tone of this collection of stories is more likely to depress than uplift.

These characters are not really people with whom one would want to spend much more time than the length of a short story — unless they showed more potential for development.

The themes seem to run together after a while: death, depression, loneliness, despair, thwarted and unfulfilled dreams, hopeless survival. Perhaps next time Yellin will write more stories of exploration and discovery, dreams (and people) that are not so thoroughly broken.

Yellin reveals details slowly, exposing the layers like peeling paint from a derelict building. This technique works with varying degrees of success. For example, the reader usually likes to know details such as approximate age and gender of the protagonist or narrator before the third page of a story.

Most stories have an episodic quality, with multiple leaps in time and space. The effect can be disorienting and distracting, especially within stories of such short length.

The first story, “Return to Zion,” tells of a modern day Odysseus whose experiences parallel those of the “Odyssey” character. But the repeated emphasis on the similarities with Greek mythology weakens this otherwise powerful and at times poignant story. Simply naming the protagonist Odysseus would have been enough — his wife and son do not need to share their names with the myth’s tragic heroes as well.

The titular story, “Kafka in Brontëland,” explores Jewish identity in Brontë’s brooding landscape of the English moors via a patchwork of images, musings and snippets of action and dialogue.

Family and identity are common themes, as in “The Other Mr. Perella,” about a lonely man looking for family via the phonebook. Yellin raises interesting questions as to the nature of identity — the unique characteristics that define an individual who is paradoxically defined by a common or shared name. As one character says, “What nonsense, you know exactly who you are … Stop looking for evidence that you’re someone else.”

Yellin continues her examination of familial relationships in “Uncle Oswald.” Her descriptions are crisp and pointed, targeting family feuds with ironic humor. Yet ultimately, the family matters despite disagreements and differences. We contain parts of our relatives, whether we like it or not. Yellin also confronts the power and necessity of forgiveness, and the stubborn, festering dissatisfaction that precludes it.

“Moonlight” is both a departure from the previous relationship stories and a general commentary on human existence. The protagonist, an art critic, struggles with interpreting paintings, declaring, “The philistine hunts for meaning in an act whose very performance is a cry for meaning.” He seeks out a particular artist’s work to “re-enter the labyrinth; once more I am standing in the moonlight of his endless dream. I am as lost as he is.”

Perhaps that statement captures a universal theme in her collection of stories: we are all lost, wandering souls, some adapting (however temporarily) better than others, or at least appearing to, but nevertheless remaining lost and lonely, convinced that we are alone in our suffering. How much easier it must be for those who can openly acknowledge and share their pain.

Yellin conveys the dichotomy of human existence and tsuris: that we are both part of a community and alone at the same time. Family, relationships and the dependencies that lead to healthy or (usually) unhealthy relationships plague the various characters in this collection.

In small doses, Yellin’s careful, succinct writing can be appreciated, but the bleakness of the collection can overwhelm the dark beauty of her language.

“Kafka in Brontëland” by Tamar Yellin (250 pages, Toby Press, $14.95)

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