“The young turf-cutter fell hard for his first girlfriend while operating heavy machinery in the peatlands. His name was Cillian Eddowis, he was fifteen years old, and he was illegally employed by Bos Ardee.”
AN INTRODUCTION BY ANTONIO AIELLO
his spring, as part of the World Voices Festival of International Literature, PEN asked prominent writers from around the world to write and then perform short pieces that explore the power of prayer and meditation as experienced in our post-millennial, technological, and increasingly agnostic or fanatical age. Among those pieces was Rachel Kushner’s “The Sacred Family,” a beautifully crafted story that reads like one man’s unintended meditation on God, freedom, mercy, and prayer as a kind of existential confession.
The story opens with the protagonist, Hauser, on leave and wandering toward La Sagrada Família, Gaudi’s “masterpiece of ridiculous splendor,” alone among throngs of tourists, stuck on the Christian belief that freedom is tied to God. “He understood the idea. God created man as something free, a being with a purity of freedom, so-called.” Hauser’s students are all LWOP, life without parole, and “well beyond the moment, the act, that had shifted their life to a punishment that would go on forever.” They are in varying states of acceptance, except Diana, the youngest, who “still doesn’t have the maturity to grasp that she will never leave.” A sense of helplessness permeates the prose as Hauser tries to make sense of the evil in the world, and not the evil of his students. “Twenty, thirty, forty years, is a long time to consider your life. But instead of self-revelation, they were meant to achieve only living death, and then one day, be carried out with a state-issue cloth over the face.”
The real power of Kushner’s piece—and the reason I feel so strongly about recommending it—lies in the layers of narrative complexity that emerge as she explores the contradictions of God, faith, and the power structures that give and take away freedom and mercy. With casual references to Jean Genet, Frans Hals, and Pasolini, Kushner deepens the internal conflict of her characters and the bigger issues at stake, primarily the meaning of freedom in a country that boasts about being the land of the free, but has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The story was first partially published in the chapbook The PEN World Voices Book of Prayer and Meditation, a companion piece to the 2015 Festival.
Antonio Aiello
Content Director and Web Editor, PEN America Center
He understood the idea. God created man as something free, a being with a purity of freedom, so-called. And as Lieutenant Garcia liked to say, a fool and his freedom are soon parted. The original joke was about money, of course, a fool and his money. The idea as Hauser understood it was that if God had created man as a being who lived a perfect, untroubled existence, that would mean freedom was banished. Man would not be free if his life could not be ruined. If he could not ruin his own life, God had designed him in chains.
Hauser himself considered God a not-there. Religion to him was culture, references in art and literature. But working in a women’s prison, he adapted himself to the idea that no one inside its walls did not believe in God. This was not because to be in prison was to be closer to God. The opposite. You were abandoned there, by the world, and God seemed also to have forgotten you. You maintained your opening to him through need. You got a choice inside, King James or International, which the women called “the easy version.”
He didn’t want them knowing his first name. That was the shield he held up to protect himself. The last name was on his staff ID, which he wore pinned to his shirt. It read “G. Hauser,” but the G. was his secret from them, these women he taught, all of them LWOP, life without parole, including his newest student Diana, who spoke in a breathy and elegant whisper and knew she was beautiful and told him they had forced her confession at fourteen with no lawyer or guardian present. Growing up, she told him, her father locked her in a bedroom for weeks at a time, and instead of allowing her out to use the toilet he threw disposable diapers through the door. That was when she was twelve. When she was thirteen. At fourteen, she was an adult, or at least tried as one in a court of law.
Some of them told Hauser everything. They were well beyond the moment, the act, that had shifted their life to punishment that would go on forever. Forever, for each person, lasts precisely up to the moment they die. No one should die in prison, he knew. Twenty, thirty, forty years, is a long time to consider your life. But instead of self-revelation, they were meant to achieve only living death, and then one day, be carried out with a state-issue cloth over the face. The younger ones could not understand Life Without Parole. It takes maturity to grasp that you will not leave. Diana was trying to find a way out, using that breathy grace on him. Who wouldn’t, in her position. She had left parts of the story vague. It was considered impolite to wonder what someone had done, to ask, to be curious. And yet it was a curiosity for truth. But maybe, Hauser considered, maybe the truth itself is obscene.
Of course it was, and he avoided it for as long as he could. But her large eyes, a lost look, stained in even on his vacation. The women would all die there and that fact alone kept them in his thoughts as he wandered Barcelona and remembered, while he did, how dreary tourism was. How you saw the things that the other tourists saw and shared your experience with them, fellow outsiders, except you remained solitary, among strangers, and you all watched one another not have a genuine experience. That was his sentiment, as he walked toward the thing, the Sagrada Família, in all its tacky magnificence, the scaffolding and cranes like ladders to God, and this added to its grandeur, that it could not be finished. He fixed on a column that crushed into the back of a tortoise, as if the column on its back were part of the gravity that allowed the tortoise’s head to emerge from its shell. A girl told Hauser the place was only open one more hour. He said fine, it’s enough time, and bought his ticket.
He had been reading Genet on this trip, and in thinking of Genet sauntering along La Rambla and into the Barrio Chino, Hauser felt less inauthentic and alone. Genet embroidered sacred joy over abject states of existence. To Genet the colors and roughness of prison clothing were reminiscent of the fuzzy petals of certain flowers. Genet wrote that theft was a hard, pure, luminous act, which only a diamond could symbolize. He said handcuffs shone like jewelry. Jewels and jewelry and flowers.
Hauser had read a little of it every night, but the night before this day, visiting Gaudi’s cathedral, he had ruined himself instead. Maybe it was the safety of a hotel room far away, but one night Hauser searched on the Internet. He found so easily, as terrible acts are often marked by ease, what young, pretty Diana had done. Now he knew, and his mind felt like those metal grates in the public toilet stalls Genet described, corroded by hot piss. Evil trickled down over his thoughts. But it was not her evil, even as what she had done was bewildering. What she had said to Hauser was that something went wrong. Something went wrong.
God in prison was the single thing they wouldn’t revoke, you could end up naked in the Secure Housing Unit but they would never take away your right to pray. Only God cared about the women, which meant no one cared about them. Because God was not a person but something outside the world even for those who believed in him, and what Hauser meant by care was not God’s love. He meant human care and these women had none.
New fiction from Rachel Kushner, two-time Finalist for the National Book Award.
Hmmm. Maybe Kenny Cosgrove made the right choice to go with Dow Chemical…
Shelley Jackson continues her story “Snow,” published via Instagram and written one word at a time (weather permitting).
Phil Klay’s debut story collection REDEPLOYMENT has been named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014.
National Book Award Winner Flannery O'Conner reads her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find" at Vanderbilt University in 1959. Here are Parts 2 and 3. (via Mental Floss)
The Telegraph features National Book Foundation writers Karen Russell, George Saunders, Molly Antopol, Shirley Jackson, Jess Walter, and Lydia Davis in their article about why “the short story is the perfect literary form for the 21st century:” Read on.
Photo credit: Ania Wawrzkowicz
The real snoring hit with abrupt ferocity. The orderly, mechanical regularity of the metalworking shop had been abandoned. Now it was more like a pack of wolves snarling over a kill. I closed my eyes. On my mental screen I saw lions driving the wolves — or hyenas, maybe — into the veld. On a hill overlooking the bloody feast, a baboon whooped.
A new short story by National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich has, among other things, some very evocative descriptions of snoring.
More book news here.
(via nprbooks)
“For me, seven years is fast. Most of my pieces have taken ten to twelve years from the time of the initial impulse to the day I abandon them, and I’ve gone as long as twenty-five years.”
The New Yorker interviews Denis Johnson. Listen to the author read his story “Hippies” here, and listen to Wallace Shawn read an excerpt from “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking” here.
#NBAwards Winner Denis Johnson has a new short story in this week’s New Yorker.
Urban Outfitters speaks with Jaime Hernandez about the illustrated THIS HIS HOW YOU LOSE HER for their blog.
Jaime Hernandez, an illustrator from Los Angeles, is best known for his comic book series Love and Rockets. The series, which Hernandez writes and illustrates with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary and continues to be a mainstay in the alternative comic movement. Last fall Hernandez teamed up with Riverhead Books to illustrate Junot Diaz’s book This Is How You Lose Her, a heartbreaking and tender collection of stories from Diaz that celebrates and laments his character Yunior’s relationships with the women in his life. We were lucky enough to talk to Hernandez from his home in Los Angeles about illustrating and writing female characters.
Read more: http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/blog/fine_print_jaime_hernandez
National book award winner Ellen Gilchrist’s 1st short story collection in 8 years out on 4/8
A book can tell a kind of uber-story, in addition to the ones being told by the individual stories. And my experience has been that once you figure out which stories are in the book, there is an optimal order—or at least a good order—that will serve to make that uber-story more clear, and to make the book more than the sum of its parts—in other words, the book can be saying and doing things you couldn’t have predicted or planned at the outset. And it can be saying and doing things that, even when the book is done, you can’t quite specify or enumerate. That would be the goal I think: an irreducible language object.
George Saunders (via superstitionrev)
2013 #nbaward Finalist for the National Book Award
alwaysbringabookwithyou
all-these-paperback-dreams
Barnes and Nobles is gonna start serving food and alcohol.
Everybody’s cracking jokes about how it’s a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of Amazon.
But you know what? Props to them. This is exactly what Blockbuster didn’t do. At no point was Blockbuster like “Hey, movie rentals aren’t the lucrative enterprise they once were. Perhaps it’s time we become known for our cheesy garlic bread.”
that’s a fantastic plan, honestly? i would 100% go sit at a bookshop, buy a glass of wine, and pick up the newest biography. 50/50 i’d decide to buy it after a couple chapters, and even if i don’t, that’s still money i spent at B&N!
They could host book clubs with food and drinks where one of the employees shares their experiences with a book of their choice and tries to convince the guests to buy it.
Barnes and noble realizing the only reason people go to brick and mortar stores is for the experience and access to an enjoyable physical space they can socialize in (sure isnt for the price) and capitalizing on that is a stroke of genius and a really refreshing approach to the dilemma of competing with online stores
