Arbitrary Tales

Daniel Borzutzky

Triple Press, 129 pages

$15.28

There's nothing arbitrary about Daniel Borzutzky's humbly named Tales. To the contrary: The fragmented writings and combinatorial texts that compose this slim, tight collection are calculated machines that you don't necessarily read-they penetrate your eyes with surgical precision, only to surface with interstitial artifacts and embedded archetypes they then retool into extraordinary and extraordinarily modern fables.

In How We Celebrate the Arrival of Spring, Borzutzky proclaims, "Our instincts get us nowhere, and the only way we can reach our destination is by failing and failing over and over again until finally we come upon the right spot." Borzutzky himself may fumble in fits and starts, sometimes sputtering under warped self-imposed constraints, or in his bouts of realism occasioned so as not to disenfranchise the reader, but as a whole his collage-y expressions become a formidable juggernaut, a "collection" as opposed to "stories" that appropriates elements of morphology, mythology, etymology, entomology, regeneration, numerology, copulation, field sports, taxonomy and other illogical methodologies into one fantastical hybrid beast.

Although Borzutzky's brute voice is mindfully and often skillfully detached from his narratives, his South American pedigree (his parents are Chilean Jews who emigrated to New York) shows through in passages of magical realism and nods to the likes of Manuel Puig. But like his near-contemporary George Saunders, Borzutzky's stories are timeless, and often reminiscent of the work of elders like Jonathan Swift, Edwin Abbott or even the Brothers Grimm.

Throughout, Borzutzky's narrative role is as rogue arbitrator. Many of these fictions consist of ingeniously contrived, convoluted protocols, descriptions of involved rituals and reenactments. In "War," the engagement rules for a battle are laid out, in which the "battle is not one of fighting but of mathematics," and the precise regulations are to be enforced by snake charmers who are more accurately unemployed snake charmers, since all the snakes in this set-piece village had long since been wiped out.

Within the wonderful book as a whole, within each tale, and even within each sentence, Borzutzky's beautiful language evolves recursively, and hemorrhages holistically, all to further its transmission of the laws hidden behind primordial truths.

-Derek White