Dressed to impress

The Wild Grass and Other Stories by Davin Malasarn

I am greedy. When it comes to art and its many forms, I always want more.

There’s my penchant for Sanjay L. Bhansali movies. SLB is a Bollywood director who makes sentimental movies with cinematography so excessively lush, “an orgy for the eyes” becomes an understatement. Every scene in a Bhansali movie is hyper realized, the light is always as it would be in a perfect sky, skirts billow as they would in a perfect breeze, color is pornographic in intensity. One laments not watching these movies in equally decadent surroundings, say sitting on a bed of warm breasts while being fed slices of panda kidney.

This, it turns out, is also how I like my prose. Lush, lavish, lyrical and unashamedly seductive.  Metaphors coiling about metaphors coiling until my chest is tight and I have no choice but to succumb to the dream. And if Bhansali has a literary equal when it comes to seduction by sensory overload, it is most definitely Arundhati Roy (what is it about India?), author of one my favorite books, The God of Small Things.

A side effect of seduction by sensory overload is length. It takes time to seduce in this manner, every sense must be attended, slowly stolen from reality until the real world is lulled into slumber and the story world takes over.

It’s no surprise that I’ve never watched a short film or read a pure collection of short stories (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas being a bastard child of both the short and long forms).

I bring up all this to illustrate how different from my taste and experience Davin Malasarn’s collection of shorts, The Wild Grass and Other Stories, truly is.

There’s the writing; which is remarkable for its grace and lightness.  Prose moves across the page with the grace and precision of a ballerina. She leaps -the petite jete - she lands and at the spot where her feet touch the stage, a word appears on the page. She leaps and lands. Another word on the page and so on.  One reads a word and then the next and the next, and each is liberating.

One of the stories in the collection, The Center of Attention, is about a TV crew filming a small child (Elliot)grown large for his age, we sense unknown trauma when the unwilling mother leads the child away into her bedroom and begs the crew to leave. They need twenty more minutes of footage. The author writes.

“She stepped back and the crew went into the bedroom. They tried to open the door but Elliot was pushing hard from the other side to keep it closed.

‘Let them in please, Elliot,’ Molly said.

The boy continued to push against the door, and for a moment Molly prayed for the giant inside him.”

The last sentence in the excerpt above (which is also the last sentence of the story) is painful in its precision.  No images, allusion or connections interfere with the clarity gained in that last phrase. It is a feat heavy prose finds difficult to achieve.

In no way does the lightness of the prose preclude the proper expression of what makes us human. The author has an uncanny ability to take little moments and to spread them across the expanse of a lifetime. We see these moments, and we know that while they are single points in time, they are also stand ins for many other moments of equal joy, surprise, sorrow and helplessness.

Speaking of helplessness, the first story in the collection, The Burning Girl, filled me with a sense of unease and helpless horror that come pouring back each time I read it. The story is about a child undergoing a bizarre Buddhist ritual and it underscores on of the many strengths of the collection, variety. The stories veer from Buddhist rituals to small villages in Thailand to mines in Brazil to magic realist law firm in Manhattan. Characters range from small children to those nearly in the next world. The collection feels large and welcoming as a result.

Dolores is by far my favorite story in the collection. In it, the author captures the poignancy and harshness of young love. How strange and wonderful it can be and how easily the tides of life can sweep it away. The author writes in second person, and it is very very well done. He writes.

“With her hand held in your trembling hand, you will go down on one knew as if you were about to propose, but instead you will only be able to apologize, head down and crying, hating yourself for reasons you don’t understand.”

Many of the stories in the collection are just three pages long and the whole collection is just 91 pages. This length works for the lightness of the prose and the tight focus of the stories. If seduction by sensory overload creates insight and feeling — builds the house of meaning so to speak — by the accumulation of connections and images, Mr. Malasarn’s prose builds the same house through the avoidance of all those very things so that only what is essential remains.

The insight or clarity gained at the end of a few of the stories fade quickly from the mind, most likely because they fail to achieve the necessary weight and import to sink slowly through ones thoughts. At times, I finished one or two stories thinking they were very good but then couldn’t remember what they were about the two stories later. Now this may very well be a symptom of the short story form which means I lay an unfair burden on the collection’s shoulders.

The collection is self-published but you’d never be able to tell by looking at it. The cover is excellent, with a very classic feel and images that tie in neatly with the stories. The copyediting is also top notch and I noticed a single typo in the whole collection. Formatting was as good as I’ve seen on any other eBook. Self-published authors would do good to pay attention to Mr. Malasarn’s production efforts on this novel. No less is acceptable.

“I don’t have to be greedy. The house of meaning can be built in many ways. This moment is but a stand in for countless others. The kiss, the cut of the epiphany are not far away. Girls called Dolores are always…”

These are but a few of the lessons I take from this collection both as a reader and a writer. Mr. Malasarn has compressed many moments, many thoughts, many lifetimes into The Wild Grass and Other Stories. Read it and disfcover what you will within.

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