Bessarabian Stamps by Oleg Woolf

Abstract

European metropolis atop a map of Mexico ’s capital. Spatial and temporal confusion ensues as Arturo explores his own psyche; the protagonist mixes up other characters and becomes involved—like Luis—in Mexico City’s violent and sordid demimonde. During Arturo’s psychological journey of self-discovery—recounted in chapters that oftentimes alternate settings (Mexico City and Paris) but ultimately end up admixing locales—Wong mines liberally from surrealism. Thus Arturo takes to the streets of both cities like a Benjaminian flâneur , where he steels himself for the tritest bits of mass culture (sensationalist tabloids, lucha libre matches), even while sleeping with a prostitute and waxing poetic about a woman he’s never met—the suggestively named Nadia. Wong does not conceal his indebtedness to surrealism. The author explicitly engages André Breton’s Nadja (1928) as well as Julio Cortázar’s short story from 1966, “El otro cielo” (“The Other Heaven”), which also examines a protagonist’s dialectic consciousness stretched tautly across two shores. Like the surrealists, Wong’s interest in the spectacle, savagery, and even eroticism of public violence can ultimately be traced back to Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. In the novel’s final scene, we see the would-be assailant, Luis, cajole Arturo to burn down his (Arturo’s) childhood apartment. The conclusion offers a purifying vision of destruction: only by channeling memories properly, decathecting from past pain, and accepting the crippling contingency of the everyday can individuals transcend the ordinary. Indeed, the conclusion intimates Breton’s caustic, pithy pronouncement from his Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” Wong’s bright prose attempts to break with the political corruption and intense violence that hang over Mexico like smog. Like the surrealists, Wong, too, suggests that literature can be transgressive. Kevin M. Anzzolin Wheaton College Oleg Woolf. Bessarabian Stamps. Boris Dralyuk, tr. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2015. isbn 9781939419286 The poetic proclivity of Moldovan-born Oleg Woolf is everywhere present in his Bessarabian Stamps, a prose work written in a lyrical style, unrestrained in its use of alliteration and allegory (see WLT, Nov. 2011, 52). The book consists of sixteen darkly whimsical “stamps” (most of which are nearly short enough to fit on the back of a postcard) that feel more akin to fables than short stories, each one joined to the next through common characters and thematic concerns rather than storyline or chronology. While the colorful residents of the Moldovan village of Sănduleni are central to these stories, each remains largely inscrutable. In lieu of standard character development, Woolf details their superficial traits—physical features, occupations, and habits. The clairvoyant Feodasi, with eyes each a different shade of blue, is consulted for advice “as a soothsayer, interpreter, and miracle worker . . . or just in case.” Day after day he sits under a plum tree rereading a treatise on the role of birds in Odessan seafaring. Like the other villagers, Feodasi’s thoughts and feelings remain intentionally obscured, which makes reading Bessarabian Stamps a bit like viewing the negative of a photograph—the negative’s inverted exposure obscures those very parts of the image that would facilitate recognition and understanding of it. There is an uninhibited joy in Woolf’s writing, and translator Boris Dralyuk impresses with his ability to capture this quality in translation. Invented words are playfully scattered about: “morning’s morninger than evening; . . . . details were separated from the happenchaff along with the wheat”; as are sensory-laden descriptions : stars that “burst, crunched, and crackled over Sănduleni, like a barrel of fermented cucumbers”; and a tempestuous bride who is “like an apple orchard in a May thunderstorm.” Woolf cleverly pairs opposing concepts to convey ironies that are absurd and at the same time hold traces of meaning: “Ever since he grew fat, he’s lost a little weight, and when we meet him, he might tell us that the ailment’s primary symptom is death; and, [t]he firstborn had entered the world so old that knowledgeable people, shaking their heads, tried to...