Animate Surrealism Anne Whitehouse (bio) Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists Roberto Ransom Daniel Shapiro, trans. Swan Isle Press www.swanislepress.com/intro.html 180 Pages; Print, $20.00 The stories in Roberto Ransom’s Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists recall the fantastical fictions of Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, where mythic strangeness converges with psychological reality to create a richly allusive narrative context. In Cortázar’s “Axolotl,” the narrator is so obsessed with watching the axolotls, a type of Mexican salamander, in Paris’ Jardin des Plantes that he is transformed into one himself. “Lizard à la Heart,” the first story in Ransom’s collection, shares the humid atmosphere of the Cortázar story, now located in the narrator’s own house in Mexico. The narrator describes how a baby Egyptian crocodile that she purchased at a pet store grows up to terrorize her family. At first, they try to flush the crocodile down the toilet like the legendary alligators that are said to exist in the New York City sewer system, but the reptile returns and takes over the bathroom. They lock it in, but its weeping, threats, and moans from behind the closed door beleaguer the family until the son enters. The crocodile tears him to pieces. The father goes in search of his son and meets a similar fate. The narrator, now bereft of her family, imagines her son existing in a parallel universe, milking snake venom in a bayou. With the growing conviction that she will meet a similar end, her abhorrence transforms into desire, and the story concludes with her strange love letter to the monster, imagining a death embrace: So many times I was about to kill you and trying to find the cruelest way to do it. You heard my reproaches and curses. I’m looking for my husband and son, I feel their presence and nearness. Sometimes I feel we’ve been lucky to know you. You’ve brought us to ruin. Do you think you could have brought us to any other end?... The moment I want to hold your snout closed, I’ll know that my life is over. I ask this of you. Let it slip through my hands. Take me by the waist and submerge with me. Seduced by the executive secretary at a company picnic, Pedro, its star salesman, falls precipitously into a pit and disappears in “Snakes and Ladders.” Pedro’s seducer flees, abandoning him. The pit opens without warning, hijacking the narrative and swallowing its main character. Rumors circulate in his absence. The aborted narrative and subsequent rumors are inherited by Pedro’s successor, who takes over as narrator, linking what he knows of his predecessor to memories of sexual arousal from his childhood. The narrator of “Toad’s Visits” is a boy whose mother is afflicted by depression that visits her when she is not writing. She says it turns her into a toad. Her son pictures an enchanted toad, who transforms the princess into a toad with his kiss. The boy’s concern and anxiety about his mother grows, as well as his ambivalence towards his father, who commits his wife to an institution for treatment. Eventually, the toad is defeated, and his mother returns, diminished but no longer out of her mind. The boy’s perceptive awareness of the loss that comes with the cure gives this story its poignancy. In “Three Figures and a Dog” a nameless Italian medieval artist, commissioned to paint a fresco in a chapel, annoys the abbot, his patron, by spending days in inactivity, waiting for inspiration. “It’s not the craft that I’m waiting for, but a certain color. Once I have the color, the figures will simply appear,” he explains to the abbot, who replies indignantly, “The background means more than the figures to you? Who’s ever heard such nonsense!” The abbot instructs the artist to close his eyes and look into his heart: “The images will come to you from here.” Months pass in which the artist stubbornly waits for his vision. One day inspiration comes when a small dog appears on the bridge to accompany him to...