Novelists by C. P. Boyko

Author:C. P. Boyko
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Novelists: the soul of an age, certainly. Brilliant? Perhaps. Yet aren’t they also doddering, petulant, pedantic, knockkneed, skittish, and thunderingly insecure—resentful, awkward, annoying—demanding, deluded, and vexingly indifferent to reality? New from short fiction devotée C.P. Boyko, Novelists is a comedy of manners (and manuscripts), rivalling Vanity Fair for its satirical wit… though not, mercifully, for its length.
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2014-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

SHE STAGGERED THROUGH the narrow streets with her head thrown back and her eyes peeled open, drinking in the strange sights and sounds like a clean page absorbing ink. She paused occasionally to siphon some of these impressions into her notebook, her lips fluttering slightly as she translated her raw perceptions into prose. Each afternoon, back at the albergo, she refined and expanded these jottings into long letters home to her husband, which she posted in the mailbox across the street with the gravity of a woman making a deposit at the bank. When she returned home to North Carolina, she intended to mine these letters for material for her next novel. It was to be called Italy.

Katherine had been in Italy only two and a half days and already she had collected an incredible assortment of material. She had seen an old woman spitting off a balcony into the hair of an unwitting vendor below. She had seen a boy riding a bicycle that was much too large for him, so that his feet reached the pedals only at their apex. She had seen garbage; never before had she seen so much garbage: in alleyways, in the gutters, in cracks and corners like drifted snow. She had seen little boys pissing in the street—into the street, with their backs to a wall. She had seen Coca-Cola served in plastic bags. She had seen very small cats—not kittens, but fully grown cats in miniature. She had seen a dead dog lying undisturbed in the street, strangely black and mummified, as if it had been sun-dried before it could decompose. She had seen a fat man, shirtless but wearing black pants, socks, and shoes, seated on a rocking chair in the middle of a bustling market and apparently asleep. She had seen a man watering a dirt road with a garden hose. She had seen a man in some kind of military uniform holding a rifle under one arm and a baby in the other.

And she had captured all these astonishing things in her notebook, preserving them in noun phrases, as if they were found objects: “That Italians at bus stops crane their necks out into the street to see if the bus is coming.” “That in an otherwise empty restaurant, the Italian waitress insists on seating you next to the only other patrons.” “That Italian dogs will like any face.” Truly, Italy was unlike any other country in the world.

And the Italians were unlike any other people in the world. Never had she encountered, never had she imagined such friendliness. Everywhere she went, the locals stared, smiled, waved, or shouted “buongiorno!” Hostesses stationed outside restaurants asked when she had last eaten; grocers stuffed her pockets with oranges, for which they charged her a “very special price”; passing taxi drivers hailed her, and expressed concern for her feet. One morning a shopkeeper had come running out of his shop to ask her where she was going. Katherine, by making

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