The stories in this collection were created by two people: The me who watches and the me who writes.
Both of these creatures inside myself have lived under one sign, which has hung over my typewriter for seventy years: Don’t think, do.
I haven’t thought about any of these stories; they are explosions or impulses. Sometimes they are big explosions of ideas that cannot be resisted, sometimes small impulses coaxed to grow.
* * *
So here you are with the works of the two people living inside my skin. Some may surprise you. And that is good. Many of them surprised me when they came to me and asked to be born. I hope you enjoy them. Don’t think about them too much. Just try to love them as I love them.
- from the Introduction
We’ll Always Have Paris
4/5 stars
If it’s futile to strive for objectivity in reviewing any book, it’s doubly futile when the book in question is by Ray Bradbury. Chronicles twice in a row blew my mind at age nine, then Fahrenheit, Something Wicked, R is for Rocket, S is for Space and so forth kinda chronologically, Death is a Lonely Business, some plays and poems and Zen and the Art of Writing shy of catching up to Bradbury by the end of the 20th century. It’s safe to say that Bradbury has inspired me to a degree and in a basic way few other fiction writers have, but I long ago realized what I dig most about his stuff is only partly the rhythms of his prose (which stumble onto their faces at least once per story, even the best ones), only partly the concepts (which range, by story, from awesome to pretty lame), but mainly the goofy enthusiasm that suffuses even his creepiest and most melancholy stuff, conveyed (and often as not undermined) by gollygeewhizdamn ejaculation-prone characters (Bradbury, to my knowledge, has never written a genuine sex scene – anybody?) and, more to the point, sensorium-bursting evocations of the stuff happening around them in dynamic, living environments.
For what it’s worth, I felt that weird fire blazing from all 21 stories (there’s also the introduction and a poem) of this new collection. The few I thought were outstanding in terms of concept and execution were “The Visit,” “Arrival and Departure”, “A Literary Encounter”, “If Paths Must Cross Again” (though this otherwise lovely story has some errata it blows my mind nobody at HarperCollins picked up on: a diner called “Mick’s” on pg. 190 has become “Mike’s” by the bottom of the page, and remains so), “Pater Caninus” (Bradbury writes, as ever, charmingly of priests and dogs [I dare say, from experience, even if you're a heathenistic cat person]), and a Mars story, “Fly Away Home”. Here’s a bit, though, from my (and Bradbury’s) favorite in this collection, a story about a guy he used to know called “Massinello Pietro”:
And he saw all the faces, the looking faces. And he saw the silent houses, with their silent people. And, in his singing, he wondered why he was the last one singing in the world. Why did no one else dance, open mouths, wink, strut, flourish? Why was the world a silent world, silent housed, silent faced? Why were all the people watching people instead of dancing people? Why were they all spectators and only he the performer? What had they forgotten that he always and always remembered? Their houses, small and locked and silent, soundless. His house, his Manger, his shop, different! Filled with squeaks and stirs and mutters of bird sound, filled with feather whisper and murmurings of pad and fur and the sound that animal eyelids make blinking in the dark. His house, ablaze with votive candles and pictures of rising – flying – saints, the glint of medallions. His phonograph circling at midnight, two, three, four in the morning, himself singing, mouth wide, heart open, eyes tight, world shut out; nothing but sound. And here he was now among the houses that locked at nine, slept at ten, wakened only from long silenced hours of slumber in the morn. People in houses, lacking only black wreaths on door fronts.
Sometimes, when he ran by, people remembered for a moment. Sometimes they squeaked a note or two, or tapped their feet, self-consciously, but most of the time the only motion they made to the music was to reach in their pockets for a dime.
Bradbury can still pull rabbits from his hat, just not as many, not as quickly, which is what it is (dude is pushing 90), but the rabbits that do pop up in this collection are fun to watch manically gambol through fields of adjectives… if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing.
We’ll Always Have Paris is available at the Carnegie Library.
Happy reading and cuídate.