The Underside Of Stones

by George Szanto

In the first book of Szantos trilogy, a Canadian lives a year in a Mexican village and finds his life and beliefs progressively subverted and reconstituted.

Genres: Fiction

306 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Szanto's story cycle, "The Underside of Stones," is without doubt the best book I have read in years. The writing is not pretentious but is clear, accessible, simple, beautiful. The stories immediately draw the reader in to occupy a room near the beer-filled refrigerator of the main character's rented casa and follow him throughout his travels, conversations, experiences, and wonderment during his 10-month stay in Mexico.

I'm beginning to understand that wonderment is a many-petalled rose. There is wonderment at the conception, gestation, birth, and multi-faceted growth of a child. Experienced by the majority of the population, this type of wonder may be found on the outer petals of the rose. Moving gradually inward, we experience awe when viewing the starry heavens and the physical universe. There are the gasped-at lightbulb moments during the path of education. We shake our heads in amazement at the ingenuity of ancient civilizations' construction prowess. We are moved to tears at the timeless beauty and tangible emotion of Michelangelo's Pieta. But there are smaller petals of wonderment, those found discovering layers in things that appear simple on the surface.

Szanto's narrator, Jorge, a version of the author himself, perhaps, experiences wonderment by means of the supposedly simple rural (akin to urban) legends personified in the characters who populate the story cycle which takes place in his fictional town of Michoaquaro, Mexico. Coming from a world of Norteamericano logic and rationality, where it would be easy to dismiss the sights and stories as figments of imagination, Jorge encounters leaks between, not quite mythology, but folklore, and what he had long perceived as reality. His sense of wonderment at what lies in the slippage between both worlds rubs off on the reader, who begins to question his or her own grasp on what the word reality really means in Michoaquaro: a randomly appearing, sidewalk sweeping, talking dead man; a woman with two heads; a man with many more than five senses, two wives, and a massive urban - sorry, rural - legend in his own right; several long-dead people living, one at a time, inside a statue; tales of mythic beasts; too-serendipitous-to-be-so outworkings of plans and schemes - so many more things. Have the beer, tequila, and pulque so addled Jorge's brain that he accepts the stories he hears and sees? Even if so, the reader has not been drinking along yet is pulled along with Jorge's sense of wonderment, an almost childlike naivety that does not understand yet does not judge what goes on in this liminal space of - what? Reality and sub-reality? Fact and fiction? Sense and nonsense?

I propose that this is folkloric space, space where anything can happen. To reiterate, in my mind, it is not quite mythology, which tends to be large and grandiose. I'm thinking of the much larger-than-life Greek and Roman and Egyptian gods of antiquity and the legends that surround them.

One basal similarity between the mythical gods of old and folkloric Michoaquaro is the local cultural acceptance of the stories and scenarios. The most significant difference between the two to this reader, however, is that the ancient Eastern mythologies and cultures are easily identified as completely foreign, defunct, dismissed as relics of the past, while Michoaquaro, though fictional, is in a location that, in the age of technology, communication, and global travel, is familiar, not so foreign, and is part of our present.

A sense of wonderment arises from so many directions when reading this story cycle: how can these beliefs still exist in a modern world? Yet presented by a man from our own rational world who has seen the things he has seen, experienced what he has experienced, how can the stories be untrue? At what point do we stop being credulous? How can we slide into folkloric space to find out for ourselves what sort of metareality exists? Jorge offers no solutions to these questions, including what conclusions he may have reached about the existence of folkloric space as a real thing. But by the end of this first book in a set of three, he has one foot balanced precariously in each world, that of rationality and that of folkloric possibility. By choosing to accept one and dismiss the other, are we cutting off our nose to spite our face? Are the two worlds mutually exclusive? Or can they cohabit peacefully? The not knowing, the precarious balance is intriguing. I am at the centre of the rose of wonderment and am unsure which step to take, curious as to whether I will fall into an as-yet undefined chasm of possibility. Perhaps the second book in the series will, like a literary can-opener, pry open folkloric space to let this reader in.