Stephen Sherrill's THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK

A pervading weary hopelessness threatens every page of this novel, and no surprise; it's hard to imagine anyone having a carefree and cheerful experience of life on the lowest levels of working class society in the rural U.S. South, even if they are millennia-old beings from Greek mythology who are inexplicably stuck there. This seemed to me like weirdly unpromising material on which to construct a novel, but in The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Stephen Sherrill not only makes it work but makes of it an affecting, relatable and only occasionally shocking novel (and it's never shocking for obvious reasons; the low-hanging fruit, here, remains dangling off the tree) that I'm very glad I took a chance on when I stumbled across it in the available selections in the Kobo+ subscription listing.

Told from the perspective of the titular Minotaur -- and yes, this is the very same bull-headed man stashed away in Daedalus' labyrinth on ancient Crete, who somehow survived his encounter with Theseus and just kept on living and acquiring useful skills despite his bilateral vision, vast, sharp and heavy horns, and terrifying appearance -- our story begins where most of it takes place, in a not-quite town in the Piedmont area of South Carolina, where M* has turned up driving a decades-old Chevy Vega he has maintained himself and in need of a new place to live and a new job. He finds both, at first, at a small and decidedly podunk backwoods trailer park run by a widower, Sweeney, who buys and sells old cars for what living he doesn't quite make renting out a few old mobile homes he's tried to keep habitable. M. can help with that, and swiftly reaches an agreement to trade mechanic work on whatever cars Sweeney brings home in exchange for rent on an odd, but furnished boat-shaped trailer, at least until he can find a job in a restaurant kitchen, where he has traditionally made his own nut.

The man talking to Sweeny looks up and catches the Minotaur’s eye, which leaves the Minotaur no choice. He inhales deeply, from the belly up, filling his chest. He holds his head erect, horns straight, then walks toward them.

“Morning, M,” Sweeny says.

If fear is what he hopes for, the Minotaur is disappointed. The men acknowledge his presence with little more than nods and furrowed brows. There is a noticeable sag to the Minotaur’s shoulders.

Almost never is M.'s status as an immortal and impossible mythological creature commented on by any of the novel's characters, except occasionally as an occasion for bigotry on the part of the especially ignorant, though Sherrill devotes considerable thought to what it might actually like to live in and care for such an improbable body, to which not even emergency room physicians react to as especially strange when M. shows up with the results of various kitchen accidents. M's presence in the world is all but taken for granted, as is that of what I think is a satyr, briefly encountered stampeding a herd of goats, a tired looking wood nymph playing Ms. Pac-Man between customers at a gas station. Everybody has to make a living, no matter how glamorous her former existence might have seemed.

Most of the book takes place in a popular area restaurant, where M. gets a kitchen job not long after arriving in the area. Thus not a little of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break might remind the reader of a lesser-known work by the late and much-missed Anthony Bourdain; the hierarchy of waiters and cooks and management, the dinner rushes and the kinds of bizarre mishaps that can only happen when cabbage is being sliced and dressing made on the kind of absurdly vast scales of mess halls and cafeterias and restaurants with ten gallon drums of mayonnaise and gigantic dishwashers that run in cycles of minutes and incredibly sharp and well-maintained knives are flashing everywhere. The issue of the amount of extra headspace needed when one of your cooks has a wide pair of horns swinging around every time someone calls out his name is addressed early on, but nobody knows how to accommodate the kind of blind spot that only a guy with a bovine head experiences, unable to see what's right in front of him. Nobody gives him too much hell for these things, but his very slow and laconic speech does let him in for some issues, as, for instance, when two of the less mature waiters trick him into bellowing that he's a "tit man" right when new waitress Kelly, whose breasts have already excited plenty of comment among the staff in general, that are pretty universal in spaces where diverse personalities are thrown together and forced to interact despite their differences for hours every day.

This scenario all sounds like it would be leading to some kind of dumb monster erotica, and there is a little bit of sex in the book, but the relationship that develops between M. and Kelly is sweet rather than salacious, with plenty of time given for an actual friendship to develop out of the allyship of the kitchen before things get saucy -- and misunderstandings pile up.

Meanwhile, the community of the trailer park also gets a fair amount of page time, and while a few of the characters there threaten to become stereotypes, once again, what conflicts arise are not the kind of normies versus freaks, locals versus outsider hostilities that would serve as the easy route to drama for a novelist. Instead we get to see some healthy male friendships at work, bonds formed over the brotherhood of wrenches and carburetors strengthened by shared guilt over allowing an unfortunate accident to happen (trigger warning, animal death) and a shared resignation that this might be as good as it gets. Nobody in this book is dreaming of Getting Out of This Place and Making it Big Somewhere Else. Aspirations are modest, nobody is waiting to cut down the tall poppy or pull down a crab escaping the bucket, but it's mostly because nobody is really trying to. They don't seem to resent their lot; nobody is starving or avoiding medical care because of the cost, meaning that these characters are a bit better off than a lot of the people who might read about them, but not in an unrealistic way. Weirdly, it's kind of aspirational, which I'm not sure it was when the book was first published in 2000, but 26 years later it all seems kind of nice?

I think a modern myth is what author Stephen Sherrill is going for here, and in a gentle and thoughtful way, he has achieved it. M. has a stoicism to him that isn't showy or profound; he is a quietly competent and genuinely kind and generous being, whose thousands of years of life and haunting past as a figure of terror have left him with a tremendous compassion for himself and others that is comforting to read of and lovely to see. He can fix an engine, cook and carve a prime rib (and never mind the implications there, err...), carve an apple into a swan, read and contemplate a novel and help a friend move house, just like any other person; he has just learned to carry around a drywall patch kit to effect quick repairs when his horns accidentally damage his surroundings. I think a lot of of would like to have a friend just like him.

There is a sequel, set in and published 16 years later, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time, but I don't feel any great compulsion to read it just now. I think I'll keep it around for sometime when I'm in the mood for something just a little melancholy or lonely, but don't want a great epic tragedy. We all need one of these now and then.

*Sherrill eschews the Minotaur's traditional name of Asterion, probably because how would a dude with bovine lips, teeth and tongue pronounce that, and refers to him simply as M., as does all of the novel's other characters. 

Elaine Vilar Madruga's THE TYRANNY OF FLIES (Tr by Kevin Gerry Dunn)

Elaine Vilar Madruga demands only a little of her readers, at first: we must suspend our disbelief enough to accept that an island nation's unofficial Second Family can contain a teenage daughter who is ferociously and very sexually attracted to inanimate objects; a son whose touch causes instant death, which animals as small as ants and as large as monkeys at the local zoo can sense and deeply and frantically desire, so that his own life is constantly accompanied by suicidal animals striving to make contact with him and end their miserable lives; and that it is actually the flies -- as in those annoying little flying pests that get in everywhere to fly around, buzzing, land on everything and immediately poop on it, and find a good juicy smelly food source onto or into which to lay eggs that hatch into squirmy little maggots that gross us out and then metamorphose into a new generation of flies even as their parents die and collect in the bottoms of our light bulbs, those flies -- yes, the flies that rule the world. And their will cannot ever be gainsaid, for how would they even know that you disagree?

I mean, I don't know about you, but I have believed a few, slightly more impossible things than these before breakfast. 

Welcome to The Tyranny of Flies. We've kept a seat for you, warm and soft like the gummy bears from a school bus passenger's pocket.

It takes a real woman to give birth, but it takes one hell of a real woman to admit you will never experience what other mothers do in those first hours, days, and months. Not just because the three babies you brought into this world took a big whopping shit inside of you, what the doctors inaptly call fetal distress but ought to call fecal jubilation*, the slow shattering of the mother's insides, the fetuses former home, with the foulest of substances; not just because you pumped out three kids with gargantuan heads that forced you to enlarge the epistiotomy twice, and not even that was good enough for the third, the breech birth. No, you will never get the same gratification as other mothers because, regardless of gender, each of your kids is a sick son of a bitch.

By the way, there is a third child in this family, and she is perhaps the strangest of them all. But more about Calia, still a poopy-pantsed toddler and despite this is the only one flies don't buzz around, tickle when they land, or vomit on, in a moment. First, though,  let's consider the family as a whole.

As I've already intimated, this is not a family that loves each other. The father, whom we only get to know as Papa, was an up-and-comer in a dictatorial regime, attending a public event in his splendid uniform, already decked out in a few of his ever-growing collection of medals, when he spotted a very pretty but otherwise ordinary girl who would become the family's Mama, and decided that She Would Do, would at least give him the beautiful children that his public presentation would require in order that his Importance might increase. She, being orphaned somewhat young by some truly extraordinary and bizarre circumstances that Papa might have wanted to know about before they married, but too late now, doesn't have any other prospects and so agreed to become his wife and have his children and let him take care of her and buy her pretty high-heeled shoes, and thus a family began.

By the time we meet this family, Papa and Mama have three children, daughter Cassandra (she of the ferocious sexual attraction to various inanimate objects, her passion growing with the size of the objects as she gets older, until at age 16 she is ready to declare that the love of her life is a neighborhood bridge, constructed of iron, genteel-ly rusting away, and certainly giving no indication that it does not welcome or consent to Cassandra's leering advances and eventual, uh, consummation); son Caleb (he of the deadly touch and parade of suicidal animals ever trailing in his wake) and daughter Calia, whom Mama is convinced is a reincarnation of Mama's dead aunt when Calia reveals both intense and non-verbal neurodivergence and a preternatural talent for drawing, even at just three years old, such realistic and lifelike animals that you'd swear that, on her anatomically accurate crayon illustrations of monkey's asses the perfectly rendered hairs would stir in the breeze of your breath if you blew on them. Mama's dead aunt could draw like that, and had other supernatural talents as well. But unlike Calia, Mama's dead aunt could be bothered to acknowledge the presence of other humans now and then.

Have you seen Yorgos Lanthimos' early film, still in Greek with English subtitles, Dogtooth? In which "A controlling, manipulative father locks his three adult offspring in a state of perpetual childhood by keeping them prisoner within the sprawling family compound," there to experiment on them rather unscrupulously by teaching them that, among other things, their canine teeth will fall out someday when they've reached full maturity and that until that happens, they are still children and owe him absolute obedience and credulousness? I think that Elaine Vilar Madruga has, but did Lanthimos one better: what if the kids started out weird and only got weirder? What if their Mama hated them from birth and wasn't shy about letting anybody know, including them? And what if their house's most frequent guest was the all-powerful leader of their country, who loved those children as though they were his own and, well, what if he really was, in some way or another their Papa? By which I mean yes, on top of everything else, there are questions of identity as well as of authorship and the reliability of our sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person narrator that might well turn out to be rather an unusual entity a la Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium but is probably just Cassandra? Maybe?

Oh, and by the way, Papa has one hell of a stutter, such that he is all but incapable of saying his children's names correctly. Thus we see frequent references to "Cacasandra," "Cacaleb" and "Cacalia," and the visually and to a certain degree sonically implied (as explained with some glee by Kevin Gerry Dunn in his special translator's note at novel's end) scatalogical syllables "caca" are very much intentional; this book does not shy away from toilet humor. Which, should that surprise you, given what two of the children call each other?

Anyway, Cacasandra, Cacaleb and Cacalia do not live in a normal household, even before their Cuba-esque island nation's dictatorial leader begins asking his favorite child, the Bridgefucker, to start spying on her parents. For, you see, the children's aunt and uncle have been found guilty of an assassination attempt against the dictator, whom Cacasandra calls "Pop Pop Mustache" because of his magnificent facial hair (no Castro beard, though), and thus the whole clan, but especially Cacasandra's father, is under a cloud of suspicion, ever gathering, like flies. She is reluctant to become a spy, not so much out of family loyalty as out of concern that becoming a government informant will interfere with her weird and illicit love affair, but ultimately she at least lets the dictator conclude that she's going to cooperate, having learned that a shrug is a good and acceptable answer to most of the proposals of those with power over her, who were going to project their assumptions onto her anyway, after all...

But so, ultimately, The Tyranny of Flies is a story of rebellion, if only of one on the smallest possible scale and with rather disappointing results. Just because it's monkey's asses that are chiefly involved in this story, one mustn't conclude that no monkey's paws were curled closed in its telling! But pay close attention if you want to follow the plot against the dictatorship(s): a lot is going on just out of frame while Cacasandra distracts you with precocious sexual shenanigans and Cacaleb conducts monstrous art out of all of those animal suicides. Can you guess the plan? Would you, too, suffer the fate of the tyrants? Or would they ca-catch you in the act?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. 

*Dude. You cannot tell me Kevin Gerry Dunn did not have a little more fun than usual in translating this book.