A debut book of stories, out of one hotel and one long winter.
The premise
A reader of John le Carré and Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Brautigan and Julio Cortázar, Russell searches for meaning in the ordinary and the super-ordinary — an inhabitant of both worlds. The stories are linked by the one location of the Old Marquette Inn, and by a thirty-year-old night clerk who witnesses these writers come to Marquette, Michigan.
There are realistic elements mixed in with the hyperrealities. Why Fellini appears at the hotel is dreamlike, almost a hallucination, and John Lennon interacts with him. The Upper Peninsula is the space from which these characters emerge, and it is winter, always winter, in this geography of space — and time.
John Lennon appears to be eating chili at the hotel bar. The former Beatle has been shot outside the Dakota in New York City and his spirit takes refuge in Marquette. He doesn’t know why he is here at the hotel but keeps spooning chili. I am seated beside him, a thirtyish man who lives at the hotel and works part-time as a night clerk there.
From the synopsis
Inside the book
In “Richard Brautigan Wanted to Jump from His Hotel Window,” Brautigan suffers an existential crisis much like the motorcyclist in Cortázar’s “The Night Face Up” — a man dreaming himself in two places at once.
If Richard looked outside at Lake Superior, he grew afraid of something happening to him. There was no hope if you were a swimmer out there. The mirror was empty except for himself. One eye fixed in its gaze on an invisible object yet to declare itself as menacing. His eyebrows like a black cat’s superimposed tail across his face.
From “Richard Brautigan Wanted to Jump from His Hotel Window”
The Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz appears as a background character in three stories — but the true protagonist is his wife, Janina, dying of cancer at home on Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley, waiting for his phone call. Milosz reads poetry in the Upper Peninsula and time-travels back to the cities of the war, where he worked for the Resistance.
He stood at the podium like Ishmael holding onto his coffin when the Pequod sank in a great orgasm of seagulls. A young man for middle age, his tousled eyebrows and razored long hair, workingman’s hands, his voice grew electric when he touched upon his own poetry in Polish. That coffin was his only safe place, as he rocked to and fro, like Father Mapple in his sermon.
From “Czeslaw Milosz Reading in the Queen City”
“The Poet and the Hairdresser” lays bare the poet’s infidelities in a darker, more humane register — a neo-noir of two Zuzannas and one Janina. The second Zuzanna is a young Jewish poet arrested by the Gestapo, whose short career ends with a bullet or worse.
In her quiet hours she wrote poetry, longhand with a nervous but steady survival of Polish cursive; sometimes she defied the world by writing in Yiddish. Let them burn me for my ancestry, but I will burn the world first in poetry.
From “The Poet and the Hairdresser”
In the last story, John Lennon appears again at Dirty Annie’s — Long Lost John, a lost Beatle who wants to row out into Lake Superior and disappear into the waves, remembering his Irish island of Dorinish. But it is winter, and these dreams dissipate.
He was confused really what sea he had rowed across in the cold mizzle. He rented the rowboat and hoped it wouldn’t be stolen when he wanted to row back across its treacherous waves. Johnny the Moondog had counted seven others living here at the hotel. He was frightened to talk. Besides, his jaw was cold and he could barely find his tongue.
From “Long Lost John at the Old Marquette Inn”
The intention
There is always the compulsive eruption of thoughts by these characters, and by the man who sleeps at the hotel along with Brautigan and Hemingway and other dream people who share the same sentence or paragraph. The intention is to be mysteriously intense, surreal and compassionate — even if someone does get murdered by the end of the story. There is a memory of smells and beds, cats and chili, phones that never ring and ones that never stop ringing, as if some Poe-like occurrence will decide whether it’s life or death.