26 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS
By Danielle Evans
269 pp. Riverhead. $27.
Evans’s latest story col-
lection reflects on recent
mythologies surrounding
American race relations. In
“Happily Ever After,” a Black
woman working at a Titanic-
themed hotel must make
herself scarce during birthday parties
(“We’d hate for the 6-year-old having tea
parties on the Titanic to get the wrong
idea about history,” says her boss). In
“Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college
student turns into a poster girl for Ameri-
can historical amnesia when a photo of
her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes
viral.
The author rewrites the official record
by way of fiction. Evans is particularly
gifted at depicting character, especially
female protagonists. That “Boys Go to
Jupiter” unfolds through the student’s
rich back story feels neither like sympa-
thetic projection nor like punishment.
Instead, this tale of social media cancella-
tion approaches something closer to
critical objectivity. In contrast, Evans’s
Black female characters often start out
on the periphery: The worker at the
Titanic hotel muses that “she was back-
drop.” Literature offers a kind of correc-
tive to history by drawing these figures
into the foreground.
Evans’s propulsive narratives read as
though they’re getting away with some-
thing, building what feel like novelistic
plots onto the short story’s modest real
estate. No surprise, then, that this col-
lection concludes with its title novella,
about a Black professor who quits her job
to work for the city government, correct-
ing factual mistakes in the public record.
The story marries Melvillian mundanity
with melodramatic suspense. I could
have kept reading for pages.
IGIFU
By Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated by Jordan Stump
110 pp. Archipelago. Paper, $18.“Igifu” depicts the lives of
Rwanda’s Tutsis from their
exile in the 1960s to the
genocide of the ’90s. These
stories follow the broad
strokes of the author’s own
life, though, unlike Muka-
songa’s prior books “Cockroaches” and
“The Barefoot Woman,” they are less
explicitly autobiographical. Instead, she
mediates the personal through fable to
convey the sense of a collective past.
In the title story, “Igifu” is personified
as “Hunger, given to us at birth like a
cruel guardian angel.” Writing in the
second person, the author asks readers to
inhabit not just the narrator’s story, but
her people’s. “You were a displaced little
girl like me,” the story begins, “sent off to
Nyamata for being a Tutsi.” In a later
tale, we meet an uprooted Tutsi child who
tries to organize memories of growing up
in Nyamata into degrees of fear, ranging
from “great fear” to “everyday fear.”
Mukasonga’s language, in Stump’s
translation from the French, is at once
intimate and impersonal. Her stories are
almost all narrated by children, whose
early exile from home and family height-
ens their disorientation in the world while
denying them ways to cope. In the final
story, “Grief,” a young woman living in
France doesn’t know how to mourn the
family she has left behind. She begins
attending the funerals of strangers, be-
coming “a parasite of their grief.” Yet
when she returns to Rwanda, she finds
no catharsis there; no family members
are alive to grieve with her. The devasta-
tion in Mukasonga’s stories is only ampli-
fied by the short story form. “Igifu” is
notably slim, as though to suggest all that
still hasn’t been told.WHERE THE WILD LADIES ARE
By Aoko Matsuda
Translated by Polly Barton
269 pp. Soft Skull. Paper, $16.95.Each story in “Where the
Wild Ladies Are” updates a
traditional Japanese folk tale
for our contemporary world.
The result is delightfully
uncanny. Matsuda finds her
wild ladies in strange and
urbane poses, as the unre-
lenting ghosts of Japanese legend now
don Adidas tracksuits, shop at Dean &
DeLuca and hum along to Beyoncé. You
might mistake them for someone you
know, except for the fact that they come
from the afterlife — shape-shifting wives
and foxes back to haunt the living.
Matsuda’s retellings are feminist with a
vengeance. In “The Jealous Type,” a
woman with a “wild curiosity” is praised
for her ferociously possessive streak. The
story ends in a comedic turn, when we
realize that she is being buttered up by a
ghost recruiter. “For a person of your
gifts,” the recruiter says, “we don’t feel
any training will be necessary and hope
to welcome you into our team immedi-
ately.” Corporate speak runs throughout
“Where the Wild Ladies Are,” heighten-
ing its absurdism while gesturing toward
the sinister.
A ghost previously punished for her
inability to produce breast milk is saved
by the invention of formula. Another who
was killed by her husband with poisoned
face cream has now reinvented herself as
a successful lifestyle blogger. These are
ghosts who lean in.
Yet just as this brave new world allows
these women to grow wild, it also cas-
trates out-of-work men. These stories,
deftly translated by Barton, touch on a
recession specific to Japan, though the
language of neoliberal precarity and gig
work will be familiar to many.A SENSE OF THE WHOLE
By Siamak Vossoughi
177 pp. Orison. Paper, $18.The 31 stories in “A Sense of
the Whole” are radically
short. Most fall under five
pages, with some running no
more than two. Individual
titles resemble those of para-
bles — “The Deal,” “The New
Man” — as if to telegraph
their aphoristic plots. In “Proverbs,” an
Iranian-American couple puzzles over
their daughter’s homework, in which she
must explain the meaning of English
idioms. A teacher in “Sharpness” consid-
ers two classes of schoolboys: one al-
lowed to play gun games, and the other
not. Rather than come down on either
side, the teacher takes up the gun as a
subject for a writerly thought experi-
ment. “There was no getting around the
fact that writers had to know who they
were in relation to guns.”
Vossoughi’s prose is laconic. His ellipti-
cal sentences isolate English words and
sayings so as to make them newly
strange. In a story titled “You Are My
Brother,” an Arab and an American walk
into an Irish coffee shop and debate war
in the Middle East by repeating “You are
my brother” to each other. The exchange
is productive on an interpersonal level,
though what it implies for impending war
remains unclear. As the Irish shopkeeper
reflects: “That thing with calling each
other ‘my brother,’ where were they
reallygoing to take that, anyway? Where
were they really going to go with it?”
These are moral tales with uncertain
answers. One might read them as anec-
dotal for the Iranian-American experi-
ence, but rendered in Vossoughi’s epi-
grammatic prose they ultimately unfold
through the language of the universal.
Each lights on a minor encounter —
between strangers, neighbors, lovers —
and what emerges is the sense that any-
one you meet has a story.
JANE HUis a writer and Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Shortlist/Stories/By Jane Hu
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALLK8P0V4L