Sleep Decades
Israel Bonilla
Malarkey Books, 2024

R

epresenting a life involves many forms of treason. One might read this first sentence of Israel Bonilla’s debut collection of short stories as a skeleton key to the entire volume, or perhaps as a warning to the would-be interpreter against putting too much faith in the words of even the most ostensibly reliable narrator, or, for that matter, reviewer. Indeed, the nineteen stories in this remarkable book, with their various modes and manners and structuring devices, may be understood as so many forms of treason committed by their narrators against themselves and the others whose lives are recounted here, attempts to represent these lives in ways that prove their narrators’ ‘fine-spun theories’. Language betrays us, of course, whether we know it or not, and even if we do not intend to commit treason, the act of representation itself cannot be otherwise.

Yet language is also the substance of our self-making, the climature of those fine-spun theories, the warp and woof of the story itself—the medium in which, as the narrator of ‘Confessions of an American Marihuana User’ says, ‘at some moment in life we enunciate a couple of sentences that epitomize us’. Bonilla has placed an epigraph from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Empedocles on Etna’ at the beginning of his book: And we feel, day and night, / The burden of ourselves. In the poem, Arnold’s Empedocles claims that, under the pressure of this burden, the wise man looks inside himself to find a cure, and that all fears and darkness may be dispelled by submitting to the ultimate reality of nature: In vain our pent wills fret, / And would the world subdue. / Limits we do not set / Condition all we do. / Born into life we are, and life must be our mould. The burden of ourselves, for Arnold’s Empedocles, is distilled in the perverse human will that would impose its inordinate desires upon the world, yet ultimately lacks the power to do so.

This frustration of the pent will is in evidence throughout the volume, and represents a mode of being that characterizes the lives represented here, thrust into conflict with those limits we do not set: the heroic activist and ex-professor of ‘Antisophers’, whose uncompromising drive to change the world has led her to a stifling anti-intellectualism that conceals and compensates for her discontent with the elusiveness of such change; the narrator of ‘Boca de Iguanas’ who ends up discovering ‘a newfound distance between the sky’ and himself, ‘stagger[ing] around in the darkness of [his] consciousness’; the knock-kneed boy of ‘Margins,’ who flees the ugliness of his body by imagining himself as pure mind—not unlike Empedocles: Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,— / But a naked, eternally restless mind!—yet is left ‘gasping for breath’ by an encounter with a waitress. The motley cast of Sleep Decades push up against the limits that forge and fashion their multiform identities.

The first story in the volume, ‘A Biography in Ten Objects’, echews chronological narrative in favour of ‘the manner of Vermeer’, that is, ‘a painstaking attachment to the everyday bric-a-brac’, and, as the title suggests, chooses ten exemplary objects from its subject’s life—glasses, lamps, a cell phone, a pen, a shopping cart, a mortar and pestle, arum lilies, homeopathic pills, a buddha statue, a bible—, portraying her life in relation to these objects. It is almost as if the burden of ourselves has become the burden of the objects in which our lives are externalized, a fetishism of the object which absorbs the experiences of those who have lived together with this bric-a-brac. I am reminded here of Marx’s description of religion, where ‘the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race’, and which he compares with commodities as the products of human hands. A similar note is struck in ‘Levity’, whose narrator describes the contents of his bedroom—a photograph of his parents, his grandfather’s lamp table, the carpet—as ‘the most meticulous map of a personality’, a cartography of the soul, if you will. Thus a life is plotted, in the various senses of that treacherous verb.

By contrast, in ‘Alive and Well’, an invalid grandmother is transfigured into an object by the various quarreling factions of her family. Instead of familiar objects representing the life, will and desires of an individual, in this story an individual is transformed into an object upon which the wills and desires of others are projected. After a series of strokes, the grandmother is increasingly disabled: ‘Her identity wasn’t cohesive; her sense of time was ravished. The word burden loomed through everyone’s mind. And how could it not? My grandmother was at the threshold of impersonality.’ Yet as the strokes remove the burden of ourselves from her, she becomes not exactly a burden on others, as the cliché has it, but ‘a thread to which everybody hung on’, an altitudinous impersonality not unlike the ‘charred, blackened, melancholy waste’ where Empedocles finds himself alone in Arnold’s poem, an ‘inert’ body against which the various characters measure their own burdens.

The title of the seventh story in the volume, ‘All the Works That My Hands Had Wrought’, is taken from Ecclesiastes 2:11: ‘Then I looked on all the works that my hand had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun’. In this story, which begins with an echo of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, a mediocre man and student attempts to mold himself into a brilliant intellectual and showman like his mentor Colin, eventually organizing a disastrous meeting with an ex-acquaintance in order to prove what kind of person he had become. Ultimately, a reading of his own textbook on grammar, the crowning achievement of his career, which had caused a break with Colin, seemingly due to the latter’s envy of the narrator’s success, leads him to realize the vanity of his excessive ambition and the pathetic reality of his life. This calls to mind a quote from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s essay Halakhic Man: ‘Repentance, according to the halakhic view, is an act of creation—self-creation.’ Self-making is, of course, also an act of self-unmaking, in which the will is subject to hard limits: Born into life we are, and life must be our mould. Or, perhaps more ominously, in Hamlet’s words, There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will. Elsewhere, Rav Soloveitchik describes this self-fashioning in terms of ‘the crystallization of the fleeting individual experience into fixed principles and universal norms’ by means of halakha as an ‘objectifying instrument’ of consciousness. Of course, our narrator is far from the Rav’s idea of halakhic man, yet, whether the limit be divinity, rabbinic law, or life itself, the freedom of the self-making adventure inevitably founders on the Realitätsprinzip.

‘As the Waters Fail from the Sea’ also takes its title from a biblical verse: ‘As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep’ (Job 14:11-12). In this story, narrated by the heir of an elderly bookseller, masses of dusty books pile up around the eccentric old man, who gradually pushes away those close to him as well as most of his potential customers. As in ‘A Biography in Ten Objects’, the bookseller is here refracted in the objects that surround him—particular volumes which he keeps in a neoclassical glass-door bookcase and which he does not wish to sell:

I have long thought of it as his canon. It permeates his whole life: his manners, his diction, his motions, his temperament. You can see Carlyle and Hazlitt in his incoherent passion, Johnson and Tolstoy in his zealous earnestness, Emerson and Melville in his prolix mysticism, James and Hume in his pluralistic view of the universe, de Bury in his handling of books.

It is not just the content of these writers that defines the man; it is rather the dusty ponderousness, the physical nature of the books that ‘builds up to a barrier, nothing else’. While the old man ‘somehow ascends’ and ‘seems awake’ only in discussing books, these same books, just as they have crowded out the people in his life, soon impede entrance to the bookshop. Yet he is resigned—‘Leave them alone’—just as Job in the quoted passage resigns himself to the finality of death, and ‘the door will cease to open; the tomb is finished’.

The ‘many forms of treason’ are echoed in the formal variety of these stories: the unorthodox presentation of ‘A Biography in Ten Objects’; the epistolatory form of ‘Draft’; the anaphoric accumulation of ‘Roulette’; the De Quinceyan paradigms of ‘Confessions of an American Marihuana User’; the visionary monologue of ‘Basement Blues’; and the various first-person narrators telling third-person stories or their own. This formal variety reaches its culmination in the final text of the volume, τὸ ὄν, a tour de force in which narrative technique and experimentation are pushed nearly to breaking in an attempt to explore the limits of representation, perhaps in an attempt to move beyond the necessity of treason.

Bonilla writes an exquisite and sonorous prose, Victorian in its resonance and haunting in its effect upon the reader. One strength of these stories rests upon the dialectic between the often low station of the characters and their circumstances and the careful, exacting style that eschews any lingering attachment to mere realism by foregrounding its artifice and historical antecedents. This is not a book of comforts; it is written, as the jacket copy tells us, ‘in the adversative mood’, and yet these stories are not devoid of hope, although perhaps they, once again like Empedocles in Arnold’s poem, would beseech us to curb any unjustified extravagance:

I say: Fear not! Life still
Leaves human effort scope.
But, since life teems with ill,
Nurse no extravagant hope;
Because thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair!