Sabina Murray’s ‘Tales of the New World,’ reviewed by Ron Charles
Unfortunately, the nine short stories that follow this wonderful novella are harder to recommend. Among the more successful ones is “Translation,” about Magellan and the young aristocratic named Pigafetta, who served as his translator. It’s a weirdly affecting, morose comedy about the friendship between a brutal, blustering leader and a gay man who adores him. As in most of the stories in this collection, Murray’s narrator affects a witty, contemporary tone; even the 16th-century characters banter in modern English about the irony of their mission to Christianize the natives while abusing them.
Other pieces capture moments of exotic, vanished places. There’s a mordant story about the last, exceptionally gruesome days of the Aztec Empire, when the ruler of Texcoco is summoned by the king of the Aztecs. Another strange, gripping story is narrated in the feverish voice of a survivor of Jim Jones’s cult in Guyana.
(Black Cat) - “Tales of the New World: Stories” by Sabina Murray.
But almost all these short stories leave us wanting more — more information, more development, more story. “The Solace of Monsters,” for instance, shows us Capt. Zimri Coffin lying awake, terrified, reading “Frankenstein.” A few days later, the horror of Mary Shelley’s tale is outdone when his ship rescues the survivors of the Essex, who resorted to cannibalism after a whale shattered their ship. This, of course, is the incident that inspired that leviathan classic of American literature, “Moby-Dick,” but Murray seems unwilling to do anything more with her evocative premise than launch it.
Other stories are predicated on the kind of historical and biographical information that few American readers are likely to possess. “His Actual Mark,” for instance, about the Australian explorer Edward John Eyre, starts with such promise about his trek across “the blank spot where God ran out of ideas and couldn’t be bothered with trees and billabongs and more wildlife than a distant screech from birds digging in the sand.” But then it quickly reaches an emotionally complex ending that requires knowing about Eyre’s troubled career as the governor of Jamaica. (Ten points if you can describe the Morant Bay Rebellion.) Even the narrator jokes that Eyre has become “almost invisible” in the popular mind, so why not help us out a little more? Effective historical novelists know how to fill in obscure context to bring interested readers along; historical short story writers aren’t off the hook just because they’re operating in a more constrained space.
Collections such as “Tales of the New World” make me wish the Kindle let us cherry-pick stories the way iTunes lets us pluck a great song from a mediocre album. In the new world of e-publishing, “Fish” could find a place between feminist masterpieces like “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Wide Sargasso Sea,” but it needs some way to break out of this problematic book and be free.
Charles is The Post’s fiction critic. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
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