Matthew Battles’s 11 “tales,” as they are called on the title page of “The Sovereignties of Invention,” cover the range of literary parable and fantasy. Several echo the tone — observant, factual, elegant — of our greatest living practitioner of this genre, Steven Millhauser. For instance, here is the opening of “The Dogs in the Trees”:
“The first sightings of dogs in trees were reported not long after the Fall equinox. Early rumor came in the form of videos shot at arms’ length on cell phones and hastily uploaded — grainy, shaky, shot with cock-angled intensity, the palsied depth of field swimming as it sought purchase amidst limbs and leaves.”
(Red Lemonade Press) - ‘The Sovereignties of Invention’ by Matthew Battles
As the narrative develops, more and more dogs are sighted, quietly hunched among the branches. Tethered pets soon begin to bark and howl at night, maddened with desire to be aloft. Oddly enough, nobody makes any serious effort to lower the dogs back to earth. And eventually the animals begin . . .
Well, there’s no point in spoiling the story. But one can safely say that it remains mysterious and its final meaning elusive. Indeed, while all of Battles’s tales neatly hook the reader, he seems better at creating symbolic or allegorical situations than resolving them. I frequently finished a story by murmuring, “Huh?” or with the feeling that it was just a bit too precious and derivative, overwrought in both senses of the word.
For example, it’s hard not to read the title story, “The Sovereignties of Invention” without thinking of Borges’s classic examinations of sensory overload, “The Aleph” and “Funes the Memorious.” In Battles’s science-fictional narrative, a device records every detail, noticed and unnoticed, of its protagonist’s short run through a park and then allows him to reexperience “the immense interbricolated labyrinths of sensation harvested from that single late-fall jog.” In effect, the unfortunate man discovers a world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. Still another story, “The Manuscript of Belz,” uses the background of contemporary religious war to create a homage to “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote,’ ” Borges’s little classic in which a French writer re-creates, word for word, the text of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” and by so doing transforms it into a post-modernist masterpiece.
Best known as the author of “Library: An Unquiet History,” Battles is currently a program fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. On the one hand, he’s obviously bookish, his work readily calling to mind not just the fables of Millhauser and Borges but also the prose-poems of W.S. Merwin’s “The Miner’s Pale Children,” the imaginative miniatures of Helen Phillips’s recently published “And Yet They Were Happy,” various forms of literary experiment and even old episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Yet at the same time, Battles can set a story at a computer conference that features an expert on “crowdsourcing distributed libraries of emotional solidarity.” “The Gnomon,” appropriately enough, then neatly builds to a terrifying representation of “emotional solidarity.”
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