Ordinary horrors

Today I received via e-mail an invitation to purchase chapbooks with the following titles:

Sauce Robert
Add Musk Here
Disrobing
The Root
Shooting the Strays
War Holdings
Their Shadows are Dark Daughters
Pants
The People Instruments
Tampon Class

Assembled this way, these could be chapter headings in the imaginary memoirs of a very peculiar person. Is "Sauce Robert" a recipe or a command? Do the dark-shadow daughters shoot the strays, and are the pants in chapter 8 dropped by the disrobing person in chapter 3? In "The People Instruments," are the people playing instruments or becoming instruments? Who attends the Tampon Class and what kind of test is given at the end? It's a story just begging to be written.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javiar Marias, who loves to send readers hunting for other books. In A Heart So White, a quote from MacBeth, dropped casually into conversation, gains resonance and significance as the novel moves inexorably to its horrible conclusion, although perhaps "horrible" is not the right word, suggesting as it does cataclysmic events involving massive death or dismemberment. The horrors on Marias novels are small, interior horrors, apparently insignificant decisions or minor secrets that fester over time until they finally poison the soul of one or maybe two people, three at the most. Nothing much really happens in a Marias novel; characters think or talk or think about talking, often about distant or incomprehensible events, but over the course of the novel suspense builds and these small events and minor conversations take on an almost unbearable weight of foreboding, and then comes the horror, which is really not all that horrible in comparison with, say, anything that happens in MacBeth. What makes Marias's horrors so much more horrible is that they are perpetrated not by power-hungry princes but by ordinary people just doing what they do best, which sometimes includes murder or arson and often includes lying to themselves or others about why they do what they do.

In Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Marias refers repeatedly to Shakespeare's history plays, which at first seems odd given the dearth of royalty in the novel. There is a visit to the palace and a talk with a royal personage about Chimes at Midnight, but the title quotation from Richard III is introduced at a very strange moment: while the narrator is watching a woman die. Why Richard III? What battle? Think on whom? I'm halfway through the book and I don't know the answers to these questions, if there are answers or if the answers matter. But now I want to go back to Richard III and see what relevance it could possibly have to this novel.

Marias novels include some disrobing, some pants, plenty of shadows and daughters, but I'm pleased to report that Marias avoids any mention of tampon class, for which I am truly grateful.

Onward.