An Elegy not to be confused with Eulogy
Origami Zoo Press recently sent me a review copy of their latest release, ‘An Elegy for Mathematics‘ by Anne Valente. While a lot of the stories here have been included across the board in journals, this is across the board an elegy (or mournful tribute) to mathematics, if not a science of storytelling.
Between delineated microcosms you may find your beautiful heart sinking toward the grave of what cannot be explained other than in theory. Anne does well in breaking parts of this collection up from traditional stories using lists: the day times at which a hummingbird goes the feeder, the different ways the things in our world desire (a whale, a shrimp, an owl) or how any random person would cultivate the moon. Indeed, this collection will make you desire.
Valente uses a consistent and demanding first-person narrator for what I believe to be the truer heart of the stories. And somewhere I feel I am being let down, I feel like a lowering casket going six feet under. Or drowning.
The author’s lists then feel like small jabs or bee stings later into the collection. Like the story If the Hum of Bees Flooded Our Ears where a teenager finds recluse in headphones and yet distinction, thrill in catching bees until he is stung, no bitten, by one and a happiness until the father abandons the family…
There is theme throughout this work of real human concepts and emotion of immortality, fear, desire. What made the stories great for me was her simple style in setting and conjecture in those traditional stories. From behind wooden sheds or from the back spokes of a child’s bicycle hope lives here, innocence is here. We can live on the moon if we want.
After reading the full collection from the press, I really had to personally discard those lists in the end. In the end, I really had to lay to rest to that science, that sad truth of the world, and write this, letting the heartbreak trickle down and understand the reality: that we don’t live on the moon, that I’d break said bike if I rode on it,that this is an elegy more so than a eulogy. Because Anne is young. Because this is a birth of something, a talent, a skill, a writer, a hope…