Book Review: The Archivists
In Daphne Kalotay's short story collection, love and loss are painstakingly catalogued
By Leah Eichler,
It’s always tricky when writers read about other writers, even fictional ones. Sometimes they are (unrealistically) successful, or an abysmal failure, but what if they are just plain good but not aggressively ambitious?
That’s Peter, the protagonist in “Awake,” one of the short stories in Daphne Kalotay's new collection, “The Archivists.” Unable to afford Manhattan, Peter, a struggling writer, moves to a small town with his girlfriend, but their lives stagnate. Peter never finishes his novel and they settle in to a life of mediocrity.
“Didn’t he see that life was passing him by?” opines his girlfriend. Living in mediocrity seems terrifying enough for a writer, until Peter falls asleep in his truck and time trips.
The story, like others in the collection, are snippets of the road taken, and hints of what could have been, had the protagonist ventured down a different path.
In “Heart-Scalded,” an artist is invited to a party, where she knows she’ll run into her ex-boyfriend, whom she still loves, and his new fiancée.
In “A Guide to Lesser Divinities,” an academic at a gas station buys a lottery ticket on a whim but it’s the man she meets inside who ends up being her lucky pick.
In “Providence,” a woman faints on her run, nearly dying, but is rescued by strangers she intuits were there for her.
“Seeing” is a terrifying story about a woman who goes for a walk in a remote area of New Mexico and stands up to a would-be rapist. Danger is everywhere but like the other stories, there’s a fork in the road, and the future depends on which route you take.
In each story, Kalotay flirts with the supernatural. Things shouldn’t turn out the way they do, with the protagonist so lucky, but somehow everything works out. In the end, the author always offers a realistic explanation for their good fortune, but you can’t help but feel the hands of fate buffeting her characters along.
Many of the stories also appear to be modern retellings of fables or classic stories. In “Awake,” where the main character falls asleep and time travels, there’s a bridge called “Rip Van Winkle.” “Vertigo” — about two teenage boys in a remote European village from opposite sides of the political spectrum — feels like a riff on Romeo and Juliet. “Three Times Two,” about three couples and their disastrous hike up a mountain, gives off A Midsummer Night’s Dream feel.
The book’s eponymous story, “The Archivists,” remains its most sophisticated. Told from different generations of the same family, their stories slowly collide.
It begins with a grandmother, a Holocaust survivor expecting blue hydrangeas for her birthday, the exact colour of a boy’s eyes she knew long ago. In a different city, her daughter, an aging ballerina, tries to resuscitate a famous dance that was never meant to be captured on film. Meanwhile, the granddaughter in a different time zone works diligently in a laboratory examining the genetic impact of trauma, and the marker it leaves on not only the DNA of one’s children, but grandchildren.
In this story, the fork in the road has repercussions not only for the protagonist but for the generations to come. The memories of what could have been are passed on from mother to daughter to granddaughter, who each in their own way want to capture some evidence of life that’s fleeting.
“The Archivists” is a stunning collection of human experiences, and we the reader and ultimate archivist collect them and keep them sacred. They each ring so true and leave us with a catalogue of emotions we won’t soon forget.
PS - This is our first book review. If you have a book you would like to review, please feel free to reach us at editor@esotericamag.com.
Thanks for this, Leah. You have piqued my interest in this book.