how to do a magic trick
how to do a magic trick biogoraphy
The taint of the prose – a musky, melancholic, elusive inner aura, the sense of darkness expunging the promise of each new dawn, of swallowed pain behind the flicker of a smile, of aspiration to home and happiness foredoomed – marked his essence, and bred its own climate in the reader’s imagination. A state to absorb, if not inhabit.Thus, picking up his second collection, Something Like Happy, in advance of riffling its pages to shiver the air, the title strikes you—as a trick might—as “a marshmallow with a hook in it,” as Norman MacCaig used to say when he proffered a compliment—the “Like” being overshadowed, prodded or burdened by some provisional hint of collapse. Ahh, happy, schmappy!
But, no, the deception lies here in the author’s double bluff: the teller of the title story, a bank clerk, concludes her tale – of crippled emotion, murder, resentment, the disappearance of a man who smuggles happiness inside him undiagnosed – attesting to happiness herself, rooted in something “long ago, some childhood pleasure”. It is an epiphany, unexpected.
This tale is one of three first published in the New Yorker. Burnside has modified it slightly, without unbalancing its essentials, displaying fastidiousness, not preciousness, an attention to minutae which he pursues in every story.
The New Yorker stories are masterpieces of nuance, mood, and withholding. Read the collection from start to finish and you will encounter them in ascending order of captivating simplicity, interspersed with ten other stories all of which (with one exception) are real achievements.
“The Cold Outside” is an almost perfect expression of knowing another’s life; in it a man, the narrator, is nearing death. Within his solitude we find him, truly himself, astute, anatomising his marriage, which is now moribund. In solitude he reaches out from the narrative, to astound us, not with what happens in just a few hours, which, in essentials is incidental, but with the whole life he will leave behind.
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