Altmann's Tongue - Brian Evenson

Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella (2002) – Brian Evenson

It took me a long time to finish this collection, probably around five months. I just couldn't read more than a story or two at any one sitting. Evenson's work is filled with seemingly senseless violence and brutality, leaving you (or at least me) with feelings of deep depression. Yet I can't deny the power of his writing. Still, I could only handle small doses.

Many of the stories are "flash fiction" of only a page or two, yet there's much of the gruesome packed into a few hundred words. In the book's introduction, Alphonso Lingis remarks that "Eighteen of the twenty-six stories of this book are stories of killing people. Another is about killing cats. The dogs that show up get killed. The readers' eyes are kept on the killer, not the victim whose life is often not evoked at all, already passed away."

Not exactly stories for The Family Hour.

There seem to be no moral lessons in the stories, certainly no remose on the part of the killers. The killings don't seem to be acts of overwhelming emotion - lust, anger, revenge. But neither do they seem to be killing for killing's sake. It's just a part of who these characters are.

If you can read the three-page "Eye" on a full stomach, my hat's off to you. In fact, the most revolting stories tend to be the shortest. Yet the longer story "The Munich Window: A Persecution" and the novella "The Sanza Affair" are absolutely riveting. The novella, for all practical purposes, is a police report, at least for the first several sections. Part mystery, part police procedural, the work is filled with unreliable narrators, suspense and depth. "The Sanza Affair" alone is worth the price of admission.

Also worth the cover price is Evenson's afterword, which chronicles his connections with the Mormon church, his teaching position at BYU, and his subsequent self-excommunication from both.

From the Afterword:

Altmann's Tongue is meant to be a challenging book, is postulated as a challenge to the reader. The stories in it are meant to function beyond their initial reading, in the way readers choose over time to process the reading experience and supply their own moral response to the absence of response within the text proper. A sort of virus, as it were.

That's some virus. Is it a virus I'll expose myself to again? Maybe. I'll definitely re-read "The Sanza Affair" and "The Munich Window." As for the others? I might need immunization.