Daniel Grandbois - Short forms, like the subatomic realm, are the trickster gods

Daniel Grandbois, Unlucky Lucky Days (BOA Editions, 2008)

"Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, these seventy-three tales of our Unlucky Lucky Days might well be termed Dr. Seuss for adults. They call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, absurdists, surrealists and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham."

"These are funny, bizarre, moving stories-a pleasure to read." - Lydia Davis

"Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits." - Brian Evenson

"Grandbois' trembling leaflets bring to life all the rejecta and detritus scattered in such silent and secretive array around us, recovering all we thought lost or dead." - Eleni Sikelianos

"Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious."- Rikki Ducornet

"Brief, animist epiphanies-most shorter than a page-comprise Grandbois's folkloric debut. The frog of "Greener Pastures" dreams of becoming an architect like his father, and shapes his dung hills into replicas of churches. The blind cat in "The Teacher" decides on a career change, aided by an equally blind mouse. The growth on Aunt Mary's neck ("The Growth") appeared "as random as the decay of an isotope in an old growth forest when no one is there to hear." Absurdist and surreal, witty and ironical, Grandbois's observations make for pleasant grotesques: impressionistic idées fixes "like the heads of soldiers... large enough to block passages against intruders." - Publishers Weekly

"In these 73 pieces from Unlucky Lucky Days (a mixture of fables, creation myths, tall tales, nursery rhymes that don’t rhyme, and Zen koans), Daniel Grandbois, in simple diction and high-speed syntax, takes the reader on a journal to where all thought begins, translating the experience into language.
On this journey, one finds, among other things: a twin goat who wears around his neck a bicycle chain like a chain worn by a rapper; a man who, after running out of toothpaste, pliers out his molars to wash them in the washing machine; and a man who mistakes his wife for a hat (inspired, possibly, by neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book which discusses a case study on visual agnosia).
Yet if these tales sound like mere shenanigans, they are not. A humorous mysticism, like that found in Zen koans, exists in all this play. In the creation myth, “Happy Birthday Grandma,” Grandbois re-writes Hakuin’s now clichéd “what is the sound of one hand clapping.” Here, the “unborn things” of the world realize that if they immediately blow out sticks flamed by lightning, the sticks’ ashes will grow new life:
…There was a great hoopla in the thunderstorms as each new thing was born, and then everyone shouted, “Blow out your stick!”
But they couldn’t hear each other over all that thunder. Besides, they were growing tired of having to wait forever for lightning to strike a stick to begin their birthday parties. It was decided that fire should be caught and kept on hand. Also, they would replace the thunderclaps with clapping of their own. No one knew how to do that yet, so they practiced with only one hand at first, until they got good enough to use both." - Doug Martin

"Unlucky Lucky Days is a collection of 73 very weird short stories. Mostly, they are less than a page long and take unusual perspectives: gum, a stain, an urge, a growth, sounds, mirrors, a newspaper all have thoughts and feelings, and are central characters complete with motives, desires and actions of their own.
'The Growth' for example is a story about a growth on Aunt Mary, and "The growth wondered what it would be like to hold a hand in the air and clink a glass." The growth imagines itself doing other things, including attaching itself to someone else's neck. The story seems to question why a growth attaches itself to a particular neck at a particular time. It explores the randomness of an illness such as cancer, how it can almost be a living thing. It is a most bizarre perspective, but a powerful one.
In Toothpaste, Grandbois writes "From the moment I recognized it was Carl's teeth banging around in the dryer I went deaf." This is another surreal story - Carl pulls his teeth out with pliers and puts them in the washing machine because he has run out of toothpaste. It is a neat story, one that makes "sense" in a nonsensical way. Like most of the stories in this collection it requires a non-logical response, one that accepts the weirdness of the situation and responds to it in an indirect way.
If you are looking for a straight-forward collection of fiction, I would definitely advise to look elsewhere. Daniel Grandbois is not for you. He is for those seeking the absurd or the surreal or the illogical. His brief fictions are almost puzzles that have no clear answer, or Zen Koans or age-old fables and fairy tales with a twist of Salvador Dali. Grandbois uses familiar story-telling devices and subverts them for his own use, as with "Once upon a log…"
Many of them are new takes on well-known fairy tales and nursery rhymes – the story Hansel and Gretel is echoed in "we didn’t see them again until our return – their bones a trail of breadcrumbs leading us home" ('Migration'), and Jack and Jill get stuck down the well with two thousand other couples.
I have to admit that many of these stories passed me by. They felt like silly nonsense and I wasn’t drawn in. I think this is because these stories are meant to be read more than once, given time, puzzled out. I didn't have the energy for man eating frogs, a Spider King called Frank, or a canary called Sunny Side Up.
However, I did have the energy for a chair that is sure it isn’t meant to be sat on, a left hand that saws off its own ring finger, a house that gets its revenge and many other shorts in this collection. These stories made me laugh, disturbed me and made some kind of weird sense in a way that's difficult to explain. My responses were right-brain ones, emotional ones. They were responses that reminded me of the illogical sense I had as a child when real and magic were the same thing, when imaginary friends could talk, and so could animals and toys. They also remind me of my more bizarre dreams, the ones that make complete sense until I wake up properly and switch on the left-side of my brain.
In two stories in particular, I feel we are given some direction about the intentions behind these stories. The Author gives us some insight into the births of these stories:
"I read random pages of books from folk tales to physics, and rearrange the on a shelf. I pick a subject like termites and research it on the web for a phrase, a habit, and trait, like the heads of soldiers being large enough to block passages against intruders."
Grandbois also responds to any prospective critics in the opening story 'The Yarn':
"'Tell us your tale,' said a violin spider obliged from its loosely woven web.
The yarn stopped in its tracks and laid itself out, as that is how yarns tell their tales.
'Leaves one unsatisfied,' commented the spider. 'The ending is too abrupt.'"
These are not loosely woven webs. And neither are they unsatisfying, for readers who are prepared to put in some energy and open their minds." - Annie Clarkson

"Grandbois gave me my money’s worth. Even though it is a slim book at 117 pages, Unlucky Lucky Days is packed with 73 short tales. The longest maxes out at three pages, the shortest three sentences. Each one shows a writer so comfortable in his own skin, that he appears flawless at times. Granbois plays around with characters and prose in unique and inventive ways, creating his own genre of absurdist fiction populated with dead (or soon to be dying) humans, living everyday objects, and sentient wild creatures. There are mirrors that long for a different perspective, revenge-seeking middle fingers, and storytelling balls of yarn, all of whom live and breathe as much as any of the human characters in the book.
The best pieces – “The Note,” “The Yarn,” “The Tunnel,” and “Almost Borges” — are more serious in tone, but show great heart and Granbois’ adeptness at creating deep, robust stories with very minimalist prose. That is not to detract from the lighter tales such as “Toothpaste, “The Finger,” “Three Wise Men,” and “Svevo,” which showcase the author’s dry sense of humor perfectly. And even the stories that don’t hit with as much impact (every reader will have their own favorites) still draw you into the strange world of the tale, sometimes in three paragraphs or less.
It was while perusing the book in City Lights, that I stumbled on to “The Note” and read the first paragraph:
“A note was pinned to a man in his coffin. It said, ‘I only seem dead.’ The man’s sister had pinned it there, as she’d pinned it to his pajamas before bed each night — so afraid was he of being buried alive.
With her help, he’d escaped that dreadful fate.
She, however, did not.”
That is all of five sentences and yet it speaks volumes about the characters. I was hooked. Everything that followed, on the flight home, and the subway rides to work, did not disappoint either.
It’s not often you get to read stories by a writer who can take his work seriously, but seems to be having so much fun with the stories. Completely brilliant." - Ken Wohlrob

"On his website, Colorado fiction writer Daniel Grandbois describes his first book, Unlucky Lucky Days, as a “collection of nonsense and absurdist tales” so I guess I should have known better than to go seeking the real-life inspiration for one story, “Mansion,” about a turtle who is “an executioner in retirement” and becomes stuck in a mansion he was trying to execute (if that make sense, you’ve got a more agile mind than I do). Grandbois writes that a librarian decided to take the mansion as a paperweight, and “that’s where you can find the executioner right down to this day—in the fish tank near the children’s books at the Boulder Public Library.”
It sounds like a story a parent would make up for a child who asked about a little house in the bottom of a fish tank, but when I went to the library to check out that tank, I found not a mansion, but a sunken ship inside it. I couldn’t tell if a turtle was hiding in there. Grandbois book is packed with puzzlers like “Mansion,” stories only a paragraph or a few pages long, most of them following the meandering logic of a make-believe tale invented on the fly, in which the author gives sentient life to objects or creatures, such as a stain on a cement floor ("The Stain"), a centipede ("The Centipede"), and a head of broccoli ("Broccoli").
At times there are hints of menace in these stories—such as that “executioner” in “Mansion,” or a bunch of dead bears in “Croquet,” but they never get too dark, unlike one of my all-time favorite flash fiction collections, Jim Crace’s “The Devil’s Larder,” in which he wrote of food motivating lust, envy, murder, and greed.
Grandbois is also a musician who has participated in several of Denver’s most accomplished and idiosyncratic bands—Tarantella, Munly, and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club. (Jay Munly, a member of Slim Cessna and frontman of his own outfit, has also published short stories.) These groups all like to tell quirky tales through their songs, and at times some of Grandbois’ stories missed for me because they had that cryptic quality of song lyrics without the sustaining force of music behind them. Grandbois doesn’t always evince the knack that flash fiction master Lydia Davis demonstrates for achieving depth through nonsense, such as “Passing Wind,” a story in her most recent collection Varieties of Disturbance that featured the narrator’s inner monologue on the occasion of her dog’s fart in front of a guest (or was the guest the culprit?) that somehow offered a keen take on social relations and the way the human mind works.
But others of Grandbois’ 73 stories hit right home with an insight or a joke as sharp as those of Davis (who offers book-jacket praise on Unlucky Lucky Days). For example, in “The Growth,” which begins, “They toasted good health without looking at the growth on Aunt Mary,” the growth itself takes over the story with the force of life, fantasizing about sprouting hands and escaping. Surely the growth looms this large in the minds of all at the table (especially the kids) who must avoid looking at it.
“The Log” tells the story of a human face on a log, carved by a chimp. “He’d meant to carve his own face,” Grandbois writes, “but his use of tools was limited.” And in “Toothpaste,” the unnamed housemate of a man named Carl discovers Carl’s teeth in the dryer, and finds him replacing his teeth with pliers, complaining, “We’re out of toothpaste!” The perfect passive-aggression of Carl’s act and his accusatory tone about the toothpaste will remind readers of their own cohabitation situations gone sour.
It doesn’t seem as though Grandbois minds if some of his stories leave the reader scratching his head; he builds in the very critique some might make of his writing in the lead-off tale, “The Yarn,” which ends with a spider commenting, “Leaves one unsatisfied. The ending was too abrupt.” - Jenny Shank

"You can read just about any of the stories in Daniel Grandbois’s Unlucky Lucky Days in under three minutes; while a few spill over onto a second page, most are just a few paragraphs. Here, for example, is the entirety of “The Tunnel”:
A man and a woman stepped into a tunnel. It was lighter inside than they had expected. In fact, the deeper they went the lighter it became until the light was so bright that it blinded them both.
The worlds in which these stories take place bear little resemblance to the ones in which their readers live… but there may be other relations to consider. In this essay, Grandbois discusses the magic he’s found in such tightly compressed narratives.

As Cairn terriers were bred to get into the crannies of Scottish cairns and root out little beasties, the short forms of literature scare such vermin of the human mind into the light. These places can’t be reached by the Great Danes, English Foxhounds, and French Poodles of the long forms, to whom the frantic little terrier may look like only a plaything. A step back reveals it is needed no less equally by the man.
Long forms make their homes most often in what is called realism, a natural setting for something of their size. Planets, for example, live, by comparison, in a more realistic place than do subatomic particles—at least when tallied by human common sense. Yet, each locale is buzzing with indispensible activity. In many ways, the short forms, like the subatomic realm, are the trickster gods, come to mess up the hair of anyone believing the pinnacles of artistry or knowledge are within reach. They expose the conceits of realism, not with malice (when working at their best) but with humor—a wink, a nod, or a hairy-assed moon—for we are all in this together.
“Everything you can imagine is real,” said Picasso; it’s become my standard answer to questions framed to suggest high literary art can be summoned only by the incantations of realism and the character-driven long forms. Misconceptions like these keep the literary arts decades behind the visual and the auditory, and light-years behind scientific discovery.
My stories bubble up from places in my mind or places my mind attaches to that don’t know how to use words. As best I can, I translate them into the current usage of the English language, one that may be around for another few hundred of our circles around the sun, at most. The stories that matter to me are those capable of rewiring the nervous system, of opening wormholes to broader perception, like Zen koans.
Folk tales and children’s tales, especially those of yesteryear—”The Tales of Uncle Remus,” “Just So Stories,” George MacDonald’s and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—can do this as well as any, can lay bare the bizarre, often contradictory workings of this electric lump of gray matter, which thinks back through ages oblivious of me. In adult literature, the brief absurdities of Beckett, Edson, Kharms, Calvino, and Pinget reveal more about what it’s like to inhabit this strange body with these mad monkeys in the mind than any number of tomes devoted to the gradual development of character and plot.
The realm of presently-formed human animals interacting with each other on this particular moss-covered pebble, which drifts silently through a universe expanding at rates we cannot account for, is certainly worthy of our attention, but it is also rather small compared to the very real, forward-, backward-, and sideways-spinning realms of the imagination." - beatrice.com