Oliver Zarandi, Soft Fruit in the Sun, Hexus
Press, 2019.
In this provocative
debut collection, Oliver Zarandi introduces a new hybrid genre
perhaps best defined as ‘tender body-horror’, in which frank and
naturalistic explorations of familial, romantic and sexual
relationships are juxtaposed with characters who bleed incessantly,
or live in other people’s bodies, or eat furniture, or casually
conspire with their lovers to kill families and animals alike (“Fuck
reptiles too, I say… Fuck ducks and geese”).
Soft Fruit in the
Sun couches modern truths in darkly-comic parables that bite like
unseen teeth. By turns funny and absurd and quietly grotesque, as
affecting as they are razor-sharp, Zarandi’s stories play out in a
universe both like and unlike ours. A world where grief, the
inherently dysfunctional dynamic between men and women, poverty, body
image, toxic masculinity, eroticism and mental illness all recur,
steeped in dream logic and cut through with a dry, ironic wit.
Lovers of Lydia
Davis, Carmen Maria Machado, and the strangeness of Dino Buzzati and
Roland Topor will devour Soft Fruit in the Sun like manna.
Throat / Place / Tender: Oliver Zarandi’s Tender Body Horror
Soft Fruit in the Sun, an anthology of Oliver Zarandi's writing about
bodies -- women's, men's, his own, and others -- has just been
published by Hexus Press. As a writer and the editor of Funhouse, a
journal of stories and art about the weird and anatomical, Zarandi's
work deals with the absurdity of occupying a flesh-and-blood human
shape. Drawing on his own experiences with disordered eating, his
surreal, macabre, and wryly hilarious stories inhabit the realm of
'tender body horror' where characters bleed incessantly, or eat
furniture, or conspire casually on first dates to kill family and
animals alike.
“These stories
have the feel of something found and dark, as if spelled out in
broken twigs on the floor of an ancient forest” — Ben Loory
“Zarandi’s
writing happens at the crossroads of brutality and tenderness. It is
cause for alarm, and reason for celebration” — Bud Smith
"Surreal and
disquieting... blending a humanistic approach with a penchant for the
grotesque" — Volume 1 Brooklyn
"Macabre, and
wryly hilarious... deals with the absurdity of occupying a
flesh-and-blood human shape" — i-D
Full disclosure: I
blurbed Oliver Zarandi’s new collection Soft Fruit in the Sun, so
I’m not exactly an impartial observer when it comes to his writing.
But that’s not a bad thing: Zarandi is a writer worth championing,
someone whose writing takes readers to wholly unexpected places and
revels in bizarre yet familiar imagery. And so we talked about the
making of his collection, the writers he admirers most, and what his
take is on the current Premier League season.
Both with the
writings in Soft Fruit in the Sun and some of the work you’ve
published at Vol.1 Brooklyn, you’ve pushed at the limits of certain
forms — essays that read like fiction, fiction that uses the
structure of an essay. What draws you to those liminal spaces? And
when did you first begin experimenting with structure in this way?
I just want the work
to be fun to read. If that means writing it like a list, then so be
it. I went to university to study writing back in 2014, but I dropped
out. I remember my teacher just talking about writers like Richard
Ford and so on and when I read Ford, I thought yes, this is good
writing, but it’s not me. Why do I need to write this way? It’s
like a lot of these MFA courses. I remember one of the teachers on
the course invited us all into her office. I won’t name the writer,
but she’s well known, let’s put it that way. She said ‘none of
you will become writers’. I thought, wow, you’re being paid to
say this shit. She then said, look, short stories should always be at
least 8000 words. Again – why? What if I wanted to write one that
was 100 words long? I just hated all these made up rules on writing.
All those disappointed faces in her office. If it’s interesting,
it’s interesting. I experiment with the way a story is because
that’s the only way I know how to say what’s in my head. I read a
lot and try and write in a way that can only be me. I don’t want to
write a New Yorker story – I want to write my story and if somebody
wants to publish it, great. If not, then I’m not upset.
At what point in the
writing process does the structure come into focus? Do the themes of
a story come first, or does the way the story will be arranged?
I always read a few
short stories before I even start writing. I underline them, I digest
them and then when I begin, I always believe it should fall into
place. It doesn’t. Everything about the way I approach writing is a
shit show. My brain is just too packed and my left arm twitches a
lot. I’ll take huge breaks and think, think, think and then go back
to it. I sometimes just test myself and write a first sentence. I
just go for it and see where each sentence takes me. A lot of the
time these experiments take me absolutely nowhere. Dead ends. But a
few times, a good story comes out of it and, looking back on some of
these stories, I have no idea how I even got to that point.
“The Chair,” for
example, was all written by hand because I broke my laptop. I’d
been watching a documentary about Hugh Hefner and thought ‘what if
Hugh Hefner were a 5 year old child, a real piece of shit and visited
the Wild West?’ So I started writing it that way and the story came
from it that way.
A story like
“Blood!,” however, was written in San Francisco. I could only
afford a soup that day and it was pretty cold, so I sat down outside
a cafe near the Castro and sipped my soup. I looked inside a cafe and
a very overwhelming woman was shouting and laughing and I could see
food stuck in the corners of her mouth. A lot of people were looking
at her as if to say who is this woman? Why is she here? So I started
writing that story. But it was boring. So I changed it and put this
large woman inside of a bath tub because she bleeds all the time.
What could be more annoying, I thought, than somebody bleeding all
the time in your favourite cafe? But the story is about those
intrusive thoughts too, about how we do sometimes want to remove
people from our society. All those people in that cafe that day, just
looking like they wanted to kill this outsider. What gives them the
right? Why are we all so territorial?
I’m sometimes
amazed at how dumb people can be and if you want to really know a
good writing starting point, it’s the fact I can’t figure out why
the human race – one I like quite a lot – can be so cruel and
fucking stupid at the same time.
The title Soft Fruit
in the Sun is both eminently descriptive and a little unsettling.
When in the process of putting this collection together did it become
apparent that it was the title that worked best for the book?
I wanted a title
that was a little less abrasive than the original title I had in
mind. I’m actually too embarrassed to tell you what it was, but
trust me when I say it was dog shit. I’m inspired by paintings a
lot of the time and have a bunch of books on that right in front of
me. I need to have those images in front of me, to reference as I
write. So the idea of soft fruit in the sun actually came from a
still life painting I saw in a massive art book. I’m working on a
second collection of short stories right now called Women And Men In
Different States of Unrest and this was inspired firstly by a few
paintings I saw by Falk Gernegross and from reading too much Grace
Paley.
Some of your work —
I’m thinking of “Blood!” in particular — takes the visceral
to a surreal level. What draws you to this convergence of the
visceral and the weird?
It began with my
eating disorder. I didn’t eat solid food for years – literally
years – and, oddly enough, this brought me a lot closer to my body.
I’d focus on each part of my body like they were chapters in a
book, scenes on a DVD. I started watching horror films. Dawn of the
Dead, Day of the Dead. The Fly. Basket Case. Zombie Flesh Eaters. But
there were films like Taxi Driver, Spoorloos, Irreversible, Le
souffle au cœur, Ichi The Killer, films that, at the time, opened
things up for me.
But in terms of
books, I’ve always been drawn to the weird, the gothic. I read out
of compulsion a lot of the time, sometimes with 5, 6, 7 books on the
go. It’s odd and unsettling and very painful to carry that many
books around. But when I was younger – say, 18 – I was obsessed
with writers I like to call masculine. Bukowski, Joyce, Salinger,
Fante. And as much as I still enjoy some of those books, you start to
see how ugly and privileged some of that writing is.
I think mostly all
of my favourite writers are women now. Grace Paley changed the way I
look at sentences and dialogue. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is
great, but The Violent Bear It Away is one of the most disturbing
books I’ve ever read. It is all about the body – in a religious
sense and in a meaty way too. It starts with a corpse and, if you
haven’t read it, the ending still makes me want to vomit. I love
it. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Sula, two masterpieces that
are unlike anything I’ve read before. I like writing things that
will make people laugh too, so reading writers like John Jodzio,
Patrick DeWitt and Ottesa Moshfegh, Miranda July, Amy Hempel. And
then there’s Amelia Gray. Gutshot was unlike anything I’d read
and spoke to me in a very personal way. I think back to that writer
at the university who said short stories needed to be 8000 words and
Amelia just shits on that. Her stories are hilarious. I met her and
Ben Loory a few weeks ago in LA and they were lovely people. We ate
some cake.
Certain elements of
modern technology work their way into your fiction — the dating app
in “A Tragic Life,” for instance — while other examples of it
feel timeless. As a writer, how beholden do you feel to the specifics
of a particular time and place?
It’s an odd one,
because I do try and keep modern things out of my stories – but I
guess it’s inevitable. In these stories, I found it difficult to
put names to a lot of the characters. I wanted them to all blend into
each other. If I do use names, I will mostly always use the same
names, again and again.
So in Soft Fruit in
the Sun, I wanted to be outside of this things we call 2019 and just
exist in this odd space where people are nameless or where you’re
never sure what city it’s taking place in. I’d love to say this
was a Beckett influence or something, but it wasn’t at all. When I
was sick all those years ago, when I wasn’t eating, I would get
quite delirious. I felt like I was floating for 5 or 6 years and that
the city I’m from – Wolverhampton – wasn’t a real place at
all, but a sort of prison. Those years have all, strangely, collapsed
in on one another like a compressed accordion. Sometimes I can
stretch it back out and look in on it all, but it always snaps back
shut. So the idea of time and place definitely comes from this
feeling of isolation and illness, of feeling completely helpless in
ones body.
I think for the next
collection, though, I’m already moving away from this. I saw a
painting of a Polish dwarf in the National Portrait Gallery for
example and wrote a story about him, about his life. I did a bit of
research too, but I’m fascinated by real figures from the past.
Imagine E.L. Doctorow but if he had a fixation on boils and genitals
and syphilis.
Closing with a
sports question: where do you see Wolverhampton finishing this
season?
I’d say after
beating Man City last week, Wolves have maybe got the kick-start
their season needs. I’d say 8th or 9th – definitely top half. It
won’t quite be the same as last year and we didn’t invest in
enough proven players this time round, but they’re a great team.
Now, my question for you is where do you think Spurs will finish?! - Tobias Carroll
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