Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird - Agustina Bazterrica

 

I really enjoy short stories, and I probably read around 200 of them a year. Some are standalones culled from magazines, but most come from the half-dozen or so short story compilations that I read every year. I started reading short stories primarily as a way to "test drive" an author's prose style, but I've long since become a fan of the genre itself and the reading experience that can only come from short fiction. All that said, I can't remember the last time I was left so horrified, mystified, frustrated, or pleased by a single collection of stories as I was by Agustina Bazterrica's Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird. 

I suppose I should have seen it coming. After all, the Scribner publicity describes the book as a "collection of twenty brutal, darkly funny short stories" that "takes readers into their deepest fears and most disturbing fantasies." I agree with all of that except for the publisher's use of the word "funny." And it's not as if there are no really excellent stories in the collection either, because there are several. What strikes me as so unusual is that even though I loved a few of the stories, I equally despised as many as I thought were top-notch. The extreme contrast in my reaction to the stories is what I will remember most about the book.

The last story in the collection, "The Solitary Ones," about a young woman trying to make her way home on New Year's Eve's last train of the night is my favorite of the twenty. Bazterrica builds the tension in this one slowly, but steadily, until the young woman simply keeps making one bad decision after another because she is fast running out of options. 

Among the others I really like is "The Dead," a story about a little girl searching for ways to reunite her dead mother and her still very much alive father. This is one of those stories that a director with Alfred Hitchcock's skills and temperament could do so much with today. Others I enjoyed are "Perfect Symmetry," a prison story in which Bazterrica's imagery is memorable despite the brutality that evokes it, and "Earth," one of the saddest stories I have read in a long, long time.

But there are also some stories that made me feel nothing but revulsion, and that's probably exactly what the author was going for with stories about the sexual abuse of children, self-mutilation, and animal abuse. "Roberto," "The Continuous Equality of the Circumference," "A Hole in the House," "Hell," and "Mary Carminum," come to mind. And then there are stories so obtuse (like "Architecture" and "Unamuno's Boxes") that I can only guess about her intent. 

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird is not necessarily a bad short story collection. Bazterrica wanted to shock and horrify the reader with a group of stories that define in the darkest terms imaginable what it means to be a human being. In that, she most certainly achieved her goal.

Agustina Bazterrica jacket photo