Review: Kafkaesque Time Warping
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 9, 2012
I felt annoyed after finishing "One More Tuesday," the first story from this collection. I wasn't annoyed because the story was bad or frustrating. I was annoyed because I hadn't written it. I think that's the highest praise you can get from a fellow writer."One More Tuesday" follows Josef through less than an hour of a Tuesday morning, actually more than one Tuesday morning, the same morning multiple times. Like the protagonist from the film Groundhog Day, Josef is stuck reliving a segment of time. He wakes up in his apartment, goes to the street outside, converses with an old man walking his dog, and later witnesses a horrible accident in which a streetcar crashes when it runs over the man and his dog. A few minor details differ from day to day. Sometimes Josef wears shoes. Sometimes Alice--a girl living across the hall whom he wants to ask to dinner--is on the streetcar and other times in her flat, but the old man and the little dog always die.[[Josef had tried warning the old man on more than one occasion. Josef had tried stalling the streetcar many times with as many reasons as he could muster, but the driver was a stickler for his schedule. Josef had tried everything he could think of to keep it from happening all over again, but it didn't matter. Every morning, he awoke after a horrible nightmare only to discover the nightmare had not ended. Far from it. It was always beginning anew.]]Josef decides that the only way to break out of the nightmare is to save the old man and his dog, even if that means saving them against their will. Josef succeeds but at what cost to his relationship with Alice? And what about the old man who threatens to go to the police after Josef knocks him out with a punch to the face. How can Josef justify his socially unacceptable behavior without giving the old man and Alice more reason to think him a lunatic? These questions and the endless repetition of Tuesday mornings that precede them leave Josef feeling utterly demoralized. He decides to try again and takes one last drastic step, but will Tuesday morning come again?Fowler's story has a Kafkaesque feel. Josef lives alone in a dreary apartment building. He works at a mind-numbing job in a tile factory. He is frustrated at his inability to ask Alice to dinner. He feels powerless to make positive changes in the drudgery of his life. Even the doors to the apartment building oppose him.[[A spotted bulb in the plastered ceiling sent a dismal glow over the rows of square mailboxes lining the lobby wall, their faded numbers barely legible. At the pair of heavy doors, Josef leaned his weight into one and pushed it open against its will.]]Fowler gives "One More Tuesday" a delicious twist with an ironic turn. Josef's heroic acts to save the old man, to reach out and do a service for a stranger, ultimately undermine Josef's humanity, leading to a horrible crime. Kafka would be pleased with that one."Leap Day," the second story, centers on a young woman named Joan who discovers a time warp in her apartment. In her bedroom and hall, the date is February 29, 2012 but in her living room the date is July 5, 2014. She begins the day with a call from her boss Mateo to tell her that someone has robbed the coffee shop in which they work. When she answers a knock at her door, she finds her boss who now has tattoos and piercings, acts like her boyfriend, and claims the break-in happened two years ago. There are elements of situation comedy in this story--Joan talks to Mateo from 2012 on her phone in the hall while watching the Mateo from 2014 thumbing a magazine in her living room--as she tries to figure out what is going on. She chases 2014 Mateo out of her apartment with a softball bat and then climbs out the window of her apartment so she won't have to cross the timewarp on her way to work. Time warps again as she approaches the coffee shop and her terrifying encounter with the thieves is anything but funny."Leap Day" doesn't have the ironic twists of "One More Tuesday," but like the previous story, it demonstrates how important the linearity and immutability of time are to making sense of our existence. If you're looking for some thoughtful stories with a bit of humor and terror thrown in, Out of Time is the book for you.