When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds (Novel(La))
Trying to tell you the nature of the place Sasha's book took me would only send you to Sasha's book expecting something, and when you expect something from a book, you've already failed.   I try to move covertly as I approach the perimeter of a book. In the time before I read the book, when I'm not yet reading a book, when the book is sitting on my bedside table, when I'm putting on my pyjamas and brushing my teeth, when I'm setting my alarm, when I'm lying in bed in the dark in the middle of the night knowing that I'm not going back to sleep, when I know that any minute now I'm going to give up trying to sleep and I'm going to reach over and turn on the beside lamp and I'm going to pick up the book that is sitting on my bedside table and I'm going to start reading it, I try to move covertly.   And even as I enter the book, I try to be covert. I try to move up the outside of the book and slide quietly in without noticing that I'm practicing the act of reading. Without noticing I'm doing anything. I try not to notice myself as I enter a book.   And as I continue to read the book, I try to remain covert, unintended, un-arrived.  In the end, Sasha's book silenced me.   I tried to find a way to articulate this silence.   I tried to pick some sentences from the book to share with you, sentences that would make you feel the feeling of silence Sasha's book left me feeling.   But the sentences I picked to try to make you feel the feeling of silence Sasha's book left me feeling left me feeling the way I felt because of the sentences that came before.   And each sentence seemed to lead to the next sentence.   And each sentence seemed to follow from the sentence before.   And, yet, each sentence sat alone and made me ache with the silence Sasha put inside me in a way that stopped me from being able to quote a single sentence that might make you feel the way Sasha's book kept leaving me feeling.   However he did it, Sasha managed to take exceptionally beautiful single sentences and fool me into believing the one followed the other, so that quoting a single sentence seemed a robbery of sorts.  In the end, I won't wind up telling you what I set out to tell you when I set out to tell about Sasha Fletcher's book. What I told you in the beginning, as I set out to tell you about Sasha Fletcher's book, will look now, toward the end of our time together, like a lie; and what I tell you now, here at the end, will look like a lie when you look back at what I set out to tell you when I first set out to tell you what I set out to tell you about Sasha Fletcher's book.   Sasha's book is a lie. It's a lie because it makes sentences work on me in ways sentences should not be able to work on me. It's a lie because it makes me believe that sentences can do things they should not be able to do.   Sasha's book is a lie that makes me hurt in a way I like to be hurt. My writing here about Sasha's book is a way to prolong the hurt, to resurrect the hurt, to make the hurt come back alive and live in me for a little bit longer, because I don't want it to go away. --Ken Sparling, elimaeSasha Fletcher s whimsical first novel(la) is like a bird that visits, flutters, migrates south, circles back, sings again, and finally vanishes in the clouds. It is alive and organic. It has a pulse and wings. While there is whimsy aplenty in these pages, each moment of carefree wordplay actually serves a purpose: it reveals the author s process, it shows us the working mind, the mind at work. She shot me a look. I was impacted by the look. The look made impact with me. These turns of phrase, these twists of sentence disclose Fletcher s editorial instincts, his composing consciousness. I was thinking about being lonely. I was thinking about feeling lonely. I was thinking about worrying about loneliness. I was worrying about loneliness. I was worrying about worry. I was worried. These crafty permutations are satisfying because they echo our internal patterns of thought and of language. To be sure, Fletcher is precise. He has a poet s savvy for rhythm, the Beat s love of the ampersand. His chance rhymes often strike a nerve. You can feel how he is fulfilled by an image, and how his images fulfill. Most impressively, he knows how to arrange the words on the page so that you feel like you re reading art, or poetry, or whatever something tended to, something cared for. This slim volume with its pretty cover feels like an art object, which is nice. So what s the novel(la) about? It s about birds, storms, windows, fire, mail, food, dreams, and marching bands. Essentially, it s a fire-bellied Promethean poet s dream of creative bliss and domestic heaven. It s about grape salads and building beaches. But mostly, it s about a relationship. It s about how a lover keeps her beloved from getting carried away.  That s what I most loved about when all our days are numbered: the intimate peek into a shared space. The dialogue. For a book that is far removed from reality cops fall out of spigots, rainbows stream out of boxes, and flawless skies lie underground the poem does slyly chronicle a love affair. And not just any love affair, but a fresh, young, blithely hopeful one: I wanted to wear you like a skin. I wanted to bury myself inside of you. This is the song of an earnest lover: I opened my mouth as wide as it would go. I wanted to put her in it and keep her safe. The book s finest moments are comprised of the dialogue between the narrator and his lover. And ironically, for all the novel s whimsy, it s this gritty, real stuff that hits home. Love is wanting her to go on. As I read, I began to identify with the narrator s beloved, who unfortunately remained forever obscured behind the narrator s endless fancies and aloof absentmindedness. Come down from there, she says. No, he says. But she, or rather we, the beloved slash reader, we too can express ourselves, we too have a voice, we too can get carried away. Are you listening she said? I am I said Listening. Good she said. Good, indeed. It s good to listen. For how else do we ever keep each other from getting carried away? --Paul Charles Griffin, The Brooklyn RailSasha Fletcher deals in extremes. In When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets But We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds, there are only a couple characters and there are a lot of characters. There is very little happening and there is a lot happening. A man (husband? boyfriend?) is telling a woman (wife? girlfriend?) with some kind of affliction (blindness?) and extended story, a fantastic run-on where birds are plucked from within stomachs, whales swallow cruise ships, clouds and waterfalls insinuate themselves into the narrative at random. The only thing that appears to be important to the storyteller is momentum and excitement, almost as if he doesn t have time to worry about plot and character, almost as if there will be real consequences to face if he doesn t keep the story moving, if he doesn t keep his audience interested and invested in what s happening. Plot lines get abandoned and new ones get created, old ones get picked up again and attempts are made to connect them with the new ones. It s like spending an afternoon in a backyard with a kid with ADD, but in a good way, like only in the exciting and engaging way that kids with ADD can be. When is a different kind of love story, one where the love between a man (with a thought process like that of a slinky falling down an endless set of stairs) and his audience is the only thing that isn t heavily expanded upon. There is no explanation as to why he s telling her these stories, you're left to figure that one out on your own. It's not that Fletcher is refraining from insulting your intelligence by spelling things out for you, it s that he s got more interesting things to think about, say, a marching band procession leading a boat-full of people out of a whales mouth and down the street. It could be a mistake to call this book whimsical. Whimsy has a bad connotation. When a writer tries to be whimsical it can often feel like they re jerking you around, like they re trying to have fun and be like a child again, which can be annoying because the writer is clearly old enough to have kids of their own and they should just grow up already. When does not contain this type of whimsy. It s a whimsy that deals with real emotions, a whimsy that deals sex and death, with love and loneliness, fear and anxiety. Whimsy has a connotation of lightness, of airy frivolity. Fletcher deals with tangible, life-changing things in a style that is, on its face, whimsical. But underneath, it s a voice that has a deep understanding of what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive and constantly living in the moment, always moving forward. --Chris Heavener, Annalemma