Intimations
Alexandra Kleeman
[Harper]
André Breton describes surrealist objects as “repositories, in art, of that miraculous charm, which we long to recapture.” One way to approach Alexandra’s Kleeman’s thickly layered and often cryptic story collection is through this absurdist legacy: by appreciating the enigmatic charm of the “things” dotted throughout her fictions. Dazed and world-drunk, her characters gravitate toward everyday objects – knives, doors, food, furniture – to navigate their shifting, dreamlike narratives. In stories like ‘A Brief History of Weather’, ‘Rabbit Starvation’, and ‘Intimation’, Kleeman shapes densely symbolic tales and displaces narrative interiority onto material spaces: a hermetically sealed family home, a room of rabbits, an entrapping dollhouse. Kleeman’s greatest strength here is in leaving the life of her things – and her characters – alien, enchanted and unexplained. She skillfully allows forms and feelings to amass uncomfortably within the reader; to persist outside the limits of their story. But these stories also suffer from strange-by-numbers syndrome. The prose can feel too studied, too knowingly abstruse. Kleeman worries away at image-clusters so similar – bodies as hollow absences, faces as moldable putty – that they sometimes come off as complacent repetitions rather than urgent, recurring concerns.
But as the collection builds, stories get told in wildly varied settings (and even genres), and Kleeman’s talents radiate. Finally, abstract thingliness becomes emotionally and even ethically charged, as we are made to face the consequences of the violent objectification of animals, women and all that is other, and to fantasise about the rupture of boundaries: “how wonderful to be able to melt the shape from things that belong so smugly to themselves”.
Words – Gill Moore
