In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss | Book Review
“The Rose in Twelve Petals” begins Theodora Goss’s newly-in-paperback collection In the Forest of Forgetting, and the story makes an ideal introduction to the the author’s work. A retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, it frames and then re-frames our expectations. The initial recognition of the familiar story pulls us into the the fairy tale mindset: of stories that map the small journeys and decisions that can unexpectedly lead to major life changes; of characters and encounters that we understand to be meant not quite literally, yet not as simple allegory either. As the story progresses, the postmodern telling of the tale, the way that every character and every side are given voice (reminiscient of Pamuk’s My Name is Red), the way that the subtext of classic fairy tales — gender, class, politics in the largest sense of the word — are literalized, all serve to pull fairy tales into modernity, into history (often but not always our own). This mixture of old and new modes of storytelling recurs in the collection’s other fifteen stories: there are times, settings, characters and themes that appear again and again, similar but different, the original fairy tales of a multitude of parallel worlds. Throughout, Goss’s storytelling palette is made up of the strange day-to-day patterns of individual wants and desires, the certainties and uncertainties that make up our daily lives.
So it is with “Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold,” where the titular professor is given the chance to choose between the certainty of his humdrum, largely failed academic and personal life, and the uncertainty of passing beyond an ambiguous threshold into a new level of existence. And so it is with the World Fantasy Award-nominated “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm,” about a man building a glider to reach an airborne city where his art will be appreciated (art and the appropriate audience for art are other recurring themes in the collection). For both Meister Wilhelm and Professor Berkowitz it is uncertainty, a lack of faith, that is the enemy of the artist.
“Why aren’t we going to the top?” I asked.
He looked over the edge of the plateau. […] “That rock, he is high. I will die if the glider falls from such a height. Here we are not so high.”
The flip side (Goss again showing multiple sides to many stories) is seen in a pair of tales set in the author’s native Hungary. In “Letters from Budapest,” an art student rebels against the dull, utilitarian view of painting enforced by the Party’s Art Committee. Lured by the thrill of artistic certainty offered by a decadent painter in hiding, he horrifically discovers that there are choices even more creatively sapping than following the Party line. It’s a good story, and a brave one. “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” is very much a parallel tale, of a similar place at a perhaps somewhat later time. A sparsely poetic, coldly beautiful epistolatory story, “Sorrow” is concerned with the certainty of revolutionary movements — aesthetic, and thus inescapably political — and the uncertainty that comes from rejecting conformity with them. I was reminded of Spook City’s fall to the Nothing in Ende’s The Neverending Story, as the silent revolution of entropy advanced across the artist’s community of Szent Endre. The sun now shines with only a “vague luminescence,” writes the nameless letter-writer who has refused to join the movement, and “I sit…not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow.”
Death is life’s great certainty; no surprise that the big D enters into many of these tales. Cancer is one of modern life’s foremost uncertainties, and it, too, figures prominently here. It figures most prominently in the collection’s title story, “In The Forest of Forgetting,” where a woman diagnosed with “lumps” casts aside the certainty of past roles — Patient, Daughter, Wife, Mother (which largely represent the cast of Goss’s new fairy tales, replacing Kings and Queens, Knights and Princesses) — in a mythologized journey toward a new, uncertain role and place. It is as heroic as it is tragic. “Lily, with Clouds” shows a similar journey from an outside observer’s viewpoint, as the so-certain worldview of a small town Southern matriarch is fractured when her prodigal sister returns home to die. If there is an unambiguous statement in Goss’s collection, it is expressed here:
“It’s frightening, if you think about it too hard. Maybe art always is.”
Mind you, Goss’s stories aren’t all grim. “Sleeping with Bears” is the delight of the collection, as the sister of a new bride goes from uncertainty (“I don’t understand why [my sister] decided to marry a bear”) to certainty (“I finally understand why my sister is marrying a bear”) in a story that pokes at notions of gentry and family history in the American South, while literalizing some of the earthy sexuality of classic fairy tales. “The Belt” also touches on issues of class, gender and sex, continuing the familiar fairy tale of the male noble who marries a beautiful common woman past the usual ending of and they lived happily ever after. In fact, what “The Belt” does is replace the certainty of that typical fairy tale ending with an equal certainty, grounded in modern notions of psychology and class, that no such unilaterally happy ending could now be possible when both sides are considered. The story is presented with such a feeling of earnest good advice, however, of empowerment for both women and men, that to me it felt optimistic rather than pessimistic — some new, truer form of happy ending, the story suggests, may now be possible. Your mileage may vary.
I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. […] But I do not know which moral is the correct one. And that is also the way of a fairy tale.
The stories ment