Dennis Haritou: Last week’s Story of the Week, I am still playing catch-up, is called “Do You Have a Name” and is by Elisabeth Bloom Albert. It takes place in Paris where an undocumented worker has risked his job and left his post at the lobby desk of a hotel in order to have sex with Emeline, a grateful prostitute, gratis. Emeline is paying him back for saving her from an abusive john. The story coils back to the incident with the john and then spins back further, with some elegance, to display the wider perspective of the unnamed alien’s hard-scrabble life with his two roommates, Abdou and Hamed. Towards the end of the story we return to Emeline and the guy in the hotel laundry room. Then the story concludes with a gentle twist of an ironic knife. Nine pages. Like I said, elegant.
The story is told in second person: “You entered the room, did this, did that.” Where the “you” is this poor smuck trying to cope with a society that doesn’t want him but still needs him. How well this works, I guess, is a matter of taste. I found it wearying after several pages. Especially where the narrative voice enters the guy’s head. “You wondered….” Who is talking here and who is the reader supposed to identify with? Also you have the challenge, which I believe that JR has mentioned to me…or I to him…that the narrator is much more literate than the characters she is depicting and is describing their condition using a command of expression that would be beyond her less well educated subjects.
That’s what I had a problem with. But what I can be enthusiastic about is that Elisabeth Bloom Albert is a power writer. Her prose affected me like a tea infuser. Pour boiling water into the cup and the tea container implodes the golden brown caffeine into the previously vapid liquid and you’ve created Earl Grey. Please excuse the silly simile but I am not writing a college paper. This is just a blog.
The middle section with our hero and his roommates, Abdou and Hamid, was the largest and the most densely imagined. Maybe this section could have been shorter but it’s domestic details that make a life. We learn how this sad little household, of three straight (I presume) males, far from their real families, works. I tried to imagine what it would be like to cook potatoes and eggs that had to last as your food for all week. And then I tried to imagine watching the potatoes turn grey by the end of the week…but you ate them anyway. Like I said, I tried to imagine this. But then I decided that I didn’t want to imagine it. Albert’s story, over the course of a mere nine pages, let me into these characters’ world. It wasn’t a very pretty world. But it was, to this reader, a very real world. You can’t ask for more than that.
And now I am caught up with Narrative Magazine’s Story of the Week!
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