Unlucky Lucky Days

I was on vacation in San Francisco recently and one of the necessary items on my to-do list was a pilgrimage to City Lights Books. While perusing the shelves, I spied a signed copy of Daniel Granbois' Unlucky Lucky Days. Knowing the man's name and having heard great things about him from trustworthy people, I decided to plunk down some hard-earned cash. Grandbois gave me my money's worth. Even though it is a slim book at 117 pages, Unlucky Lucky Days is packed with 73 short tales. The longest maxes out at three pages, the shortest three sentences. Each one shows a writer so comfortable in his own skin, that he appears flawless at times. Granbois plays around with characters and prose in unique and inventive ways, creating his own genre of absurdist fiction populated with dead (or soon to be dying) humans, living everyday objects, and sentient wild creatures. There are mirrors that long for a different perspective, revenge-seeking middle fingers, and storytelling balls of yarn, all of whom live and breathe as much as any of the human characters in the book. The best pieces - "The Note," "The Yarn," "The Tunnel," and "Almost Borges" -- are more serious in tone, but show great heart and Granbois' adeptness at creating deep, robust stories with very minimalist prose. That is not to detract from the lighter tales such as "Toothpaste, "The Finger," "Three Wise Men," and "Svevo," which showcase the author's dry sense of humor perfectly. And even the stories that don't hit with as much impact (every reader will have their own favorites) still draw you into the strange world of the tale, sometimes in three paragraphs or less. It was while perusing the book in City Lights, that I stumbled on to "The Note" and read the first paragraph: "A note was pinned to a man in his coffin. It said, `I only seem dead.' The man's sister had pinned it there, as she'd pinned it to his pajamas before bed each night -- so afraid was he of being buried alive. With her help, he'd escaped that dreadful fate. She, however, did not." That is all of five sentences and yet it speaks volumes about the characters. I was hooked. Everything that followed, on the flight home, and the subway rides to work, did not disappoint either. It's not often you get to read stories by a writer who can take his work seriously, but seems to be having so much fun with the stories. Completely brilliant.

UNLUCKY LUCKY DAYS, a debut assortment, is fabulist flash-fic of the highest order. Nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages, & in general the work eludes the social & economic demarcations of what we like call "realism." Instead it offers disturbing yet charming shards of unbridled imagination. In a typical metamorphosis, a brass lion's-head knocker takes leave of its doorway, setting off to play middle-school pranks. All told, the collection divvies 73 surreal miniatures among seven sections labeled, as if Grandbois were a good Judeo-Christian, "Sunday" through "Saturday." Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world's common clay. He can be gloomy, suggesting for instance the nightmare morning of 9/11, or he can be healing, turning the Inferno into a Tunnel of Love. Indeed, inspired reversals at the last minute distinguish nearly all these abrupt dream-loops, now childlike, now chilling. These DAYS can create a climactic rush via a well-worked lack of commas & they can arrive at ironies that supply rightness and closure. At their best, they push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then leave us gasping. Now, on occasion, there emerges a world we recognize. "Hat and Rack" might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is "closet"), and "The Sea Squirt" might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness -- the obvious danger here -- masterfully. He may work with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders, yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth (indeed, this text is rife with others, everyone from Borges to Bob Dylan) & in the end they achieve the timelessness of geometry.

Um... WOW. Something tells me that this author LOVES mushrooms... and I'm not talking about the saran-wrapped, grocery store variety, either. HAHAHA Honestly, I LOVED this book. It's the most intelligent, unique thing I've read in a long time. But yes... it's pretty much an acid trip in words. Grandbois has been compared to Dr. Seuss, but I don't think that's quite right. They share creativity, to be certain, but Seuss is much more structured and "sensical." Reading this book was more like analyzing a Salvador Dali painting of indoor clouds or melting clocks. It is pure surrealism in the written form--which I didn't think was even POSSIBLE, so I gotta give some serious kudos. So will YOU like it? I've come up with a three question quiz to help you determine if you will: #1 Do you use the word "weird" as a compliment? (personally, I inherently LOVE things that are weird, so it's about the nicest adjective I know). #2 When you wake up from a truly Alice-in-Wonderland-type dream, do you wish it was ACTUALLY REAL just because of its super-freaky awesomeness? #3 Women--have you ever worn fairy wings in public, not as part of a Halloween costume? (Or men--have you ever wondered what it was like to be a stapler?) If you've answered yes to at least two of these questions, CHECK THIS BOOK OUT. I really can't explain what it's like in words, so I'll include a complete chapter for you to analyze at your own discretion. Here it is: "THE NEWSPAPER "Having been read only once, the usual story, the small-town newspaper was stuffed into a cereal box, slated for the can. It tried to strike up a conversation, but the box couldn't read, no matter the words splattered all over it. "Ah, but, miracle of miracles, the paper was retrieved. It shouted for joy, something it very rarely did, which sounded like this:!. But then the newspaper was separated into three pages and folded and creased in unnatural places. "It became a hat, an airplane, and a sailboat. "'Look at me,' said the hat, perched high on the bald man's head, greedily soaking up the sweat. "'What about meeeeeeeeeeee?' asked the airplane, soaring through the dining room. It had borrowed several e's from different places to ask such a question, as no respectable paper was going to print more than two in a row. With an anticlimactic crinkle, the airplane crashed to the floor. "For no apparent reason, the plane and hat were gathered and lit on fire. "Carrying the news, the boat set sail down a gutter but took on too much water and was soon despondent in the sewer, where the rats, to its horror, could read."

Daniel has a keen sense of the bizarre, often overlooked aspects of life. His stories of stains and hairs are told from a perspective few, if any have the pleasure of seeking and the uniqueness factor is high! Not all will understand his art but anyone who is needing a trip down an unconventional road, try Unlucky Lucky Days.

" Unlucky Lucky Days" is a book of 73 succulent stories. Every word resonates with an allegorical style that opens the doors to an unusual universe of objects and characters-- "The Chair," "The Fish," "The Log," "The Yarn," "New Heaven," "The Urge," "The Left Hand." These stories are astonishing and surreal, satirical and philosophical, and written with great humor. A third of the stories center on humans, but you will meet many other strange creatures here as well, like The Three Cranes--Fly No Oval, Hear No Oval, and Walk No Oval--and the beautiful but doomed giraffe, curiously named Happy Birthday Grandma. From "The Hair:" "When the wind was just right, the hair made throatlike tunnels of itself and imitated birdscalls. `WHIP-poor-WILL... WHIP-poor-WILL,' chirped the hair at twilight, sometimes four hundred times without stopping." "Unlucky Lucky Days" is an absolute treasure! One of my favorite tales is "Greener Pastures," in which a giant man-eating frog, who dreams of becoming an architect, shapes his dung heaps into replicas of the churches he has devoured so that when he leaves "once more for greener pastures, the people [are] stuck there, praying for their own.".