Taking Flight...or Not
“The Great Mutation” is a short, strange story about the sudden onset of a virus in a village which causes people to spout wings. The first is Isabella and, being young and all, she manages to make effective utilization of this new growth. Her aging father, however, not so much:
“Isabella s father sprouted wings when he was already over fifty. He did not draw great profit from them: with fear and vertigo he took a few lessons from his daughter, and he twisted an ankle in landing. The wings wouldn’t let him sleep, they filled his bed with feathers and down, and he found it difficult to put on his shirt, jacket, and coat. They also were a hindrance when he was behind the counter in the store, and so he had them amputated.”
Nationalism
Nationalist pride in the face of the absurd is in for a heavy swing of the hammer in “The Two Flags.” In concise and effective imagery underlining the absurdity of misplaced national pride, Levi gets right to the point by the third paragraph:
“In all of Lantania’s schools it was taught that the annexation of the volcano by the Gunduwians had been an act of banditry, and that the first duty of every Lantanian was to train militarily, hate Gunduwia with all his might, and prepare for the inevitable and desirable war, which was going to bend Gunduwian arrogance and reconquer the volcano. That this volcano every three or four years devastated thousands of villages and every year caused disastrous earthquakes was of no importance: Lantanic it was Lantanic it must be again.”
Judging
Judging by appearances or with ignorance in tow comes in Levi’s precise literary surgical skills in “Five Intimate Interviews.” To put distance between readers who may not at first realize they are the ones under the microscope, the interviews are being conducted with animals: gull, giraffe, spider, E. Coli and, in this case, a mole:
“Don’t think because you can’t see them from the outside that I haven’t got ears. My hearing is ten times more acute than yours; on a logarithmic scale, of course. I can hear a root grow. I can hear the rustle of a caterpillar. And in order to protect myself from your insufferable racket I have only to descent fifty or sixty centimeters: there I am not to freeze.”
Perception
“The Mirror Maker” is Timoteo. He grows tires of making mirrors that do nothing more exciting than reflecting back the same rigidly constructed perception of reality as reality. He dreams of mirrors that do more; mirrors that ask more of those looking at their reflections:
“Timoteo’s secret mirrors were more versatile. Some were of colored, striated, milky glass: they reflected a world that was redder or greener than the real one, or multicolored, or with delicately shaded contours so that objects or personas seemed to agglomerate like clouds. Some were multiple, made of ingeniously angled thin plates or shards: these shattered the image, reduce it to a graceful but indecipherable mosaic.”
