On the other hand, we aren’t looking for our day to be too atypical. Scary is not good. We don’t want, for example, a 747 plowing through the roof of our condo while we’re napping.
So we’re constantly balancing repetition and variation, the ordinary and the extraordinary, in an attempt to achieve a pleasing equilibrium.
Within the context of our lives, it’s the job of the artist to maintain that balance while tugging us gently in new directions. He’s obligated to offer us fresh perceptions of the world, variation within repetition, the extraordinary within the ordinary.
This is what Ted Wojtasik does well in his second novel, “Collage” (Livingston Press. 180 pages. $14.95).
Wojtasik is chairman of the Creative Writing Department at St. Andrews College in Laurinburg. His first novel, “No Strange Fire,” received a gold-starred review and “Editors’ Choice 1996” in Booklist.
“Collage” is likely to bring Wojtasik more kudos.
The narrator, Zeljko “Zee” Matejcic, is an American-born Yugoslav living in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s. He’s a young gay man exploring his sexuality about the time AIDs becomes epidemic. He works as an archivist for the National Archives cataloging the letters and journals from Robert Peary’s voyage to the North Pole. And he creates collages from bits and pieces of other lives, puzzling together the past and present into a comprehensible form.
Wojtasik employs a storytelling technique that’s part stream-of-consciousness, part flashback, part poetry to transport the reader seamlessly from the past to the present and back again — all within the space of a few paragraphs, as when Zee describes his father’s reaction to a collage created from family letters while the narrator drifts back to Peary’s experience in the arctic:
“When my father saw the collage, he gulped at the air as though he had been punched in the gut. He clenched his hands into fists. His eyes were spinning.
“‘I remember few more grim and desolate scenes than the environs of Fort Conger as I took them in while being lashed to my sledge, a helpless cripple, on a bitterly cold February morning when I left the fort to return to the ship Windward.’”
“‘How could you have done this?’ His voice erupted into this high-pitched shriek, ‘How can you have done this to my father’s letters.’”
Wojtasik’s spurning of narrative convention for experimentation is completely appropriate in the context of the story he’s telling. And what at first may seem a stylistic artifice only serves to intensify the energy and movement of the narrative while focusing the thematic relationship of the past to the present. By the end of the novel, the reader is engrossed in the flow of storytelling, and much of the emotional impact of the narrative is the product of Wojtasik’s experimental design. Indeed, it’s difficult to envision how the story could be told employing a more predictable approach.
Although the gay subject matter may not be the stuff of the shop-worn initiation tale, the novel’s sexual content is never gratuitous and serves only to increase one’s understanding of and sympathy for the narrator’s lifestyle.
Wojtasik has created a forceful, honest, experimental novel that functions on multiple emotional and intellectual levels and prods the reader into new perceptions of a world that exists outside the commonplace. He’s done his job. There’s little more the sophisticated reader can ask of an author.
Stephen Smith can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
