In the grand tradition of experimental fabulists like Donald Barthelme and Ben Marcus, Yarrow Paisley’s audacious story collection I, NO OTHER gathers ten deliriously unhinged tales that plumb the depths of the psyche’s more disordered precincts. Employing an exuberantly baroque prose style shot through with seams of mordant wit, Paisley conducts an unsettling exploration of themes encompassing identity’s mutability, the tyranny of libido, and the fundamental unreliability of language as a medium for conveying stable meaning.
The collection of ten stories careens through landscapes populated by such improbable entities as a flâneur (a wanderer among urban spaces) who “infiltrates” the lives of various characters and leaves chaos in his wake, a consciousness who observes twenty years of visitors and memories, and a lovelorn adolescent whose erotic fixation on her imaginary brother transmutes into a sapphic obsession with a snake-limbed siren. In the metafictional “Reinformation Theory,” a Barthelme-esque scientist runs afoul of his own theoretical framework when his simulated realities begin to contaminate one another. There’s also “Lynx: A Chronicle,” which charts a guilt-stricken narrator’s ritualistic observations of a mother cat after accidentally killing one of her kittens—transforming everyday feline behaviors into ceremonial encounters laden with an almost religious significance.
Paisley’s linguistic pyrotechnics dazzle and disorient in equal measure with profoundly unreliable narrators whose perceptions are warped by delusion, hallucination, and dreamlike dislocations in time and space. In “The Revised Minutes,” for instance, the narrator—confined to a psychiatric ward—compulsively revises his life story through multiple versions of events involving characters like Miranda, Carlotta, and Olivetta, transforming trauma into a sort of abstract poetry: “Miranda is not here. Olivetta is innocent. I commit no crimes. I require a pencil. I require my pills.” Paisley’s prose veers vertiginously between clinical observation and fevered confession, the narrator’s compulsive revisions moving between various incidents and identities while repeatedly returning to his fundamental needs: “The minutes will transpire. Be patient. Perhaps in some degree this disappointment will abate. But let me request my pills. Minutes march rabid through the stillness of this room sometimes.”
While I, NO OTHER showcases Paisley’s prodigious gifts for challenging traditional forms—fragmenting into recursive simulations, shifting between corporeal and spiritual planes, or compulsively revising their own premises—the collection may prove too opaque and disorienting for readers seeking conventionally plotted narratives. However, people who like experimentation and the unexpected should enjoy their stay in this book. Just don’t expect to find your way out easily.
Readers seeking standard narratives may find the fractured realities and linguistic acrobatics of Yarrow Paisley’s I, NO OTHER too disorienting. However, those who relish fiction that defies expectations and pushes boundaries will find themselves right at home.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader