Occasionally leaping into the near future, but often ruminating dimly on an unsustainable present, David Bassano’s ALTIPLANO AND OTHER SHORT STORIES is a series of vignettes about people who can’t go on. Exploring an environmentally ravaged technocracy as vividly as small-town Pennsylvania or rural Mexico, ALTIPLANO portrays human beings in the clear-eyed moments—sometimes hopeful, often not—when they finally understand the world around them and the systems which define that world.
The circumstances of Bassano’s stories are often grim: a man struggling to care for a chronically ill wife; a townie in an unfulfilling relationship desperate not to become another uninspired middle-aged dad; a father and son who refuse to conform to the demands of a technocracy. But these grim circumstances are fascinatingly and compellingly laid out with agile prose—sometimes evoking Hemingway in its staccato frankness (“Now I was broke and hungry and alone, and the tequila was gone and I was driving through the altiplano near Real de Catorce on the last of the gas”); sometimes striking and almost whimsical (“To be a caveman in the late 21st century was a difficult and monotonous sentence to bear”); sometimes confident, calm, and alert (“The trees changed from sugar maple and elm to hemlock and balsam fir as he climbed. It was very quiet; when he stood still, he could hear the thin patter of the thick flakes falling and the wind in the branches”). In both the content of its stories and the flow of its language, the collection strikes a satisfying balance between diversity and consistency, maintaining the reader’s interest while adding layers of complexity to its images and themes.
ALTIPLANO also derives great interest from mining very modern thematic material. “Seeing Trails” is a classic story of an arrogant man pitting himself against nature (and often getting the worst of it), and “The Dead Don’t Pay” has some of the quiet desperation of Giovanni Verga. ALTIPLANO also frequently returns to the world of borders, one amongst many systems that seem divorced from human concerns. “I-589” lays this out best, portraying a political asylum-seeker from Egypt imprisoned in the US while he awaits a hearing—dependent on the goodwill of an NGO to navigate a byzantine system of judges’ personalities and endless paperwork. Stories like this contrast with others (“Altiplano,” “Mejor Solo Que Mal Acompañado”) where Americans move with conspicuous privilege through other countries—the political and cultural muscle of the US acting like gravity to rearrange objects around them. In this convoluted, lopsided system of power relations, the few spots of hope (“The Silver Cross of Taxco”) are welcome and brilliant.
With its confident prose and clear vision of humanity, ALTIPLANO is thoughtful, beautiful, and readable.
David Bassano’s ALTIPLANO AND OTHER SHORT STORIES evokes a very modern malaise with well-imagined scenarios rendered in muscular prose.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader