A bearable lightness of things: Tabish Khair reviews Carlo Pizzati’s A History of Objects

The first story in this collection, ‘The Hard Drive’, is initially misleading, for it seems to be a prelude. Then one reads the other stories and realises that they all stand independent of one another; they are narrated by different voices, at times playing with autobiographical elements. But in some ways, ‘The Hard Drive’ is still a prelude: it introduces the reader to the thought process informing this collection.

‘The Hard Drive’ is narrated by a person who claims to be always right, and who is mnemonically recovering stories from files of fiction and photos that he lost after his hard drive collapsed. It later turns out that he was instrumental in that collapse, but what the story indicates is a certain relationship to reality: “My job now is to describe this person, to reconstruct him and, to begin, what I can tell you is that all his friends, his family and his acquaintances hate the fact that he’s almost always right.”

This last line of the story is both indicative and purposefully misleading: both this story and many others that follow suggest the plasticity of stories and the irony in any claim to recover reality.

Play on fiction and reality

The stories revolve around different objects: a coconut-scraper, a diaper, a mask, a leash, etc. However, they are not focussed solely on the object. ‘The Coconut-Scraper,’ for instance, is an account narrated to a conceptual artist of a coconut-scraper, said to be the representation of a martyred proselytiser. It turns out, towards the end, that the account of the martyr is fabricated, giving the story — and this is a common feature of some other stories too — a rather anecdotal turn that, nevertheless, is redeemed by its play on fiction and reality: “Does it matter if it is true?” The answer that this story suggests, despite its ironical ending, is ‘no.’ I have serious differences with this answer, but it is the preferred answer of our generations and age, particularly those who insist, like the narrator of ‘The Hard Drive,’ on being always right about the truth.

Though the stories are staggered over a few decades (and scattered around many countries), some of them also engage with the pandemic. ‘The Mask’, narrated by an adolescent and set in the early months of the pandemic in Italy, ends in aporia — one does not know if the narrator is infected or not. This seems disappointing until one notices that it is appropriate to the times and the virus. However, another pandemic story, ‘The Hand Sanitizer’, is far more anecdotal or incidental.

A certain slightness

This leaning towards anecdotal stories is both the strength and the weakness of this collection. It confers a lightness of touch on the better stories, usefully underplaying the serious or tragic undertones. But sometimes it can lead to a slightness, especially when the many different voices narrating the tales have a similar tone and pitch. This exists despite the obvious fluency of the narration, or maybe because of it, and the occasional flashes of description that linger in memory: “The days stumbled over each other like people at a crossroad looking at their phones.”

I preferred those stories, meandering though they tended to be, which tried to suggest something more elusive. For instance, ‘The Portrait’, obviously a play on Oscar Wilde’s famous novella, works through an initially rambling narration about a young man’s obsession with an older woman, and his relationships with her son and daughter, to finally suggest the mysteries of time and personality. The best stories are those that, like ‘The VHS Tape’, combine an unexpected anecdote connected to the ‘object’ with an open ending which suggests more than it says.

The objects seldom appear in their thingness. The focus is rather on their ‘history’, or, in effect, on a story that envelops the object or connects to it. At the same time, the story is not necessarily bound to the object: one can imagine many other stories enveloping the same object. In all this, the collection seems to exemplify the post-modern celebration of storytelling, with some stories embracing it and some uneasy about it.

But despite the unease, this celebration has survived the wave of story-making politicians across the world. It will be interesting to see if it survives the more homicidal stories of the pandemic too; for instance, the ones that exhort people not to take the vaccine.

The reviewer is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.