Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima: Review by Jake Casella Brookins
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Ananda Lima (Tor 978-1-25029-297-1, 192pp, $24.99, hc) Cover by Jamie Stafford-Hill. June 2024.
Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is pleasingly hard to classify. One could take the easy route and call it a debut collection – and an exciting one, to be sure, an excellent mix of stories magical, speculative, and wholly grounded. But there’s reason to think of it as something like a fix-up, which I’m always game for: The stories are situated within a larger narrative, framed between interstitial sections that comment on or modify each piece and make the book feel like a unified whole, featuring a metafictional writer as the main character. The truth is somewhere in the middle; I’ve never encountered anything quite like this book, and it is delightful.
There’s a deep playfulness throughout Craft, a sly and sometimes wickedly funny sensibility – befitting, for a book that begins with an admission that “once, back in her twenties, the writer had slept with the Devil.” In between the named short stories are nameless entries, marked only with empty brackets – “get in loser, we’re doing epoché,” perhaps – that chart a kind of higher level of writerly reality. Some of these sections read like rough drafts of the stories that follow, or stories that didn’t even make it to the final cut – more honest, less polished. “Porcelain”, a tragicomic story of a man finding a rat in his toilet – a story that ends with an unexpectedly gut-punching image of loneliness – is preceded by a bracketed section consisting entirely of scratched-out notes for a rat story, for example.
Another entry offers a biting critique of, well, critique: “Idle Hands” consists entirely of notes from the writer’s workshop group, which are by turns sympathetic, insipid, insulting, and just useless. How, one has to wonder, can one write, knowing these kinds of misreaders lie in wait? It’s extremely well-done – I’d call them savage caricatures, but one suspects there’s very little exaggeration. But even here there is playfulness, with the Devil seeming to inhabit one of the characters of the titular story. (This Devil, it should be noted, is more of a genteel trickster figure than a classically infernal Lucifer.) Elsewhere, there are wonderful small flourishes – the writer fighting with typos that slide back onto the page – as well as suddensoul-baring moments of metafictional honesty.
Now living in Chicago, Lima was born in Brazil, and a number of Craft’s stronger stories draw on the parallels between Brazilian and American politics or the sometimes surreal, sometimes mundane horrors of immigration. One of the most striking stories in the collection is “Antropófaga”, in which a hospital worker becomes addicted to eating the tiny people who are available from a cafeteria vending machine. “Tropicália”, despite being a fully realistic story, is soaked in even more dread and anxiety, as an immigrating corporate worker in New York navigates company microaggressions and growing national xenophobia, where a misplaced passport might derail one’s life.
The political context of Trump and Bolsonaro brings reality smashing into the book at points; I was also quite surprised at how effective Lima’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is. I haven’t particularly hidden from pandemic fiction, but nor I have I sought it out – so I was really struck by how well Craft captures the odd mix of feelings, the misinformation, the accurate fears and retrospectively silly concerns we all had through that first year. Although few of the stories dwell on it at length, the pandemic is a rising note in the metatextual sections, underscoring the book as a produced object that came out of a specific time – and, even here, the Devil makes an appearance.
My favorite story in the collection, “Hasselblad: Triptych”, captures much of what I loved about Craft as a whole: a kind of serious playfulness combined with innovative deployment of the actual words on the page. (It’s worth remembering that Lima is an accomplished poet; I highly recommend her first collection, Mother/land.) A seemingly simple story, it begins with the main character, Michele, welcoming the nameless girl who will be staying with her family for a few days. As the story progresses, we get essentially the same sequence repeated three times, with details shifting around between the characters. It’s a distinctly witchy performance, as though Michele were redefining herself and reality on the fly, transferring desirable traits to herself – but there’s nothing villainous here; instead, it’s a kind of clarification, a focusing, one that allows the story’s interest in art, identity, and memory to shine through, and that lets us see its characters in imperfect but intriguing continuity, rather than petty opposition. “Hasselblad: Triptych” is a fractal representation of what Lima’s doing in Craft: a deep, sometimes diabolically clever approach to storytelling, one that is all the richer for how it shows the reader its own devices and plans.
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Jake Casella Brookins is from the Pennsylvania Appalachians, and spent a fantastic amount of time in the woods. He studied biology, before switching over to philosophy & literature, at Mansfield University. He’s been a specialty coffee professional since 2006. He’s worn a lot of coffee hats. He worked in Upstate New York and Ontario for about 8 years. He’s been in Chicago since 2013; prior to the pandemic, he worked for Intelligentsia Coffee in the Loop. Starting in 2021, he’s been selling books at a local indie bookstore. He lives with his wife, Alison, and their dogs Tiptree & Jo, in Logan Square.
This review and more like it in the September 2024 issue of Locus.
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