Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 1.20.2020
Book from: Personal collection
This story appears in the winter 2019 issue of Ploughshares.
In the dim forest cabin, a brown bear stared at me. He sniffed my suitcase. I froze.
The bear looked at me with his deep black eyes. We gazed at each other. No longer afraid of him, I felt a close connection. I watched as he explored the small, rustic room, pawing at the door mat and the bedside rug…
This opening scene is shortly revealed to be a dream, one which conducts the waking narrator to a reminiscence of a past boyfriend, a bearish Communist and fellow college student in 1950’s New York.
I relish, with a kind of voyeuristic hunger, tales of student/bohemian New York life in the 50’s-80’s, and I love the unsettlingly lucid style of this short, regretful story. As those flat yet flowing sentences accumulate, their deadpan tone an imperfect restraint for the off-kilter emotional urgency beneath, it’s impossible to escape a sense of the weight of the narrator’s presence. I could hear her tranced voice in my head, feel unblinking eye contact. I wish I could spend more time with this strange, melancholy, pure narrator, but the story ends painfully soon, after briefly playing out a teasing contrast between different ideas of visions and the miraculous; which brings us back to the dream of the bear.
This story is such an incredible study in tone. I’d love to find more of Amsterdam’s work.