The Gurugu Pledge

August 7, 2017
“Two,” the story that opens Walsh’s imaginative collection, is an apt introduction to its landscape of lonely challenges, failed loves, and intractable burdens. Expecting to die the following year, the story’s protagonist polishes an intertwined pair—whether they are objects or creatures remains opaque—for display on a lonely road, hoping for a rendezvous that will finally take the duo away. The narrator concedes that it, or they, “cannot love me,” adding, “But looking into their little wooden eyes, I must believe it can.” “Travelling Light,” another narrative juxtaposing isolation and obligation, follows the progress of a shipment being transported from London to continental Europe, shrinking from container size to crumbs by the time it arrives in Athens, where a return shipment awaits. Unabashedly fascinated by language, Walsh excels at devising situations that illuminate its quirks, gifts, and limits; while a few pieces are little more than clever premises, the rest are rich with sharp prose and provocative insight. In the title story, for example, an unnamed narrator links a relationship’s dissolution with a global trajectory into wordlessness: grammar dissolves, homeless men sleep under unprinted newspapers, and “the first wordless president” (whose gender cannot be named and therefore doesn’t matter) campaigns via gaze. With the failure of words comes a certain liberation. “Yes it is quiet,” the penultimate sentence reads, “but we are still thinking.”

Starred review from August 1, 2017
Unsparingly observant and disconcertingly sharp, Walsh's (Vertigo, 2016, etc.) latest short story collection is an eerily matter-of-fact chronicle of our own impending doom.There is loss (literal, figurative) at the center of each of Walsh's surprisingly playful stories, which read less like narratives--though they are--than like parables or prose poems: surreal in their elegance, too slippery and strange to fit into more conventional bounds. In the title story, a woman explains to a former lover why she won't be writing him anymore: because there are literally no words. "Communication went out of fashion," she writes, at "about the same time as we stopped speaking," but then words, she considers, were always inadequate anyway, demanding more words to explain their damage. In "Two Secretaries," a recent graduate working--very temporarily, she is sure--as a self-styled "clerical assistant" explains the rift between herself and a colleague, an actual secretary. "We may look alike," she assures us, "but we are not." In "Hauptbahnof," a woman takes up indefinite residence in a Berlin train station, waiting for a person who is not waiting for her. Still, she is, like all of Walsh's women, painstakingly practical in her delusion: the biggest problem with living in limbo in the station, she reflects, is the difficulty of recharging her phone. Also, perhaps, the price of water. "Exes," which lasts less than a page, is a meditation on a fraught email signoff; in "Femme Maison," a woman, now single, expands to fit the demands of her house, feeling, for the first time, both ownership of the space and debt to it. Arresting in their otherworldly simplicity, Walsh's stories are lonely but never sentimental; grief may haunt her prose, but it is as a fact and not a feeling. A singular reading experience that leaves a mark.

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