The Din of Celestial Birds

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other. In one, a character imagines that a bird has been calling his name for six consecutive nights—and perhaps a bird actually has. A dead child is brought back to a stuttering and incomplete life, while a dictator refuses to admit that he is dead even as he is being buried. A scientist works in isolation to try to cheat death. An ex-Nazi wanders in and out of the jungle, having become a different sort of nightmare. These stories offer the gestures and satisfactions that would come to define Evenson's later work, but also suggest other paths he might have taken and reveal how indebted his fiction is to writers such as Ben Okri, Sony Labou Tansi, and writers of the Latin American Boom. And as Leslie Norris suggests, "They are written, too, in a faultlessly efficient prose, so we see these strange worlds in the clearest and coldest of lights."