The Cathedral of Mist

The Cathedral of Mist by Paul Willems
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Willems was called "A sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino". I don't take this lightly, as Calvino is one of my favorite authors of all time. So I went into this little volume reading with my emotional and intellectual guards up.

They didn't stay up for long. They couldn't. What my heart shielded me from, my mind let slip past. And when my thoughts were strong, I melted, emotionally. These works wove their way through me until I thought, by the end, that perhaps I was the titular Cathedral of Mist.

The opening story,"Requiem for Bread," is sorrowful and beautiful, a plaintive story of love, longing, and death. The title acts as a kind of magnifying glass to the tale itself, focusing one in on its disarming simplicity, while opening the reader to a shocking, yet touching, emotional state. It is a dream of a story; exquisite.

"An Archbishop's Flight" is a journey into northern decadence, as if Huysmans had gone to the arctic to die and kept a journal until the very end. A delightful dream-state vignette. There was no real plot to speak of, but that isn't the point of this type of story, is it?

"Cherepish" is agonizing tragedy distilled down to the last paragraph. What a gut-punch! The dreamlike imagery and slow, methodical pace caused me to let my emotional guard down even further, then "Pop!" - like an unexpected kick straight to the ghoulies! This story broke me. It left me on my knees, in agony, wondering what hit me.

"In the Horses Eye" is a beautiful and awe-full story narrated in a voice somewhere between Algernon Blackwood and Calvino. Gorgeous and dark, this story venerates the power of words and our potential intimacy with them.

"The Palace of Emptiness" is . . . "squicky" is the word that comes to mind. An abandonment of love for the soul-shattered void of co-dependence. There is no hope in this story. None at all. It is the most uncomfortable thing I've read in a while. Horror writers would do well to look, not at the subject matter here, but the emotional state generated by Willems' words. When your writing leaves the reader in the same state, you might just have something worth publishing there.

"The Cathedral of Mist" is compelling and smacks strongly of Borges. It isn't quite magic realism, nor is it truly "surreal" in the strictest sense. But it is weird, rife with things that should not be, but are. This isn't to say that it is a dark tale. Far from it. I found it rather light and airy, despite the ominous title and explicitly dark setting. But there is, because of this strange optimistic taint, a strong sense of loss, in the end. And, in fact, this story is, really, all about loss: The tangible evidence of a miracle can never be erased quickly enough. Miracles belong only to the moment, and live on only in memory.

After the six stories, two essays, one on reading, and one on writing, are included. Here, the intellectual echoes of Calvino are strongest, particularly Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Willems' chapter on Reading is the most beautiful reflection on the act I have ever read, which sounds almost incestuous but is perfectly right in so many ways. It really is beautiful. For example, this paragraph:

Time's traces are everywhere in the libraries of old houses . . . libraries are dials of darkness and shadow whose hours I like to picture as blue or violet, slowly dyeing the pages of their books. Extraordinarily evocative remnants.

Willem's essay on writing is, like the very act itself, a burbling up of disparate thoughts that somehow form a coherent idea. But what that idea is, exactly, will differ from writer to writer and reader to reader.

I find myself closing this book as if waking from a dream. And like some mornings, I just want to crawl back into bed, close my eyes, and dream some more.


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