Consider the following: You’re running late to see a play, and forty-five minutes into your shower you decide to not bother showing up at all. Or: You’re on time for the play, but it’s a high school performance, and a “not particularly exceptional” one at that—especially the set design. But, despite its slapdash manner, the supposed garden is just “gardenly enough” for you to allow yourself to watch the scene unfurl, and you actually end up kind of enjoying yourself. If you find that you are the type of person who is constantly at war with these two alternating states of self—where obligations can be ditched at a moment’s notice, or begrudgingly followed through—then you will feel right at home in the world of Imaginary Museums (Soft Skull Press, 2020) by Nicolette Polek. The brief scenes found within have the rare ability to create just that sort of effect: in which the hurriedness, the odd figure ushering you in and out of the story as quickly as possible (lest you become aware of the absurdity behind the absurdity) all add to the joy of the experience. Watching, you can sense that, just offstage, the performers are in full-blown panic—but the show must go on—and it’s better for it.
Drawing attention to artifice can be a dangerous game, but in Polek’s hands it is clear that the very awareness that threatens to ruin the spell of engaged reading is essential in understanding the characters within these stories, and why they act the way they do. In this collection—twenty-six short stories spread across four sections—attention is constantly being drawn to the performer in mid-action, fully aware of themselves as the observed, and reacting in interesting ways. This isn’t The Ways of Seeing, although I’d bet that some of the characters have heavily thumbed copies resting on their bedside tables.
A standout story, “Winners,” takes the simple premise of two people engaged in casual conversation. When one of the interlocutors becomes aware of the other’s blundering of facts, instead of calling the person out on the error, they instead look inward.
Why did Fellow 2 refer to Ezra Pound as a woman? Fellow 1 begins to think that maybe she did know Ezra Pound was a woman, but had for some reason forgotten. She tried to remember what Ezra Pound looked like, and imagines her looking similarly to George Eliot, whom she had also, at one point, thought was a man.
There is great pleasure in reading stories like the one quoted above, when you can identify the central, relatable moment, and watch it be taken to it’s bizarrely, slightly left-of-logical conclusion.
Polek doesn’t merely imbue her characters with self-awareness to watch them struggle, but to offer them agency as decision-makers. Expectations, both imposed by the stories, and by us as readers, are stifling for the performers, and we enter the stories just as something clicks for the characters. In “Arranged Marriage,” the titular event is filtered through Lilith, the bride-to-be’s perception of the wedding party, and her role as a role as a performer. Bridesmaids here are referred to as “understudies,” and when Lilith decides to skip out on the wedding, the story continues, as it must. Lilith’s uncle steps in and “agrees to put on the wedding dress.” The continuation of a traditional narrative carries on despite—or perhaps in spite of—the characters who want out. The arranged union carries on, “as the balalaika orchestra plays heartfelt renditions of Croatian love songs.” This moment recalls the final scene of Fellini’s Amarcord, a film that doesn’t so much come to a neatly tied ending, as it just sort of peters off the edges of the screen, blending into the fabric of everyday reality. The bulk of these stories have a similar effect. Despite their compact size, these stories contain ideas that extend beyond their borders, and into your thoughts.
Polek’s bread and butter is the realm of matter-of-fact absurdity, which feels akin to the world of existential sketch comedy (think Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave), where punchlines are seldom, and you’re likely to walk away feeling seen, somehow. Which is not to say that there aren’t laughs, because Polek is incredibly funny. Hilarious, mildly disturbed aphorisms are littered throughout nearly every page of the text. “The most experienced swimmer can drown at the hands of someone who cannot swim.” And, a personal favorite: “Not every human experience is inherently valuable.” There is a devious, knowing smile behind moments like these, and part of the experience of reading Imaginary Museums is that the earliest stories in the collection are arranged in such a way that they can be admired, but the audience is kept at arm’s length. Look, but don’t touch, as they say. Then, all of a sudden, the stories go into more intimate territory. In a story called “Flowers for Angelika,” we are introduced to the narrator’s grandfather, who, at 26, fell in love with a “rodent-like” woman named Angelika. Set in Košice, Slovakia, it feels as though we are spying on something personal and real. As soon as mutual admiration is felt between the two characters, the grandfather slips into Angelika’s house while she is out, and finds himself surrounded by plants that, at the slightest touch, crumble into “brown dust.” The grandfather proceeds to water everything in the entire house, plants and furniture alike, culminating in a beautiful moment:
The house was still as my grandfather filled bowls with water. He filled pitchers and mugs and said a prayer. He cupped water in his hands. He poured it onto the dried dirt. He poured it over the leaves and the exposed roots. He splashed it on the begrimed carpet, and onto the couch. He went into her bedroom, which was terribly messed, and dumped water onto an heirloom quilt. A mouse froze under the sink, and watched him spill water on her telephone. He went outside into the rain and watered each garden flower with the hose, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough.
The strongest stories in Imaginary Museums find a balance between self-awareness and unguarded tenderness. The weakest, not as much. But it seems like the overall point is to dip in and out, to read and reread, and to experience the collection as a multifaceted object that can be engaged with as one would engage with pieces in a museum. By the end of the twenty-six stories—averaging at three pages per—I found myself in a pleasant haze of Polek’s creation. There are other, authorly comparisons that others will make, but I offer that Polek’s work reminds me most of Edward Gorey’s illustrations, particularly his work for Florence Parry Heide’s The Treehorn Trilogy. While the confines of the drawings may seem imposingly small, the boundaries are adorned with dashed-off curlicues that only a master hand could perform. Polek has a similar ability to draw you into the miniature, to warmly welcome you into richly conceived micro-worlds. But as soon as you get too close, you’re reminded: Look, don’t touch.