Life is low-down but poetic in 'Woodcuts of Women'
Sunday, June 3, 2001
In "Woodcuts of Women," Austin, Tex., writer Dagoberto Gilb provides the antidote to all that commercial junk that surrounds us.
Don't get me wrong. I like commercial junk but after a while � you know what I mean.
Anyway, Gilb's characters are down, but not out, neither good nor bad, just human, real human, trying to ... well, they're not trying to do much other than survive love, lust, betrayals, dead-end jobs and rejection.
The main characters in this collection of short stories are all men � artists, drifters, construction workers, department store clerks, johns, a guy with ugly, old pillows � in varying degrees of relationships with women, usually several women at the same time.
I don't know much about Gilb. I first read his stuff in the Texas Observer, a progressive bi-weekly out of Austin. His stories also have appeared in The New Yorker and The Threepenny Opera. He has another collection of short stories, "The Magic of Blood," and a novel, "The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna."
I figure Gilb grew up in El Paso because he easily describes the city and that schizophrenic feeling people have for the place where they grew up. After a brief diatribe about El Paso, one of his characters says, "The best thing about El Paso was that people thought you were cool and tough for growing up there."
The book cover says Gilb spent a good portion of his life as a construction worker, and he also vividly describes that end-of-day feeling:
"All he could think about was unlacing his dirty boots, then taking off his stinky socks, then the rest. He'd take a cold one in the shower. The second one. He'd down the first one right at the refrigerator."
The story called "The Pillows," shows the sensitivities of Gilb's characters. After a chance meeting, the narrator of the story takes care of the apartment of a friend while the friend goes to Mexico to work briefly as a journalist and try to get over being rejected by the woman he loves. But as the narrator apartment-sits, he learns about his friend's fatal flaw and realizes why the woman rejected him. It was because of his dirty, old pillows.
The narrator buys new pillows for himself because he can't stand his friend's pillows. When his friend calls to tell him he's coming home, the main character wonders if he should leave his new pillows at the friend's apartment. He decides to take his new pillows with him as a favor to his friend:
"He would look at these new pillows, and he would look at those dead ones, and he would think of the years that had passed, how he'd wasted so many, how simple it might've been and how he'd messed up."
Don't expect Hollywood endings in this book, or even anti-Hollywood endings. There's a lot of heartbreak but also a lot of poetry and moments of, not joy, but something in that neighborhood.
The book also is worth getting for the artwork by Artemio Rodriguez, who has a drawing that goes with each short story.
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