"Natasha and Other Stories" by David Bezmozgis (2004)

The trick with a short story is to provide enough detail to render the characters three-dimensional and believable while simultaneously leaving enough space for plot so that the episode recounted makes the reader want to stop for a moment before moving on to the next story.

Natasha by David Bezmozgis does just that.

The seven stories in the collection follow the Berman family - Bella, Roman and their son Mark - as they emigrate in the late 70s from Latvia to settle in the Jewish Eastern European section of Toronto.

The stories are chronological, told in the first person by Mark Berman the adult, and they are narrative gems. The narrator is able to translate the mood of the household, the neighbourhood and the intervening decades (Mark is about 30 when he recounts the incidents from his life) into language that is precise, unadorned and yet so very expressive. The style might even be described as cinematographic with scenes that could easily be filmed - sometimes panning out, sometimes zooming in on an object or comment - elevating the mundane to the epic and maintaining a perpetual sense of foreboding for this somewhat unfortunate, ordinary but nonetheless complex little world on Bathurst Street: Nine-year-old Mark wonders innocently (and the reader frets in proxy) at what's become of his father and the wife of the influential Dr. Kornblum while dinner is served. The Natasha of the title is a 14-year-old girl whose unnerving sexual worldliness induces a physical and psychic shiver but offers no self-evident meaning, establishes no causal links, and provides no resolution.

"Natash and Other Stories" portrays situations and responses that are existential in execution and outlook – they are modern and brilliant.

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Dali: Hidden Faces

 
Guess who, at the age of 16, wrote in his journal entitled “My Impressions and Intimate Memories”, “When I come back, I will be a genius and the world will admire me. I may be despised, misunderstood, but I will be a genius, a great genius because I am certain of it”.
The inimitable Salvador Dali, of course. Showman par excellence, iconoclast, bombast and man of deep contradictions, Dali was indeed a genius. Today his life and work are not “despised” or “misunderstood” and in fact, a stroll through a traveling exhibition of his work (held at 19 Grand Place in Brussels) will show just how influential his work has been to the development of art (fine art, decorative arts, advertising, film) and psychology (the subconscious, the erotic, the dream state).
The exhibition displays a bit of everything: some of Dali's sculptures, early efforts at drawing and writing, a copy of his novel entitled “Hidden Faces”, a deck of Tarot cards, playing cards painted on plates, magazine advertisements for women's stockings and more. On display are also items that reveal his curious, ever-shifting contradictory political opinions. He paints a picture of Mao and superimposes Marilyn Monroe's face on it. He takes a photo of Stalin, another of Franco, puts these up against his own face and has someone take a picture of these three moustachioed men – to say what? He was expelled from the Surrealist club for refusing to toe the party line and said that he was apolitical, although he admitted to being an anarchist and a monarchist – both at the same time. Dali's politics changed over time as did his addresses, his financial standing and his friends and allies but he remained his own best publicist, an imaginative thinker and a superb artist.

Salvador Dali Exhibition Brussels Grand Place until September 10, 2012

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