Camoflauge
Reviewed Mar 16, 2025 on The Litt Review.
This book was bizarre. I pulled it off of a $5 cart at Twin Rivers Bookshop in Miramar, where I sit in and volunteer on Fridays. Small, 84 pages, covered in an oil painting of a red desert and with the author’s name looking vaguely Austronesian - Mrr Ybail being the only legible letters - I was surprised to find it was two short stories by a white Australian male author instead of a short, interesting novelette. The two stories, Camoflauge and The Seduction of my Sister were both surrealist exercises in distance and confusion.
Camoflauge dealt with a piano-tuner who is cross-grained to life, a calm man who doesn’t stand up for himself or his interests, a visitor here who seems to be looking and waiting at the expense of any single moment of joy or wonder. The conclusion implies that he dies at the end of the story in an aeroplane crash, wondering if life could have been different. Besides also feeling the existential ennui that pervades existence, it was difficult for me to resonate with him as a character. He appeared to have no flare for life, no central fire burning away in his chest. I found the story offputting.
The Seduction of my Sister was worse. A disaffected child who doesn’t use his sister’s name - we only find out it is Gladys half way through when another character mentions her - he begins throwing LPs across the garage roof to the new neighbor kid. It is never made clear what the other child does with these - store them? Throw them back? Eat them? The LPS move on to the entire contents of the garage. B the end, after the boomerangs have all been thrown, an entire armchair is somehow physically manifested into the offing. Finally, our author sends his sister’s best dress over, and then his sister herself.
I must lack the requisite understanding of surrealist fiction. Was he throwing the things because he couldn’t connect to others without using materialism? Was he himself a luddite, throwing the trappings of civilization in an attempt to connect? Were the marginal movements of other characters - his mother’s former life as a seamstress, now taken over by selling whitegoods in a Sears clone, or his father’s strange laughter and side-eye humor - were these more important than our central character? Who was seducing his sister? Was he? Was the boy across the fence?
I don’t know. I finished the book. I’m now going to figuratively throw it over the garage.
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