The Centaur, From Skinny Dipping

The back cover of Alan DeNiro's "Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead" promises a story in which "a man loses his leg in a war, and a field doctor sews on a fairy tale leg in its place."  Opening this book, I immediately began hunting for this story, maybe because I just had to see how the author would make it work.  The story turns out to be called "The Centaur", and it opens with a realistic scene of battle trauma in which the lead character does indeed receive a fairy tale in place of a lost leg, and then slips into a dream where he is reunited happily with his wife in fields where "sheep at bright golden barley, and men in hobbyhorse costumes played jaunty songs on flutes."

He then wakes up, discovers that his phantom leg has fallen asleep, and also discovers that the battle is moving on and that the army's medical personnel is leaving him behind.  All of this barely breaks the placid surface of deadpan weirdness that characterizes Alan DeNiro's prose, which another member of the Litblog Co-op recently compared to that of hippie surrealist Richard Brautigan in a conversation about this book.  As with Brautigan, you can scour the unhinged imagery for meaning, if you like.   Or you can just let it all wash over you, and let the strangeness sink in. 

Comments

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