Miracles and Horrors in “The Last Philosopher in Texas” https://ift.tt/e2yBxDN
“Do you want to know how to time travel?” asks the narrator’s tía in the opening short story in Daniel Chacón’s new collection, The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions. Equal parts surreal and sharp, devastating and delightful, The Last Philosopherin Texas has something for everyone. From a time-traveling aunt, who may or may not carry a message from the narrator’s deceased mother, to a man driving through the Starbucks line where Jesus takes his order, a skinny chai latte with two extra shots of espresso, Chacón pulls readers into one world after another, melding realty with irreality.
One of the successes of The Last Philosopher is the mixing of fiction and superstitions, as the title suggests. Scattered throughout the short story collection are “Superstition” chapters. “Superstition: Day of the Dead” warns readers never to put a photo of the living near a Día de los Muertos altar lest the dead think you neglected to visit them in the afterlife. “Superstition: Love at First Sight” explains that love at first sight isn’t so much about loving someone else but instead using the energy created between two people who experience such a feeling to will something into being. Another “Superstition” chapter, “Photos of People Who Hated Each Other,” cautions readers to “never put the photos of two dead people who hated each other in the same room, let alone on the same wall” because it “releases negative energy” that can seep into the rest of the house. In “Dropping Silverware,” the narrator explains the art of fortune-telling by dropping silverware. “Ice” asks readers to be wary when the ice that gets stuck at the bottom of the glass loosens and falls onto the face of the drinker because it is a sign they are about to do something stupid.
These “Superstition” chapters are carefully placed, seemingly providing readers with a map to reflect on previous or forthcoming chapters. I found myself wondering if a character in “The Flickering Quasar” who had ice from their drink avalanche onto their face unexpectedly at a party was about to, in fact, do something stupid. I was curious if the narrator in that same story had indeed fallen in love at first sight or if the spirit of love that sparked between himself and Angie the night they met was what powered the mysterious ‘flickering’ the narrator experienced while dating Angie, a self-proclaimed witch. The narrator’s experience of “flickering,” which manifests in this short story as both black spots in his memory and uncontrollable flickers of memory from the past intruding into the present, is mimicked in the collection itself, with previous themes and shorter vignettes seeming to accompany previous or future short stories. However, everything is not always as it seems, and Chacón lets readers be their own guide through the collection. Above all, imagination rules the worlds created by Chacón.
While many of the stories in The Last Philosopher in Texas are playful and, at times, irreverent, Chacón still takes on important and timely topics. For instance, “The Chicano Time Traveler” explores the generational differences in identity between an uncle and his nephew: is it Chicano or Chicanx? What are the goals of each generation for their community? Like many of the other short stories in this collection, “The Chicano Time Traveler” plays with the reader’s sense of time, blurring the lines between what is memory, dream, or reality. In this short story, tío Rudy shares a story idea he has about a time-traveling Chicano who goes and “changes all the fucked-up things the gabacho has done to us,” including throwing hands at “Colombus real good.” When the Chicano time traveler returns home, Rudy explains, “things would be different” and “Brown people would be in charge…mayors, [and]…lawyers and doctors and shit.” When the narrator sleeps that night, he dreams of his tío Rudy and the Chicano time traveler. In this dream, he went to law school and became a successful lawyer and activist set on giving back to la raza. While sitting in his grandmother’s garage, the narrator tells Rudy about this Chicano time traveler and how, 20 years in the future, Rudy will tell the narrator this exact story. Which, Rudy finds hilarious. The reader is left to puzzle out which reality is the real one. As a character in “Borges and the Chicanx” muses, “Am I the dreamer or the dreamed?”
While many of the narrators of these short stories land just on this side of believable, many are deeply relatable — the child who wails when his mother tells him Santa Claus and Rudolph were killed in an air accident, the narrator who has an odd but world shifting dream, the lonely musician who falls in love, a woman just trying to find something she cannot name, a young English professor with deep-seated imposters syndrome who cannot comprehend Jorge Luis Borges.
Miracles and horrors of all kinds abound throughout The Last Philosopher in Texas. However, Chacón’s unique wandering and wondering narratorial voice carries readers along a cross-country, cross-dimensional, and multi-temporal journey. A journey I’d happily go on again and again.
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