The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Silence Please! Stories after the Works of Juan Muñoz by Louise Neri
Dennis Barone

Louise Neri, ed. Silence Please! Stories after the Works of Juan Muñoz. Scalo, 1996. 175 pp. $27.50.

Published by a Swiss press in cooperation with an Irish art museum and printed in Germany, this collection of eleven stories by American, English, Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish writers takes as its starting point the work of a Spanish sculptor, Juan Muñoz. The exhibit of his work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art provided an occasion for these stories; without it they would never have been written, they would not exist and we would be poorer without this cumulative gift of word and image.

Through dialogue, self-conscious colloquialism, existential internal monologue, letter, libretto, tape-recorded message, radio broadcast, etc., writers such as Dave Hickey, Patrick McCabe, Lynne Tillman, and Marina Warner have crafted short fictions that sometimes directly and other times obliquely take off from and/or return to a visual work by Muñoz. Words do pleasing and odd things herein and it is a pleasure to read a story and then return to the photograph of the particular art work from which it sprung to see the nature of the relation. For example, in Luc Sante’s “Tabula Rasa” an occupant of a hotel room that seems to be sealed off in a no-time and no-place begins to draw as his only solace. The picture he draws: that which precedes the story of his entrapment. Such interweaving of image and story is especially ingenious and delightful in Quico Rivas’s “The Story of Estraperlo.”

I found myself liking narratively complete stories, such as the aforementioned one by Rivas or Vik Muniz’s “Pygmalion Mâché,” more than the ones that were fragmented, such as John Berger’s “Will It Be a Likeness?” His story sounds to me to be the one in the collection that is closest to art criticism, and therefore it is the story least in the spirit of the activity which was to move away from “the closed-off, stillborn nature of much art criticism” and into a more imaginative world, a world such as Muñoz’s and such as that depicted (echoed?) in most of the stories that his world has evoked. [Dennis Barone]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Silence Please! Stories after the Works of Juan Muñoz by Louise Neri Dennis Barone Louise Neri, ed. Silence Please! Stories after the Works of Juan Muñoz. Scalo, 1996. 175 pp. $27.50. Published by a Swiss press in cooperation with an Irish art museum and printed in Germany, this collection of eleven stories by American, English, Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish writers takes as its starting point the work of a Spanish sculptor, Juan Muñoz. The exhibit of his work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art provided an occasion for these stories; without it they would never have been written, they would not exist and we would be poorer without this cumulative gift of word and image. Through dialogue, self-conscious colloquialism, existential internal monologue, letter, libretto, tape-recorded message, radio broadcast, etc., writers such as Dave Hickey, Patrick McCabe, Lynne Tillman, and Marina Warner have crafted short fictions that sometimes directly and other times obliquely take off from and/or return to a visual work by Muñoz. Words do pleasing and odd things herein and it is a pleasure to read a story and then return to the photograph of the particular art work from which it sprung to see the nature of the relation. For example, in Luc Sante’s “Tabula Rasa” an occupant of a hotel room that seems to be sealed off in a no-time and no-place begins to draw as his only solace. The picture he draws: that which precedes the story of his entrapment. Such interweaving of image and story is especially ingenious and delightful in Quico Rivas’s “The Story of Estraperlo.” I found myself liking narratively complete stories, such as the aforementioned one by Rivas or Vik Muniz’s “Pygmalion Mâché,” more than the ones that were fragmented, such as John Berger’s “Will It Be a Likeness?” His story sounds to me to be the one in the collection that is closest to art criticism, and therefore it is the story least in the spirit of the activity which was to move away from “the closed-off, stillborn nature of much art criticism” and into a more imaginative world, a world such as Muñoz’s and such as that depicted (echoed?) in most of the stories that his world has evoked. [Dennis Barone]

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