The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Collected Stories by Calvert Casey
David Ian Paddy

Calvert Casey. The Collected Stories. Trans. John H. R. Polt. Ed. and introduction by Ilan Stavans. Duke Univ. Press, 1998. 193 pp. Paper: $16.95.

Duke University Press has done a great service in bringing our attention to the writings of Calvert Casey (1924-1969), an author who, despite early praise from Italo Calvino and others, has been lost to us. Casey was born in Baltimore, worked in England, India, Canada, Turkey, Switzerland, and Italy (he committed suicide in Rome), but he identified primarily with Cuba. Cuba is the place that preoccupies most of his writing. In fact, several stories, but especially “The Walk,” feel like a darker version of Dubliners transplanted to Havana. But what a difference a city makes.
The collection contains all of Casey’s known fiction (sixteen stories and one novella). However, this brief sample encompasses a vast world; it gives us a glimpse into the mind of a visionary stylist. I’m not sure that I would describe Casey’s stories as magical realism, but each piece does peek into a mysterious world where people and their environs seem ordinary at first, but are then overcome by a veil of the vague, bizarre, troubling, and incomprehensible. These are tales of mystery and menace. They are less character studies or well-drawn-out plots than misty etchings of disturbed moods and desires. Most of the stories are passionate interludes describing obsessive yearnings and romantic matches that always fail. Other stories explore the sleazy beauty and beautiful sleaze of life on the fringes of Havana. Viewed together, all the pieces owe much to Kafka in their haunted, nightmare aesthetic. Tales like “Homecoming,” “The Sun,” “Piazza Margana,” “The Visitors,” and “The Execution” are powerful works of the imagination that should be read, reread, and included in prominent anthologies. Let’s not lose Calvert Casey again. [David Ian Paddy]