The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser

Marianne Hauser's short fiction is a literary documentary of exile, the other-worldly travelogue of an imagination permanently displaced. These accounts of expatriates and lost children situate us in foreign realms, between the titillating intimacies of strangers and looming brutalities we can never quite see. A narrator recalls Strasbourg during WWI, the entangled thoughts of her childhood in a territory forced to change flags too many times: "My political universe was confused, reflecting that confusion of tongues in our home where French might alternate with German or Alsatian, a patois harsh and Alemannic through which French idioms flitted like clever birds." It's as though even parents and bodies and dreams had turned out to be alien impositions. In retrospect the narrator's naive literalisms, her half-literate attunement to puns and double entendres, still infect each recollection, creating a linguistic haze in which her past both vanishes and returns.

In Hauser's fiction, expatriation is not a historical accident but a condition as essential to humans as breathing or speech. A young boy's suicide in "Heartlands Beat" or a child's vision of her piano teacher's corpse invoke the permanent dislocations that adulthood can never overcome. "Absorbed in a dubious adventure that tasted of the iniquitous and forbidden, I would stare at the vibrating lump of flesh, quite unlike a face and yet more inexorably human than any I had ever known." It is as though birth were, for Hauser, the great forced migration, an incomprehensible banishment from some homeland every child can remember. Her characters gaze in bewilderment at the crude and violent landscape that, through preposterous twistings, they have come to occupy, wondering how they could have ended so incongruously, unable to imagine any dwelling but here.

Beautiful fabrications from the writer about whom Anais Nin remarked, "she deftly weaves the strange, the unknown, the unfamiliar, the perverse, into a fabric of human fallibilities that draws drama and farce close to us."

"She succeeds in fusing the fantastic and the ordinary."

—New York Times Book Review