If you’re looking for low-key meta-fiction cum magic realism that doesn’t shout out “look-at-me-and-aren’t-I-clever,” you could do a lot worse than Karl Jirgens’ The Razor’s Edge. This is a collection of linked short stories that is undoubtedly clever and sophisticated but where an impressive erudition doesn’t overwhelm the emotional core that needs to be at the centre of any good short story.
Given the thematic “width” of the collection – from pop culture to classical literature, from historical events to contemporary relationships, from scientific experiments to divination, from the trivia of daily life to the horrors of holocaust and genocide – Jirgens could have easily lost his balance. Could have easily gone off the story-telling rails. He is, after all, performing a first-person/narrator high wire act here and it doesn’t take much to fall. That he didn’t, that he keeps the reader interested (nay, more than interested – inextricably involved to the very end on multiple levels), is a tribute to his writing skills, the intricacy of the interwoven material, and the truth of the central themes that he worries to the bone in each of the stories.
It is almost inevitable in most short story collections that one gets a mix of high-performance and not-so-high-performance pieces, material that stands out and material that is less outstanding. As critics, we’re trained to sort and point these out. Try as I might, however, I found it very hard to perform this type of separation for The Razor’s Edge. The stories flow into one another: dreamscapes, mixtures of past and present, a mother knitting a hat while relating tales of World War Two partisans and a son reflecting back on his kindergarten days, an alternate history on Mayakovsky’s suicide, Foucault’s pendulum and its connection to 21st century uprisings in Paris. Not to mention Anthony Bourdain.
