The Orange Suitcase
by Joseph Riippi
from ‘Something About A Nail’:
When I was maybe ten or eleven years old my grandfather hammered a nail into a tree with his bare hand. My cousins will tell you it didn’t happen, but we called his bluff, we didn’t believe him when he said that, as a carpenter in Tacoma after the war, he’d never used a hammer. He boasted: My hands are like the Finns. My hands are stronger than Russian tanks. And then he did it, right there in front of us. He held a three-inch nail against the cedar tree and swung his gigantic frame, no hesitation. When he pulled away that nail stayed sticking out, a monument, humongous, gray and wet, with a piece of skin as its rainy flag.
The Orange Suitcase finds its main strength not in language that we’ve never seen before but in an innovative structure that suggests or implies plot rather than freely giving it out. Riippi works the small segments of this book as snowballing moments, asking us to create a story from his stories. And while this is not entirely unheard of, Michael Kimball’s Us is a prime example of this same type of process, this is nonetheless a relatively new approach in the writing world and Riippi works it well here, mixing styles and genres enough to keep the book fast, running wild on semi-memoir legs:
from ‘Something About Rings’:
A couple sits at a table across the room. I peer over my book to watch their quiet fight. They rest silent and full of hard gestures—steel hands and eyes. ‘You’re a bastard,’ says the tattooed arm. ‘Fuck yourself,’ say the jeweled fingers, clinking teacups. Quiet fights are quite ordinary. Split a relationship to see its odd rings. I settle the novel and turn to watch. They are fine, they are in the midst of love, when sucking tells less than a touch, when indifference tells more than a fuck.
At times Riippi’s attempt to create realism forces the language towards cliché or overly simplistic phrasing, but this is an understandable slight and is forgivable in a book like The Orange Suitcase. Some readers too may be turned off by the meta-fiction bent that creeps into the second half in particular, but the poetic moments that follow or precede these authorial interjections are usually enough to bring us back to loving the book and reveling in its genre-less skin:
by Anthony Spaeth