Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Ananda Lima
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250292971
Tor, June 18, 2024, 192 pgs

Some have called Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil a collection, and the publisher page lists a set of stories. This is one way to describe the book, but I don’t think it’s quite accurate; I don’t think it says enough. Moreover, while the entries in anthologies and collections are often arranged with some kind of intent, it is usually perfectly fine to go in and read whichever pieces you want, in whatever order you like. I don’t recommend that here.

All this said, this is a tremendous book, a true artistic accomplishment. If you like thoughtful, entertaining fiction which is also rich in meaning, spend some quality time with this one: it will captivate you. I’ll discuss a few things about my experience of the read, but I’ll leave a lot for your own discovery, and for your own interpretations, because the journey itself is important.

Before the first “story,” called “Rapture”, there is a sexy and absorbing intro or “pre-story” snippet. This breathes delightful new life into a well-trod trope, setting the tone for the book. Not that the stories need to be sexy, but that this is an author who knows how to engage readers. As “Rapture” unfolds, we meet “the writer” at a party where she meets the Devil. While there are some elements here which you might find in other renditions wherein a person meets the Devil, Lima renders many of those elements as nearly inconsequential. What is foregrounded is a brief but potent transformation; a personal journey which is introspective, honest, and engrossing. The piece also sparkles with moments of bright social commentary. Time and time again we see “so-and-so meets the Devil” stories, as well as stories by writers about writers. Lima delivers something unexpected, and very well told.

“Ghost Story” showcases Lima’s ability to render ordinary situations and regular people as fascinating, without relying on melodrama, through careful details and the perfect amount of relatable true-to-life drama. She also begins with seemingly disparate narrative elements and pulls them together into what may best be described as fractal relationships. At first, the tale is about a writer contemplating the latest feedback on a story from her writing group; then it’s about the writer visiting parents in Brazil. The visit carries all the complexities that going “home” carries: What is home when you’ve been living somewhere else for a while? How do you relate to the people you love the most; how do you navigate the way they are changing? Lima adds to this an unusual bit of the speculative; or, perhaps, an unusual application of the speculative—by the time the tale closes, everything comes together with masterful literary flair.

For “Tropicália”—while Lima hadn’t shied away from sprinkling in tidbits about society and culture, this section digs more directly into sociocultural roles and political problems. A young woman wakes up to discover she doesn’t know where her passport is. We get a whiff of anxiety right from the start, but then Lima takes us stumbling through different moments of the recent past, effectively dunking us into an anxiety riddled narrative about the frustrations and difficulties experienced by folks who come here as immigrants. Lima layers the narrative with complicated things, reflecting the nature of life and the way that perception can shift depending on where you are standing. By this point in the book, Lima has also taught you that details matter, that choices are deliberate, and she uses these details to suggest relationships or parallels between objects and moments and emotions, while infusing everything with an unmistakable distinctiveness. There are also glittering notes of bright humor and important observations, but it’s all carried by fantastic storytelling.

The thing is, friends, if you are paying attention, by the time you finish the third “story” you have a gut feeling: everything is connected, everything is related.

For “Antropófaga,” main character Bea is at the lowest point in her life when she discovers a vending machine at work, one which serves up tiny people in plastic packages, like junk food or candy. Bea indulges, as a little rebellion, as a guilty pleasure; then quickly finds herself caught up in a daily habit. Here, the speculative element serves to punctuate and counterpose the moments and moods of Bea’s life. More than this, the oddness of it instills in the reader a sense of the odd, a visceral feeling of oddness, which in my read probably mirrors the feeling that Bea has in most moments of her life, even when she’s not cognizant that she is feeling this way. In other words, it wonderfully evokes being a stranger in a strange land (the strange land being the United States): the disconnectedness of everything, the offness, the in-some-ways-familiar being absolutely weird.

Attentive readers will appreciate the immediate microaggressions expressed in “Idle Hands,” too commonly experienced by too many people. If you missed it, go read those first few lines again, until you figure it out. In fact, let this be a barometer: if you don’t understand the subtle seething here, if you don’t have a visceral reaction, you are probably missing a lot of the power in Lima’s work throughout; not by her fault: it’s all there, shining through each piece. In this section, Lima uses more obviously metatextual storytelling to highlight a typical and fairly ubiquitous kind of American racism, as the writer receives feedback on a story from her “peers.” The feelings about this process, and the process itself, have been alluded to earlier in the book, but Lima brings it to the fore, fulfilling a promise, one you didn’t realize had been made, but which feels right when the section takes shape. Moreover, thematically, it speaks to sparks flashing throughout the book, such as the oddness invoked by a surreal image of eating tiny people. Such moments mirror the deep, bone-level dissonance one can feel when reading comments from someone who . . . doesn’t quite see you . . . especially when you are hungry to connect in some meaningful way. On the one hand, telling a story through other writers’ feedback, on face value alone, is genius. We can piece together the story the writer submitted based on peer comments, and we’re rewarded with another layered story, as well as subtext about perception, perspective, and more. On the other hand, there is the writing group experience itself: dealing with people who just don’t understand a lot of things about “the writer,” who don’t really see her, don’t quite get what she’s doing—who are “well meaning” yet too self-assured to question or doubt themselves; and even use external validations to reinforce their positions . . . or, take the opportunity to flex and showoff . . . not to mention the way the overall system often rewards a certain kind of uniformity when it comes to artistic endeavors. Classes could be taught on this section alone. Simply put: brilliant work.

Reading “Idle Hands” is when I realized: this is not really a collection. Oh no, friends. The pieces reference each other, and “interludes” (for lack of a better term) often build on the sections themselves. Nor would I call this a novel in linked stories; this is something else, I realized, something fascinating and beautiful, something I hadn’t seen before.

When “Rent” comes around it is sharp and abrupt; and because we’d been set up for it in earlier parts of the book, we have an interesting framework with which to engage it. Which makes it even more interesting and somehow more compelling. There’s also something really satisfying about the journey from the original introduction of this section as a “story,” which happens in the context of a much earlier section, and then (sequentially) reading the feedback to another story just before this section, and then finally coming up to this. Almost as if—at least, in one possible interpretation—this section has become the final presentation, this is what the author from earlier in the book decided to write, having followed her own journey; her decisions being different, unique, independent from what she was told to do, and all the more incredible for it. It’s almost a statement of rebellion, of refusing to be completely controlled or colonized: an action that says look, you were wrong, and I don’t need you. I only needed to realize this for myself. This is perhaps one interpretation. Perhaps this section is simply a triumph of resisting the pressures of outside forces that don’t understand you anyway. The pressures insisting that you conform to what they think you should be, that you speak in the specific ways they think you should speak—that you should present as the version of you that fits their own ideas of who they think you are.

It’s incredible and powerful, but it would not speak in the same way if you simply saw “Rent” in the table of contents and jumped to the “story,” and didn’t have the context of the lead-up of the book. I’m sure it would still do something; Lima is a stunning writer, and it would be a mistake to underestimate her. It would probably still be powerful. And . . . perhaps, that is just as worthy a journey as the one I took. But I am glad I went page by page to get here.

While “Porcelain” is also short, it feels even tempered, and more overtly about loneliness and perhaps even isolation. It seems more straightforward than some of the other pieces, but it’s just as possible that I am missing things that other readers may easily get. It’s still a good entry: a story within a story featuring, among other things, a guy who finds a rat in his toilet and the many things that this can mean. In the context of the book this section continues to form within the reader a general vibe, a consistent, intricate emotional composition. Short but still effective and wonderful.

Throughout the book, the interludes continue, relaying (among other things) various episodes with the Devil. Sometimes they recontextualize what’s happened so far, sometimes they add to it, sometimes they develop their own narrative. One of the best things about the interludes is that they go far towards developing an autobiographical feeling behind everything, especially later on, which enhances immersion and gives that surreal sensation of fiction overlapping with reality. Most fiction is informed in some way by an author’s real life, and beliefs, and perceptions; but the impact here is rather profound. At the same time, authors and other artists who write books about writing (or their art) or who utilize main characters which seem to more directly reflect themselves . . . well. Sometimes it can feel overly self-indulgent. Literature has amassed so many mid-life crisis narratives written by men which are little more than thinly veiled fantasies. There is also a tendency, sometimes, for books to idealize “the artist,” to attempt to render them as . . . how do I put this? Perhaps, eccentric geniuses? Or kind of iconic? Here, with Craft, we have something which feels more sincere, a set of reflections framed by amazing storytelling, rather than thinly veiled fantasy or thinly veiled pontification.

“Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” is perhaps more overtly or directly philosophical. And yet it is also perfectly experiential, capturing anxiety as well as the cycles of other emotions, even as it is contemplative.

Relationships are brought to the fore for “Hasselblad: Triptych,” but arguably, one’s relationship with oneself, as main character Michele’s interactions with a young woman have her feeling somewhat awkward, among other things. Even as the young woman relates to her stories about herself, and even as those stories are interesting in themselves, what is probably relatable for many of us is the way Michele feels about herself in reaction to the young woman. It points to the way that our relationship with ourselves shifts depending on who we are with and what they say, what they do, how we feel about those things, and so on. But this is just the beginning, and Lima has more in store.

When the triptych takes shape, it plays with the reader’s perception by presenting different elements of story across different narratives, demonstrating the flexibility of story, the ability of a writer to reshape meaning, the way that truth itself is vulnerable to perception and perspective. Moreover, placing the triptych at the end of the book causes the reader to reflect on what has come before, to question everything, and to relive the journey in an entirely new way.

Absolutely breathtaking.

This review is, honestly, just scratching the surface. And, reviewers don’t like to admit this, but a review necessarily reflects the reviewer’s own perspectives, which arise from their own experiences, their opinions, their insights, or lack thereof. Reviewers often like to pretend that there is an objective truth, that a story can be explained and even judged; just as professors often grade based upon the ability to understand (and, too often, agree with) a specific interpretation of story; and, as readers we will usually exclaim to each other that something “is good,” not simply that “we enjoyed” it. If anything, Lima’s book, I would argue, challenges the notion of objective perception, of being able to easily define reality, and calls into question our eagerness to decide that our version of a story is more “real,” more valid than someone else’s.

In theory, you could jump around and read “stories” in Craft the way you might with a standard collection or anthology. In fact, this is my usual approach: I dig through the table of contents and (if applicable) the copyright notes and jump to whatever looks most intriguing to me. But the sections here reference each other, and as you read, the narrative gives you an underlying kind of understanding, a feeling running through it all, an emotional momentum that I don’t think would be the same if taken out of sequence. Craft is, perhaps, a novel in refraction; a life or lives or perceptions of lives, related through words in ways that have meaning to the author, meaning which can’t really be put into words, but which might be felt in our own ways of feeling things.

As a novel in refraction, the book is about many things, but it seems to have relationships at its heart. This includes the writer’s relationship with writing. Rather than explain what writing is or means or how it is important, we understand the complex entanglement that is writing via different narratives, different experiences, different phases, and in this way develop some semblance of understanding of something which, ironically, one cannot really put into concise words in any adequate way. Rather than some haughty or elitist framing of the act of writing or being “a writer” as an artiste whom we could not possibly understand, we see this artist in very human terms, in all her anger and terror, in her love and her loneliness, in her honest, stark vulnerability. And we see how writing is a part of everything, without that attempt to say, look at me, aren’t I special; but rather, quite simply, this is me, these are my stories, whether or not they are true in the ways you might expect.

By the time I’d finished this book, I felt as if I’d been on a journey unlike any other, yet one which was still emotionally resonant, gently powerful. I want to read this book again in a year or so. I want to experience these narratives again; I want to discover the things I’ve missed; and relish these moments Lima has laid out. Craft feels personal and real in the best of ways. Whether or not I understood anything here in the exact ways that Lima understands them, even if my version of what just happened was (perhaps inevitably) different from what was intended, reading this book was a truly special journey, and I’m so glad she allowed me to tag along.