An Unlucky Man by Samanta Schweblin, 2015
The magic trick:
A classic mix-up plot that mostly just leaves the reader mixed up
This story is like trying to hold onto a fish.
Which I have never done but I feel like I’ve seen cartoon characters try such a thing, and so that is what I’m thinking of when I make that comparison.
It’s a slippery, slimy story that can’t be contained.
First of all, we have two young children experiencing twin disasters – one swallows bleach; the other wanders off with a strange man to buy underwear.
If that doesn’t set the reader on edge, I don’t know what will.
So you have that.
But the main stress comes in the form of the strange man who walks with the older sister – not because he’s such a monster, but because we’re not sure what to think of him,
If he were a monster, there’s a certain stability to our reading experience even as it’s awful for our protagonist.
But he’s not quite a monster. In fact, if you look at what he does, the results are helpful. He helps the girl replace her missing underwear.
It verges on a classic sitcom mix-up scenario at the end – where the parents assume the worst about the man and have him arrested, but we the reader know hey that’s not really fair, you’ve got this all wrong.
I hate mix-up plots. I hate knowing more than the characters.
But, again, at least there is stability in that. It would be familiar.
This isn’t really a mix-up plot either, because the reader can’t say for sure this man is innocent. There is just enough weird innuendo during his interactions with the girl – I mean, he’s helping her steal underwear from a store while her parents are tending to her little sister in the hospital. It’s not a great situation for him if you’re trying to be his defense attorney.
I don’t know.
And of course that’s the point.
Something here doesn’t feel right. We don’t know who did what or what their intentions were. We can’t know. We can’t analyze the story into knowing anything like that.
Instead, we have to just sit back and let the story make us feel weird about the world.
And that’s quite a trick on Schweblin’s part.
The selection:
“Take off your underpants.”
I was wearing my school uniform. All my underwear was white, but I wasn’t exactly thinking about that just then, and I couldn’t understand Dad’s request. I pressed my hands into the seat to support myself better. I looked at Mom and she shouted:
“Take off your damned underpants!”
I took them off. Dad grabbed them out of my hands. He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. He raised them high while he yelled and kept honking, and it seemed like everyone on the avenue turned around to look at them. My underpants were small, but they were also very white. An ambulance a block behind us turned on its siren, caught up with us quickly, and started clearing a path. Dad kept waving the underpants until we reached the hospital.
He parked the car by the ambulances and they jumped out. Without waiting, Mom took Abi and ran straight into the hospital. I wasn’t sure whether I should get out or not: I didn’t have any underpants on, and I looked around to see where Dad had left them, but they weren’t on the seat or in his hand, which was already slamming his car door behind him.
“Come on, come on,” said Dad.
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