Published 4.25.2017. New York: New Directions. Translated by C.J. Collins and Osama Alomar.

Sober-headed readers may find a trip to fantasyland silly and time-wasting; but they should read Osama Alomar’s The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories. The stories in its 95-page runtime are short, make non-frivolous (and non-obvious) points about the Middle East, the author’s native Syria, and human nature generally, and (not least in importance) are frequently hysterical. To wit, I read the two-sentence story, “They Stick Out Their Tongues at Me” to some working Jills and Joes at my Jill and Joe-filled place of work: they laughed heartily, which demonstrates that while Alomar isn’t the Syrian George Carlin (some of his jokes require a bit of unpacking) many of these fables are short and punchy enough to draw giggles from the groundlings.

Satan tasted with the tip of his finger a very tiny amount of human hatred. It poisoned him and he died right away.

The Teeth of the Comb, while brief, is by no means unimpressive in terms of style; Alomar has a large bag of tricks. He’s a fabulist in the old, positive sense of the word; his main technique is allegory—everything is a representation of something else—but the way he executes these allegories is endlessly creative, ranging from anthropomorphized elevators and stair steps that argue with each other to plays on words—the “Psychological Barrier” in the story of the same name, which is an actual fence, which an implacable government functionary turns into an electric fence—to concepts being treated as objects, such as “the past and the present and the future” that the protagonist of “Bag of the Nation” gathers up in his bag. Figures of speech are taken literally:

A man of principles was forced to swallow an insult. He choked and died.

In an oblique way, Alomar’s fables remind me of some of the descriptive passages in Bruno Schultz or Andrei Platonov, two other authors who reimagine reality through metaphors. The brevity of Alomar’s stories, how much they accomplish in so small a space, is of a piece with the current vogue for microfiction, but the genre of fable and fairy tale is something more specific: a fantasia of anthropomorphized animals or inanimate objects, but with a moral bearing on human affairs. Probably a better contemporary comparison for the concentrated wit in these stories are political cartoons, which in turn are the intellectual descendants of the Age of Wit, your fabulists and maxim (not the magazine), books-of-characters, and epigram-writers like La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Fenelon, and La Fontaine. (These jokes would have killed at the Parisian salons.)

There is a heavy heart at the heart of all this silliness that best shows itself in the collection’s longer stories. The author, Alomar, is now a refugee living in Pittsburgh. He was already the author of three collections of stories in Arabic when he was forced to become an exile from his beloved Syria. The heartache of a life in exile is suggested in stories like “Bag of the Nation,” where the narrator invites a crowd of people in the new country to come watch him reveal the contents of a bag “carrying the overflowing wonders of my nation’s genius.” But then, on the point of revealing these wonders, “an atomic irony” blows up the bag, throwing the narrator head over heels. The onlookers laugh at his misfortune. Meanwhile, it takes little guesswork to determine who in the story “The Shadow” is the “small, ugly gang leader who, with the help of his henchmen, had prepared a strategic plan for destroying and pillaging the country for hundreds of years to come.” But longer stories such as these—and in this book, “longer” means a page or two—show a certain mastery of tone on Alomar’s part. He sets up a conceit, wholeheartedly commits his readers to it with his tone, and then comes the punchline, which reverses what we thought we knew.

Probably the least successful experiments are those stories written with a mythical-sounding third-person unnamed “he” as the protagonist. The unnamed narrator is meant as a stand-in for humanity, but the effect becomes more diffused the more specific the myth becomes. An exception, however, is the small masterpiece—can I call a two-and-a-half page story a masterpiece?— “The Shining Idea,” which is truly heartbreaking. The story is a dialogue—a fantastical one?—between a father-to-be and his unborn child (and yes, that is impossible, unless we accept that the young man is imagining this conversation.) We are at least led to believe that this young man will be the father of the child. But what emerges is the contradiction between the outlook of the unborn, that views life itself as a precious gift, and the outlook of the living father, who sees all the darkness in the world and in his own unfortunate circumstances and wonders how anyone could want to bring children into the world. “Believe me, little one,” the young man says, “your situation is better than ours by far.” But the son implores, “Please listen to me, Dad. I see the children that you are speaking of playing in parks and playgrounds. They laugh and shout in extreme happiness. I want to join them.” The story is a little parable about the effects of optimism and pessimism on the world, but it ends on a painfully ambiguous note, unsure whether life is a “black page” or a “blank” one.

Let me temper my praise by surmising that short is probably the best length at which to enjoy Osama Alomar’s particular form of genius (I’m happy to be proven wrong), the reason being that he writes prose like a poet, and as William Hazlitt very wisely explained, the poet’s love of beauty causes him to reach for the most beautiful flowers instead of treading the hard-bitten sands of literal truth. This poetic tendency is most apparent in a story in the collection called “Journey to Me,” a three page unraveling of Alomar’s poetic inhibitions, so many nature metaphors strewn like cherry petals in the wind. This is actually one of the more agreeable excerpts I could have chosen:

On the horizon, flowers and grasses grow around the mouths of extinct volcanoes. Another, like a severed artery, spits hell. The rivers of lava carve alleyways in the insistence of time. What spell-weaving messengers of madness!

This language is beautiful in isolation, but in the context of the story’s larger conceit—Alomar has opened up the door to his heart and is allowing us to explore his poetic innards, as it were—what does all this disconnected nature imagery really say? And what’s with this boyish fixation with volcanoes? (One begins to think of John Lyly, the father of Ephuism, who was always ready with a dozen disconnected nature similes.) Part of why this particular story didn’t appeal to me is because I associate it with the modern vogue in poetry and in Creative Writing departments, which seems to consider the clapping together of disparate parts to be a mark of poetic genius; and it is no more that than rhyming couplets marked out a genius in Alexander Pope’s time; that a thousand hacks can be taught the same hack makes none of them an evil mastermind.

But the longer, more impressionistic stories in Teeth of the Comb have something in them less redolent of stand-up comedy than of sit-down poetry, the kind one needs to reread to tease the nuance out of. Any number of poetic images (the volcanoes are the most silly example, but there are more dignified ones) seem to form a continuity from story to story, reappearing and changing, which perhaps aligns them with that certain ideal of the High Modernist poet as a person whose imagery is not random, but rather part of a larger project to reenvision the world in the poet’s personal symbolic language. Whether Alomar is consciously using imagery in a systematic way is something I am not certain of on an initial reading, but I would not mind someone writing an article laying out the evidence for it, because I think there are continuous threads of symbolism that go beyond just beauteous flailing.