Like peering inside whispers coating the bottom of a wishing well, Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Thirteen Fugues offers readers a voyeur’s journey through the honest narrative of one girl’s discovery. Childhood, puberty, growing-up, and all the emotions that lead a girl’s steps into a woman’s, are often pushed back into the far recesses of the mind. But inside her latest work, Fink casts away the invisibility cloak to bring heart and poignancy to this curious and capricious collection of fugues.
13 pockets of story, wrapped in different eras of time, unveil 30-year-old Jewish American, Tanya’s near stream of consciousness narrative. More Kerouac than Kafka, the metamorphoses of a young woman is pealed back for the reader through her sexually explicit, undeniably emotional and comically conflicted journey through her young life.
Using the inspiration of the dissonant musical (and psychological) structure of the fugue, this book successfully retrieves the rhythm of passion and confusion that marks adolescence. Each ‘fugue’ centers around a moment of transformation. And to each of these moments, the story adds a grace note: that almost-sound just before contact with the divine. The inventive form of Thirteen Fugues is matched by its extraordinary content. These stories share a pre-occupation with Jewish law, mixed together with pre-adolescent sexuality, set to a disco beat. Most feature the unwritten and unspoken erotics of relationships between sisters, but several also explore the more frequently traveled territory of the relationships between little girls and adult men. But the twist is that the perspective is that of the girls. Scenes of religious and sexual pedagogy frame these scenarios, suggesting that sex and soul are taught together.
“In a fugue, a musical theme or phrase is transposed a key, inverted, or repeated with slight alterations.” The stories of Tanya’s life are echoes, tethered by repeated themes, notions and given ideals that she keeps as close to her as the ghosts of her never forgotten past. Whether it is choice that paves the stones that lead from present to future, or force that binds who you are to who you become, the juxtaposition of the fugues alternate as relatable and interchangeable from one reality to the next.
Powerful, dramatic and poetic, Fink writes her own rules as she brings to life a world that resonates, challenges and entertains. Thirteen Fugues is a fury in its own right, impossible to turn away from and as evocative as it is honest.
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