Web Magazine Review: |
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| The Café Irreal | |
| by James Maddox |
We here at Susurrus find an appreciation for all forms of fiction. We love the structure of it, the look of it, the taste of it. Sometimes, we find stories that we can skip along with, knowing all the twists and turns, yet still amazed at how interesting the regurgitation is presented. Sometimes we enjoy the dizzy spin of a “close reading” kind of piece, where connections are implied and the story isn't so much a story as it is an anecdote that leads to nowhere.
To be honest, it doesn't matter what form it takes. Genre driven to complete anarchy, if it feels good when we read it, that's what we like.
The Café Irreal caught my attention after some careful prodding by the Rev. Worley. To be honest, I'm never happy to be introduced to something new that someone else thinks is amazing because it sometimes isn't, and where does that leave you? I'll tell you: It leaves you a liar or a faker, neither of which I'm very fond of being. However, the Rev. is the Rev., and since he asks little of me, I find it hard to say no when he asks me to check something out.
Thus I was handed the address to The Irreal Café, and after what I had intended to be a quick glance, all the things I had set to read ahead of it were crushed under its fortuitous foot.
Clicking through its pages, I got that feeling you get when you hear something you can't quite place no matter how hard you try. I understood the words that were showing on my screen, I was able to follow what they were trying to show me, but for the most part I just listened to the sounds that they made, and enjoyed the insights they proposed.
From their guidelines page:
The Cafe Irreal is a quarterly webzine that presents a kind of fantastic fiction infrequently published in English. This fiction, which we would describe as irreal, resembles the work of writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Luisa Valenzuela and Jorge Luis Borges. As a type of fiction it rejects the tendency to portray people and places realistically and the need for a full resolution to the story; instead, it shows us a reality constantly being undermined. Therefore, we're interested in stories by writers who write about what they don't know, take us places we couldn't possibly go, and don't try to make us care about the characters.
But fiction isn't the only thing that The Café Irreal publishes. It also has built up a number of essays and reviews, which I think make the zine more endearing to me than any of its other features.
In the passing years, I've found myself glancing, now and again, at the works of Foucault. So, it was natural that the first thing I came upon with major interest was a non-fiction piece in the Irreal (Re)Views section of this magazine called “This could be a pipe: Foucault, irrealism, and Ceci n'est pas une pipe.”
It was amazing! Not nearly enough do you find a magazine with the interest and guts to produce to this kind of material, and even when you do, they do it poorly or with a nearly impossible or infantile page layout.
However, the mindwork pumping through The Café Irreal, the thoughtfulness and sometimes thoughtlessness on how the narrations and essays come together, makes me swoon, which is something, mind you, that this particular critic is not particularly fond of doing—I always seem to land on the most breakable things…
Of course, this zine is playing to the interests of specific readers. Unlike a number of online fiction magazines, you have to be looking for the types of stories that Irreal is publishing to enjoy it. Hence, if you come to the site looking for Richard Matheson, I doubt you're going to be pleased. But if you go to get lost in the dream that editors Alice Whittenburg and G.S. Evans have manufactured, then close your eyes, breath in deep, and just fall. Most likely, you'll like where you end up.
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