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A review by jennyshank
Byzantium: Stories by Ben Stroud
4.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130802-book-review-byzantium-by-ben-stroud.ece
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News
Published: 02 August 2013 06:04 PM
In Ray LaMontagne’s popular ballad “Beg, Steal or Borrow,” he sings of a “young man, full of big plans, and thinking about tomorrow.” Although the stories in Tyler native Ben Stroud’s impressive debut collection Byzantium span the globe and 14 centuries in their settings, Stroud often sticks close to this universal theme of restless young men yearning for a chance in life — at love, fortune or power. This is true whether the narrator is coming of age in the Byzantine Empire or in contemporary East Texas.
By age 28, Eusebios Lekapenos, who narrates the title story, has yet to make his mark in Byzantine society because he was born with a withered hand. His father, a powerful general, shunned him before his death, and since then Eusebios has lived with his mother as a virtual shut-in, “a rattling ghost in the great hive of the city.” The emperor Heraclius, who came to power in 610, remembers his father from their campaigns together and summons him for a gruesome mission.
Heraclius seeks an unknown to castrate a man who may lay a future claim to the throne, a task the emperor frames as “a chance to serve the empire.” As long-gone as this time is, Stroud makes clear the terrible pressure of Eusebios’ situation, through a setting that is much fresher than a contemporary gangster story this sort of plot might more typically animate.
In “East Texas Lumber,” the 20-something man yearning for love is Brian, a high school grad with a few semesters of junior college under his belt who lucks into a job as a deliveryman at East Texas Lumber in the wake of a tornado that left the region in need of repairs.
Brian is an inexperienced klutz, paired with the wayward Jimmy on shingle drops for roofing jobs. Brian yearns to finish the day’s work so he can head to The Hangout, a Christian band-hosting watering hole, and try to romance a girl. Complications, of course, ensue and Brian decides “it would take a dozen tornadoes to get me the life I wanted.”
In “The Don’s Cinnamon,” Stroud introduces Jackson Hieronymus Burke, “a free gentleman of color” whose “mother had been a slave, his father a Texas sugar planter.” Burke moves to Havana in the mid-1800s. After having difficulty finding a regular job, he solves a mysterious nun poisoning and begins a career as a brilliant, Sherlock Holmes-like detective. Burke’s story continues in “the Moor,” set in the late 1800s in Berlin.
These stories work whether or not you remember school history lessons. Stroud, who grew up in Kilgore, studied history at the University of Texas at Austin and now teaches at the University of Toledo, sprinkles in the basic facts without overwhelming with historical detail. Instead, he sticks close to the sensory details that are crucial to bringing fiction to life in a reader’s mind — how things felt, tasted and smelled.
For example, in “Tayopa,” about an expedition to find a legendary silver mine in Mexico, then known as New Spain, Stroud writes of a reduced man: “Two years before he’d been fat, his lace cuffs like the traceries of powdered sugar decorating a pastry. Those lace cuffs, blackened with grime, now sagged from bony wrists.”
Perhaps the best aspect of Stroud’s historical fiction is how it reminds us that as long as people have existed, they’ve cracked jokes. Some historical fiction writers think the best way to project authenticity is to ensure the characters never make you laugh — history is serious, their books want to say.
But in “Borden’s Meat Biscuit,” Stroud introduces an amusing Galveston-based inventor of biscuits made of boiled beef and flour, “an incorruptible and easily transportable nugget of nourishment.” The inventor, based on the real Gail Borden, who invented condensed milk, thinks he’s solved the hunger problems of the many ship crews setting sail from Galveston’s port, until his biscuits receive some bad reviews.
“I made no claims of flavor, only sustenance,” he says.
Byzantium, however, offers both flavor and sustenance, and will leave readers eager to learn where Stroud’s vivid historical imagination will carry him next.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
[email protected]
Byzantium
Ben Stroud
(Graywolf Press, $15)
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News
Published: 02 August 2013 06:04 PM
In Ray LaMontagne’s popular ballad “Beg, Steal or Borrow,” he sings of a “young man, full of big plans, and thinking about tomorrow.” Although the stories in Tyler native Ben Stroud’s impressive debut collection Byzantium span the globe and 14 centuries in their settings, Stroud often sticks close to this universal theme of restless young men yearning for a chance in life — at love, fortune or power. This is true whether the narrator is coming of age in the Byzantine Empire or in contemporary East Texas.
By age 28, Eusebios Lekapenos, who narrates the title story, has yet to make his mark in Byzantine society because he was born with a withered hand. His father, a powerful general, shunned him before his death, and since then Eusebios has lived with his mother as a virtual shut-in, “a rattling ghost in the great hive of the city.” The emperor Heraclius, who came to power in 610, remembers his father from their campaigns together and summons him for a gruesome mission.
Heraclius seeks an unknown to castrate a man who may lay a future claim to the throne, a task the emperor frames as “a chance to serve the empire.” As long-gone as this time is, Stroud makes clear the terrible pressure of Eusebios’ situation, through a setting that is much fresher than a contemporary gangster story this sort of plot might more typically animate.
In “East Texas Lumber,” the 20-something man yearning for love is Brian, a high school grad with a few semesters of junior college under his belt who lucks into a job as a deliveryman at East Texas Lumber in the wake of a tornado that left the region in need of repairs.
Brian is an inexperienced klutz, paired with the wayward Jimmy on shingle drops for roofing jobs. Brian yearns to finish the day’s work so he can head to The Hangout, a Christian band-hosting watering hole, and try to romance a girl. Complications, of course, ensue and Brian decides “it would take a dozen tornadoes to get me the life I wanted.”
In “The Don’s Cinnamon,” Stroud introduces Jackson Hieronymus Burke, “a free gentleman of color” whose “mother had been a slave, his father a Texas sugar planter.” Burke moves to Havana in the mid-1800s. After having difficulty finding a regular job, he solves a mysterious nun poisoning and begins a career as a brilliant, Sherlock Holmes-like detective. Burke’s story continues in “the Moor,” set in the late 1800s in Berlin.
These stories work whether or not you remember school history lessons. Stroud, who grew up in Kilgore, studied history at the University of Texas at Austin and now teaches at the University of Toledo, sprinkles in the basic facts without overwhelming with historical detail. Instead, he sticks close to the sensory details that are crucial to bringing fiction to life in a reader’s mind — how things felt, tasted and smelled.
For example, in “Tayopa,” about an expedition to find a legendary silver mine in Mexico, then known as New Spain, Stroud writes of a reduced man: “Two years before he’d been fat, his lace cuffs like the traceries of powdered sugar decorating a pastry. Those lace cuffs, blackened with grime, now sagged from bony wrists.”
Perhaps the best aspect of Stroud’s historical fiction is how it reminds us that as long as people have existed, they’ve cracked jokes. Some historical fiction writers think the best way to project authenticity is to ensure the characters never make you laugh — history is serious, their books want to say.
But in “Borden’s Meat Biscuit,” Stroud introduces an amusing Galveston-based inventor of biscuits made of boiled beef and flour, “an incorruptible and easily transportable nugget of nourishment.” The inventor, based on the real Gail Borden, who invented condensed milk, thinks he’s solved the hunger problems of the many ship crews setting sail from Galveston’s port, until his biscuits receive some bad reviews.
“I made no claims of flavor, only sustenance,” he says.
Byzantium, however, offers both flavor and sustenance, and will leave readers eager to learn where Stroud’s vivid historical imagination will carry him next.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
[email protected]
Byzantium
Ben Stroud
(Graywolf Press, $15)