Each of these stories is worthy of some exploration – some go long, while others are just a scant handful of pages – and every reader is likely to have their own ideas with regard to highlights. They’re all good. That said, there are a few that, to my mind, stand just a touch taller.
The collection’s leadoff offering is a strange little story titled “The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.” A story from the point of view of a successful ghost writer, it’s structured around an attempt to punch up a businessman’s memoir. Said attempt involves a chance encounter with the famed Mother Teresa at an airport – and how wrong it could go. Except it doesn’t. Or does it?
“Caries” is definitely one of the collection’s standouts, a surreal bit of magical realism (magical surrealism?) involving a conceptual artist and, well … teeth. Specifically, the fact that he discovered sheet music in his teeth. A trip to the dentist reveals a mouth full of exquisitely rotten enamel that, once removed, proved to be interpretable as music. But when questions arise about the veracity of the claim – specifically, whether he may have plagiarized his mouth music – circumstances begin to spiral.
There’s a story about a partially-eaten croissant on the subway and the ways in which we choose to uphold and violate the social contract. There’s a tale of a man wandering the country, making a living pretending to be a noted writer of Westerns. And in “Z,” a riff on the literary zombie, we meet a man who is one of the few left uninfected by a pandemic that leaves the infected with a slowly-buy-steadily growing appetite for human flesh, though he doesn’t let that stop him from, among other things, maintaining a relationship with his infected (and very hungry) therapist.
Lastly, we should talk about the titular tale. The collection’s longest, it’s about a moderately well-known film critic who is kidnapped on behalf of a fugitive drug lord and tasked with instructing his captor in the nuances of all things Tarantino, all in the service of learning the best manner in which to have the auteur killed. His reason? No spoilers, but suffice it to say that QT’s impact on his life has been significant ever since the director’s work first graced the big screen.
(Seriously – it’s split between a critical theoretical discourse on Tarantino’s oeuvre and a through-line of the plot to kill him, all with a liberal sprinkling of a drug kingpin who has LITERALLY gone underground. I dug this story so much.)
Those are my favorites, but the truth is that a different day could bring a different answer. There isn’t a dud in the bunch. Herbert a gift for the challenging and the evocative – images and ideas alike. In the space of just a few sentences, he crafts whole worlds, populating them with idiosyncratic idealogues and idiot idealists. He uses these strange situations and stranger characters to address some of the very real issues of Mexican life. Poverty, drugs, corruption – all viewed through the distorted fluidity of Herbert’s finely-honed storytelling lunacy.
It’s also worth noting that, while it can be difficult to discern the impact of a translator on the work being translated, there’s little doubt that MacSweeney has done right by Herbert – the wit, the energy, the insight are all front and center. A great translator is one who does not leave their prints behind, and as far as that goes, MacSweeney is a ghost.
“Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino” is short fiction at its finest. Julian Herbert is unafraid to push boundaries with his storytelling, resulting in a collection of pieces that aren’t quite like anything I’ve ever read. Ten gems, each possessed of their own unique sparkle and shape – a precious and worthwhile collection.
