The first minimalist novel/micro-fiction in this collection, Mr. Deadman, is thirty short chapters long, each chapter taking up no more than half a page, featuring, well, no surprise, Mr. Deadman.

In the first chapter, Pushing Up Daisies, we read: “You can’t keep a dead man down. Six feet under is six feet too many.”

Turns out, Mr. Deadman plans a getaway, starts working out right there in his cramped coffin, push-ups and sit-ups, until he’s ready to burst through the wood into the dirt, up, up, right up to the surface where he literally pushes up the daisies.

Each subsequent chapter features a different episode, a unique reflection, a new adventure, for example: Mr. Deadman at the sushi bar; Mr. Deadman takes a holiday; Mr. Deadman visits a nail salon; Mr. Deadman dances the dance of death; Mr. Deadman tries to keep up with the Joneses; how Mr. Deadman doesn’t like being called a stiff.

Offbeat combination of farce, satire, screwball, eccentric humor, black humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, dry humor and deadpan humor (no pun intended). Actually, I love it. I’ve read this Peter Cherches micro-fiction at least a dozen times.

I’d send a serious letter of recommendation to the Nobel committee with this book enclosed but I fear those sober Swedes would take my communique as so much morbid, screwball, black humor.

With Bagatelles, the title of the next micro-tale, we are given twenty-five brief trifles, telling details part of an intense yet amusing relationship between a man and a woman. Each bagatelle is no longer than a half page and black humor remains on stage but steps aside as situational humor takes the spotlight, front and center. And it is the man who does the telling with such quirkiness and precision of language that I am obliged to quote a quartet of these bizarre bagatelles in their entirety lest I bend, crack, twist or break their delicate, warped kink:

“She was a constant. I used her to gauge reality. The world existed for me in relation to her. For instance, I used her as a standard for temperature. For the sake of convenience, I called her body temperature zero. For us to be comfortable, room temperature had to be considerably below zero. And when she had a fever it had to be even colder.”

“I said something that she obviously misinterpreted, because she reacted angrily. She was screaming in a frenzy. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I let her go on until she ran out of steam. When I was sure she was through, I repeated my original statement. She must have understood this time because she said, oh yes, now I understand.”

“Sniffing each other was our favorite pastime. We would produce various and sundry odors for each other’s benefit. Some of our odors were mutual, but certainly not all. She produced many odors that I could not duplicate, and vice versa. We spent many pleasant hours producing odors for each other. When we became familiar with each other’s repertoire of odors, we began to make requests. It was pure ecstasy. When we were sniffing each other nothing else mattered. We had each other, and as far as we were concerned, who cared how the world smelled.”

“We tried to put each other into words. But words weren’t enough. So we put each other into sentences. No good. Paragraphs. Unsatisfactory. Chapters. Not quite right. A book. Books. Volume upon volume upon volume. It just wouldn’t work. Nothing was enough, everything was too much.”

The next mini-tale in the queue is Dirty Windows, a somewhat similar quizzical spin on a man and a woman, only this time they just did meet at a bookstore where she was thumbing through Finnegans Wake and he said “Nice weather.”

She took an instant liking to him since she was a meteorologist. Trio Bagatelles likewise highlights situational humor and gallows humor with a touch of epigrammatic humor and parodic humor seasoned in, a tale where three people interact in a kind of post-modern, eccentric spin-off of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Oh, and the sexes of these three are not given – you as reader can designate as you see fit.

Alas, we come to the last tale in this collection. Julio Cortázar had his A Certain Lucas and Peter Cherches has his A Certain Clarence, twenty-one peculiar adventures of a very charming but very peculiar man. How peculiar? Here’s the first adventure – piquant, provocative, provoking, and, of course, perversely peculiar:

“Clarence decided to paint his room. It was a small room, and Clarence reasoned that he could create the illusion of more space if he were to paint his room the colors of outside. So he painted his ceiling blue like the sky, with a couple of white clouds for good measure. He painted his floor in patches of green and brown, like grass and earth. And his walls he painted no color at all.”



Peter Cherches - micro-tale teller, performing artist, kazooist - one unique voice on the contemporary literary scene.