MY IQ EQUALS MY SHOE SIZE

When Garrison Keillor, one of my favorite writers, moved to Denmark with his new wife, he was unfamiliar with the Danish language. The New Yorker writer discovered that in Denmark his IQ now equaled his shoe size. He was able to contribute words like “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know,” and phrases like “My luggage is at the train station” and “Where is Aunt Jane’s pencil?”

I thought of that as I read Darkmans, and was interested in the difference between what someone says in an unfamiliar language and what they would say in their fluent language. In a section of one passage Gaffar says the words “cat,” “bell,” and “fucking nuthouse.” In actuality, Gaffar is saying “Because it’s starting to weigh me down a little — the whole cat thing, the whole bell thing… First your father insinuates it, and then you do. Yeah? And I’m not entirely sure if the confusion that’s developing between us here is based on some fundamental linguistic or cultural difference, or if I’m living in a complete fucking nuthouse— but the fundamental facts of the matter—as I see them….” (507). The passage continues with Gaffar, in Kurdish, using vocabulary like voyeuristic and blithely.

It’s certainly easy to dismiss someone’s intelligence when he can barely string two words together. I found that aspect of the author’s experimentation with language and form interesting, but I admit that I was confused half the time during the story. I really thought that at the end the chiropodist (a new vocabulary word for me) would turn out to be evil. Maybe she is and I don’t realize it because the plot was so hard to follow.

As to some of her other experimentations, at first I got a kick out of the thought bubbles in which we hear what a character is thinking via an isolated word in italics, but then I found it tiresome. I felt the same way about the descriptions in parentheses. I liked them occasionally, such as: “The unmentionable hung between them like a dark canal (overrun by weed and scattered with litter—the used condoms, the bent tricycle, the old pram) (340). It was a gross but a vivid visual and I always appreciate visual writing. I did appreciate some of her other language. For example, when she describes the turkeys as “a posse of grey-suited prison guards;” Gaffar’s discomfort with vegetables, “…he was perky by the broccoli, tranquil by the onions, sanguine by the potatoes”; and Peta’s “dark, hand-painted brows which decorated her fine-boned face like two fabulous pieces of Chinese calligraphy” (362, 361, 368). 

Barker is certainly experimental and buries the English stereotype of stodgy. There is nothing stodgy about this novel. Oh, there is also some stuff about economics. I vote for Wayne to discuss that.