Marek Waldorf was born in Washington, DC. His father was in the
Foreign Service and Marek lived with his family in Idi Amin's
Uganda, coup-wracked Thailand, England and Lesotho. While he was in
the United States he lived in Binghampton, NY.
Waldorf studied Philosophy at Harvard. After a year in grad-school
Waldorf moved to San Francisco where he appeared in Jon Moritsugu's
Hippy Porn (1991) which ran at Action Christine Cinema for over a
year.
Waldorf is the author of Widow's Dozen, a collection of stories
forthcoming from Turtle Point Press in 2014. His essays and reviews
have appeared in The Recorder, where he served as Fiction Editor
and then Editor-at-Large. He works as a grant-writer (most recently
for Brooklyn Public Library and Girls Write Now) and lives in
Brooklyn.
Reviewed by Erin McKnight for The Collagist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What happens to a life that is lived "in strict deference to the
word" when it is torn through by a language-obliterating bullet?
For the former presidential campaign speechwriter who narrates
Marek Waldorf's The Short Fall, and who falls victim himself to the
"blunt trajectory of fate," the answer to this question reveals how
rhetoric can be responsible for an audacious regeneration of
character.
Marek Waldorf has a professional background in philosophy, writing,
and editing, and as the travelled son of a UN economist, he's
especially qualified to write about the colloquy between literature
and politics. He spotlights conspiracy through the form of the
candid monologue, and his debut novel focuses its attention on the
years just before the new millennium. In the "rude lights and the
potted glare" of a pre-Internet public that craves the
speechwriter's convincing words, the formerly inconspicuous man
steps directly into the limelight by "walk[ing] into a bullet"
that's meant for the presidential candidate, Vance Talbot.
When he regains consciousness after languishing in a months-long
coma, the speechwriter faces a temporary loss of language and a
permanent state of paralysis. Though he is confined to his
state-of-the-art Apostrophe 9000 wheelchair, his mind is
immediately set in motion as it attempts to repair the verbal
faculties that were punctured by the assassin's bullet. He is also
nagged by the notion that the words he once manipulated so well may
now harbor menace. These words come quickly to threaten his
emerging powers of communication. It is by mentally parsing
everything that came before the "accident" that the speechwriter,
who used words that were intended to mollify others, makes a
shocking discovery about his own demise and the questionable
quality of the campaign in which he played such a crucial role.
It was in writing that his expression was rendered with "certainty"
because, for the speechwriter, "nowhere was the world more stable
than on paper." The doubt surrounding his own sincerity, the
product of a temperament ruled by a fear of not being believed, was
manifested in a rigid respect for the power of languageits ability
to convey and convince, and also to cloud and conceal. When the
speechwriter's sentiments came from Vance Talbot's lips, no one
could "read the words off [the speechwriter's] face" and discern
his deceit. Talbot's voice evinced the truth that the speechwriter
himself could represent but never speak. A man the speechwriter
once considered his "own private sun," a figure "through whom to
siphon [his] impossible wants," Talbot was also the leader for whom
the speechwriter felt a "profound admiration" as well as a presumed
"mutual respect." Their supposed symbiotic relationship was
inspired by the "stupendous self-assurance" a galvanizing Talbot
imbued into the lines that the speechwriter penned. But time and
tragedy have taken their toll, and the speechwriter whose work once
"notarized Vance" now encounters an independent ego that wants to
assert its authority.
And through a nonlinear chronology, assert it does. The
speechwriter is blunt regarding how he has come to view time: the
way it stretches across his mindscape and yields so easily to his
trickery and manipulation. As he fills immobile hours by "making a
yoyo of the spit thread as it detaches from [his] lower lip," as he
contemplates Talbot "amidst the oval trappings of office," the
speechwriter recalls how he coated the candidate with words that
protected him against scrutiny and negative press and how he
shielded him with his own body against a terminating bullet. He
comes to the jarring recognition that his speeches were responsible
for securing the presidential office for Talbot and, more
shockingly, for readying Talbot to continue to make speeches. With
every layer of saturated words that was earnestly applied to Vance
Talbot the candidate, the former speechwriter finds himself further
stripped of language himself.
Faced with the challenge of relearning the American English that he
once skillfully sharpened and heaved at the masses, the
speechwriter has to confront the challenge of learning another
language: the post-shooting system that seems identical to his
first language but that lacks a correspondence between words and
the images that are deceptively presented on assistive flashcards.
Feeling "two languages growing parallel" within him, the
speechwriter knows he should:
believe [himself] quite mad. But saying doesn't make it so. Nor
thinking either. [He] can't help it, words follow hard on thoughts,
they fraternize against [his] wishes, procuring phrases and
sentences, periphrases, sentences upon phrases followed by more,
line after line, more sentences and phrases, none of them quite
right, all of them casting their own sets of precedents, questions
to be answered and answers to be questioned.
Lacking the "distance to situate [himself] in relation to this
jarringly inconsistent reality," the speechwriter's muscle memory
seeks remuneration for his "emblematic" suffering.
Reparation for serving as Talbot's savior, however, can only come
in the form of logic and it fittingly emerges from the written
word. In deconstructing two lettersone purportedly written to
Talbot by the would-be assassin two months prior to the shooting;
the other by Talbot to express his gratitude to the speechwriter on
his first day of regained consciousnessWaldorf's narrator pares
political expression down to its basest syllables and determines
that it is he who symbolized the solution to a flagging campaign.
His collision with the gunman, then, is spelled out as part of a
larger scheme. But even more disturbing to the speechwriter than
the suspected frame-up which directed a bullet into his head in the
name of presidential victory is the notion that neither letter came
from the hand that signed it. Through tortuous deduction, the
speechwriter forms a series of controversial theories that all
outline the political law he once pronounced in "catchwords and
smart phrases, nicely turned and just simple enough": the ends
always justify the means.
So when the speechwriter proposes early in the novel that "it might
help to consider [him] a martyr to [his] ideals," the reader is
advised to recall what this unreliable and once-unctuous narrator
says of ideals: "Ideals are what one believes; principles are what
one follows." Nothing in this gutsy tragicomedy merely rests in the
political realm. Much like T.S. Eliot's words that "will not stay
in place," the speechwriter defends, through "hysterical
precision," against the deterioration of language that he once
meted out by resisting the "imprecision" that is responsible for so
many shortfalls in languageand in life. If the speechwriter's mind
is the lens under which "words strain," the "wide screen, epic
color and extravagant scope" of Vance Talbot reinforces the idling
political engine as "equal parts [
] lies and courage." And
meanwhile, on a literary platform balanced by innovation and
assuredness, The Short Fall steps unblinkingly into the bright
glare.
Reviewed by Erin McKnight for The Collagist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What happens to a life that is lived "in strict deference to the
word" when it is torn through by a language-obliterating bullet?
For the former presidential campaign speechwriter who narrates
Marek Waldorf's The Short Fall, and who falls victim himself to the
"blunt trajectory of fate," the answer to this question reveals how
rhetoric can be responsible for an audacious regeneration of
character.
Marek Waldorf has a professional background in philosophy, writing,
and editing, and as the travelled son of a UN economist, he's
especially qualified to write about the colloquy between literature
and politics. He spotlights conspiracy through the form of the
candid monologue, and his debut novel focuses its attention on the
years just before the new millennium. In the "rude lights and the
potted glare" of a pre-Internet public that craves the
speechwriter's convincing words, the formerly inconspicuous man
steps directly into the limelight by "walk[ing] into a bullet"
that's meant for the presidential candidate, Vance Talbot.
When he regains consciousness after languishing in a months-long
coma, the speechwriter faces a temporary loss of language and a
permanent state of paralysis. Though he is confined to his
state-of-the-art Apostrophe 9000 wheelchair, his mind is
immediately set in motion as it attempts to repair the verbal
faculties that were punctured by the assassin's bullet. He is also
nagged by the notion that the words he once manipulated so well may
now harbor menace. These words come quickly to threaten his
emerging powers of communication. It is by mentally parsing
everything that came before the "accident" that the speechwriter,
who used words that were intended to mollify others, makes a
shocking discovery about his own demise and the questionable
quality of the campaign in which he played such a crucial role.
It was in writing that his expression was rendered with "certainty"
because, for the speechwriter, "nowhere was the world more stable
than on paper." The doubt surrounding his own sincerity, the
product of a temperament ruled by a fear of not being believed, was
manifested in a rigid respect for the power of language—its ability
to convey and convince, and also to cloud and conceal. When the
speechwriter's sentiments came from Vance Talbot's lips, no one
could "read the words off [the speechwriter's] face" and discern
his deceit. Talbot's voice evinced the truth that the speechwriter
himself could represent but never speak. A man the speechwriter
once considered his "own private sun," a figure "through whom to
siphon [his] impossible wants," Talbot was also the leader for whom
the speechwriter felt a "profound admiration" as well as a presumed
"mutual respect." Their supposed symbiotic relationship was
inspired by the "stupendous self-assurance" a galvanizing Talbot
imbued into the lines that the speechwriter penned. But time and
tragedy have taken their toll, and the speechwriter whose work once
"notarized Vance" now encounters an independent ego that wants to
assert its authority.
And through a nonlinear chronology, assert it does. The
speechwriter is blunt regarding how he has come to view time: the
way it stretches across his mindscape and yields so easily to his
trickery and manipulation. As he fills immobile hours by "making a
yoyo of the spit thread as it detaches from [his] lower lip," as he
contemplates Talbot "amidst the oval trappings of office," the
speechwriter recalls how he coated the candidate with words that
protected him against scrutiny and negative press and how he
shielded him with his own body against a terminating bullet. He
comes to the jarring recognition that his speeches were responsible
for securing the presidential office for Talbot and, more
shockingly, for readying Talbot to continue to make speeches. With
every layer of saturated words that was earnestly applied to Vance
Talbot the candidate, the former speechwriter finds himself further
stripped of language himself.
Faced with the challenge of relearning the American English that he
once skillfully sharpened and heaved at the masses, the
speechwriter has to confront the challenge of learning another
language: the post-shooting system that seems identical to his
first language but that lacks a correspondence between words and
the images that are deceptively presented on assistive flashcards.
Feeling "two languages growing parallel" within him, the
speechwriter knows he should:
believe [himself] quite mad. But saying doesn't make it so. Nor
thinking either. [He] can't help it, words follow hard on thoughts,
they fraternize against [his] wishes, procuring phrases and
sentences, periphrases, sentences upon phrases followed by more,
line after line, more sentences and phrases, none of them quite
right, all of them casting their own sets of precedents, questions
to be answered and answers to be questioned.
Lacking the "distance to situate [himself] in relation to this
jarringly inconsistent reality," the speechwriter's muscle memory
seeks remuneration for his "emblematic" suffering.
Reparation for serving as Talbot's savior, however, can only come
in the form of logic and it fittingly emerges from the written
word. In deconstructing two letters—one purportedly written to
Talbot by the would-be assassin two months prior to the shooting;
the other by Talbot to express his gratitude to the speechwriter on
his first day of regained consciousness—Waldorf's narrator pares
political expression down to its basest syllables and determines
that it is he who symbolized the solution to a flagging campaign.
His collision with the gunman, then, is spelled out as part of a
larger scheme. But even more disturbing to the speechwriter than
the suspected frame-up which directed a bullet into his head in the
name of presidential victory is the notion that neither letter came
from the hand that signed it. Through tortuous deduction, the
speechwriter forms a series of controversial theories that all
outline the political law he once pronounced in "catchwords and
smart phrases, nicely turned and just simple enough": the ends
always justify the means.
So when the speechwriter proposes early in the novel that "it might
help to consider [him] a martyr to [his] ideals," the reader is
advised to recall what this unreliable and once-unctuous narrator
says of ideals: "Ideals are what one believes; principles are what
one follows." Nothing in this gutsy tragicomedy merely rests in the
political realm. Much like T.S. Eliot's words that "will not stay
in place," the speechwriter defends, through "hysterical
precision," against the deterioration of language that he once
meted out by resisting the "imprecision" that is responsible for so
many shortfalls in language—and in life. If the speechwriter's mind
is the lens under which "words strain," the "wide screen, epic
color and extravagant scope" of Vance Talbot reinforces the idling
political engine as "equal parts […] lies and courage." And
meanwhile, on a literary platform balanced by innovation and
assuredness, The Short Fall steps unblinkingly into the bright
glare.
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