Tim Horvath

Tim Horvath has an amazing imagination. He can take his work in academe (as a writing teacher) and turn it into a story about a dying department of umbrology, the study of shadows, complete with all the political scheming for promotion and infighting about ancient scholars (Galileo or Socrates?) you might expect in such a story. But then he can also imbue it with poetry when describing a lunar eclipse, or with whimsy, as in relating his experiences watching shadows on a ski slope, or even show more the nature of love (“she told me once she preferred rainy days because on them I looked at her more directly”). The entirety of “The Discipline of Shadows” is so strange, and yet so familiar, that it can induce vertigo.


Understories, Horvath’s first collection, is full of such dizzying tales. In “The Gendarmes,” for instance, a man discovers that a baseball game is in progress on his roof. They use a special ball to play, one that can’t come into contact with chlorophyll without danger of explosion. The owner of the house shimmies up to the roof, discovering that it’s covered with artificial turf, and joins the game, because really, what else would you do when you discover a baseball game on your roof? Things get stranger from there.

The title story, “The Understory,” is an alternate history tale in which a professor of botany remembers his early adulthood years exploring a forest — the Schwarzwald — with a philosopher teaching at the same university, Martin Heidegger. The botanist, a Jew, escaped to America before Hitler did his worst, but he has never fully relinquished his feelings of fellowship with Heidegger. Years after the war, Heidegger attempts to explain his “brush” with Nazism in a magazine interview, though he does not apologize or express regret for his entanglement with the regime. The botanist, now an old man almost unable to walk through his own piece of forest in Florida, reflects on his early relationship with this man who fundamentally betrayed him. It is a thoughtful elegy on friendship and history, quiet and elegant.

I was most taken with the “Urban Planning” stories, some only a few pages in length, others full-fledged stories, that are scattered throughout the book. These stories remind me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams in their exploration of an imaginary conceit. Invisible Cities dealt with imaginary cities in existence at the time of Marco Polo, which he describes to an Asian ruler; Lightman’s novel envisions places where time, gravity and other laws of physics behave entirely differently than they do in our world; and Horvath speaks of cities that could be in today’s world. In one of these cities, a mayor decides that the citizens should never again be “plagued” by rain, and so creates an intricate webbing of awnings to be deployed whenever the skies open up. In another, streets and sidewalks are elastic in nature, jiggling like gelatin underfoot. Another city is populated exclusively by chefs and those who partake of their feasts, and no one ever speaks of anything but food. The longest of these excursions into cities that do not exist is “The City in the Light of Moths,” in which movies are the raison d’etre of the entire population. These stories are triumphs of the imagination.

I spent months reading Understories, the way one will hoard a favorite food, eating only a bite or two at a time, to make it last. I reread as I read, finding new oddities and delights each time I flipped through the pages. This book was one of the best of 2012. I can hardly wait to see what Horvath will come up with next. show less

Honestly, I wasn’t sure if I would stick with this story collection out, after the first 2 stories but I am glad I did. Several of them were incredible. What an incredibly deep and cerebral set of tales. Certainly not for every one but if you like challenging and rewarding stories, give this one a try.

Any book that claims right on the back cover to successfully channel Borges and Calvino is going to be held up to some serious scrutiny. I started reading this one hoping to hate it, hoping to write off Horvath as derivative and pseudo-experimental, but by the end of the collection couldn't help but be impressed. The individual conceits of each story are conceptually impressive and offer an ecosystem of references for the texts, but it's the characterization and storytelling that actually show more populates these worlds, making them inhabitable if not believable. There's a university department of shadow studies plagued by departmental politics endemic to the structure, not to the concept; there's a city taken over by 24-hour all-encompassing film screenings, but the story is about the mindset of a projectionist, not the city itself. Some stories, of course, fail to impress with as much detailed narrative: the city of restaurants, for instance, is written more as an historical mythology than a short story proper. All in all, it's the human moments (of which "Runaroundandscreamalot!" is probably the finest example) that connect the conceptual legacies of Eco, Calvino, Borges, and Perec with the more prosaic literary moment in which we live now. show less

Tim Horvath’s Understories are finely crafted tales from the other side of the mirror. The best stories in this collection dig deep into the undergrowth of experience...the “understories” hidden beneath and supporting the tales.

Moving comfortably between fantasy and reality — at times they suggest Borges or Calvino — the more accomplished stories tend toward a realism that is viewed perhaps from a more unusual angle — an underview.

In Circulation, a librarian’s tense show more relationship with his dying father, the author of a self-published book on caves and the more fantastical, unpublished “atlas of the voyages of things” spends time telling him increasingly more unlikely stories, perhaps building up a life that was denied them.

The more fantastic tales scattered through the book are a sequence called Urban Planning Case Studies. Improbable and completely magical urban planning! A city exclusively filled with restaurants experiences famine and is under siege; a city of plastic mutability where nothing remains stable for long; a city of cinema projectionists where every surface is a potential screen (sounds like Times Square!).

Gauguin goes to Greenland instead of Tahiti; an improbable group of losers is discovered playing baseball on a man’s roof...the rules seem arbitrary.

There’s a lot to recommend in Understories — magic, invention and true emotional depth. show less