Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial
Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take
place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once
everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and
the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These
stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and
exuberant magic realism on the other. In one, a character imagines that
a bird has been calling his name for six consecutive nights--and perhaps
a bird actually has. A dead child is brought back to a stuttering and
incomplete life, while a dictator refuses to admit that he is dead even
as he is being buried. A scientist works in isolation to try to cheat
death. An ex-Nazi wanders in and out of the jungle, having become a
different sort of nightmare. These stories offer the gestures and
satisfactions that would come to define Evenson's later work, but also
suggest other paths he might have taken and reveal how indebted his
fiction is to writers such as Ben Okri, Sony Labou Tansi, and writers of
the Latin American Boom. And as Leslie Norris suggests, "They are
written, too, in a faultlessly efficient prose, so we see these strange
worlds in the clearest and coldest of lights."
