Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Readers who pick up poet and translator Ananda Lima’s fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, are immediately wrongfooted by the clever triplicate design by Jamie Stafford-Hill. Is this book collapsing in on itself, or expanding, or multiplying? The answer, of course, is yes, all three, all at once.
This sense of disorientation is everywhere in Craft. In the first passage, we learn that our third-person narrator (known only as “the writer”) slept with the Devil at a Halloween party in 1999, where he helped her realize that she should become a writer. We then go into a story called “Rapture”, where a first-person narrator tells us that she slept with the Devil at a Halloween party in 1981, where he helped her realize that she should become a writer. What is happening? Where are we? As Lima told the Chicago Review of Books, “It’s somewhere on the continuum between a short story collection, a novel-in-stories, and a novel. I like things that are hard to categorize.”
In “Rapture”, the Devil is a charming and handsome party guest dressed in “an ill-fitting suit, a faded orange wig, and some bad foundation.” (When asked about his costume, he says he is “the future”.) While flirting with him, the narrator, who may or may not be “the writer”, learns that the Devil is misunderstood; he mostly tries to use his powers for good, but his efforts never work out. The Devil tells her they are kindred spirits because they both love stories, providing an origin story for her writing career. If this sounds a bit too wholesome for you, don’t worry – there is a very hot supernatural sex scene, too.
The rest of Craft alternates between unnamed passages focused on the writer’s encounters with the Devil and titles of stories that she may or may not be writing for him or because of him. These different sections bleed together in unexpected ways, mystical and metafictional.
In “Idle Hands”, a story comprising author’s-workshop critiques of her story titled “Idle Hands”, she is given conflicting advice about what the writer should do with the story – but most of her workshop readers are drawn to a character named Mr. D. A story described in an early part of the workshop as difficult to finish suddenly pops up later in Craft as the spooky short “Rent”. We learn the surprising reason about where the word Craft comes from in the book’s title, although this revelation is too fun to spoil.
Not all the titled stories here work. “Porcelain”, a story about what a lonely character named Bernard thinks about a story about a rat coming out of a toilet in Brooklyn, seems truncated and undercooked as if it was the beloved beginning of an abandoned novel. “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” describes three different earthly parallels to the afterlife; the language is lovely, but the scenarios are too pat.
The stories in Craft with the most bite are the ones in which Lima, who grew up in Brasília, deals with her bicultural heritage. In “Ghost Story”, the writer flies home to see her family, only to be faced with how they have all changed since she moved to the United States. The writer is horrified to see her beloved parents embracing Jair Bolsonaro’s policies and to see her brother as a prominent donor to a Brazilian megachurch. Furthermore, her mother has been seeing a ghost in the house; eerily, this ghost takes the shape of the writer herself, but an older and angrier version that somehow survived a global cataclysm. (Later in the Craft, the writer comes up with a new ending to this story.)
Another story, “Tropicália”, details the paranoia faced by a Brazilian woman climbing the corporate ladder who suddenly loses her passport…in Donald Trump’s America: “I remembered reading that it took ten years for a human skeleton to be completely replaced through cell renewal…. I’d thought I was the eater, but America had been eating me the whole time, from within.”
The triumph of these titled stories is called “Antropófaga”. This is a clear reference to modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) one of the most famous works of Brazilian cultural theory. In his manifesto, Andrade claimed that Brazil’s greatest strength was its habit of “cannibalizing” other cultures and rearranging them to forge a new path. “Antropófaga” approaches this theory from another angle; its shocking first line reads, “She devoured tiny Americans that slid out of a vending machine.” Béia, an exhausted Brazilian hospital worker in the US, knows she shouldn’t be buying these snacks but she can’t help herself. “That week, Béia swallowed a bodybuilder in an American-flag Speedo, posing before her as if she were a mirror. Then a frat boy drinking from a red plastic cup, while nodding his head slightly to a beat….” Lima’s language is dreamy but precise as she describes this surreal cannibalism. Things don’t end well.
The unnamed passages in Craft are just as haunting as the stories with names. The Devil keeps manifesting himself to the writer in different situations: flirting with her at the DMV, helping her understand a painting at the Guggenheim, reminding her to get off at the correct subway stop, and maybe helping to save her husband Peter from dying. If we think of the Devil as the one who unlocked Ananda Lima’s talent for writing elusive and heart-wrenching fiction, we owe that misunderstood scapegoat some appreciation.