All Books

Seán Virgo knows the power of short fiction. He knows that the act of storytelling is hardwired into human consciousness and that the well-told story can appear in various shapes and sizes. The full force of Virgo’s writing energy in Dibidalen is directed by this knowledge. We see this clearly in the exquisite simplicity of the collection’s opening pieces – ‘Before Ago’ and ‘Eggs in a Field’ – where he uses verse fable and folktale interchangeably forging the stories’ links to a preliterate oral culture. Other stories employ the power of allegory as witnessed in ‘Shark Mother’ and ‘The Scapegoat’. Here Virgo employs traditional transcendentalism to allow nature to open a deeper understanding of human affairs. How does a boy transform into a shark? Why was the woodsman abandoned in the deserted city? Virgo’s commitment to the form’s mercurial possibilities continues in ‘The Doorway’ and ‘The Castaway’ where the reader must grapple with how to personalize archetypal symbols in order to understand a woman’s fate, or assign meanings to the actions of a doubting priest to realize his destiny. Again in ‘Rendezvous’ and ‘Gramayre’ we discover a blended mix of fantasy and magical realism where fusions of the everyday, the illusory, the mythical, and the morbid blur traditional distinctions between what happened and what we think happened. Finally, in Virgo’s most extrapolated stories, ‘The Likeness’ and ‘Dibidalen’, we are led on with the fractures and abstractions of the narratives that redirect each story’s unexpected conclusion. The result is a fascinating dance between reader and text that is as rewarding as it is challenging, reminding us of what Anaïs Nin meant when she said, ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’