Recently Read: The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break

by matthewhaighpoetry

With each finely-honed, crystallised paragraph, it soon becomes clear this is a novel written by a poet. The lines are full of tenderness and insight, carefully sidestepping sentimentality. Although “M” here is a lonely, isolated figure, I don’t feel the book encourages us to simply feel sorry for him, to think “aww” and then move on, but rather to look at our own lives and wonder about what truly makes us feel detached from others (which, as it happens, is a hell of a lot of stuff, from the mechanical way in which people talk, to their cliquey natures and repellent actions). The Minotaur, like many, fantasises about intimacy with a human and obsesses over the human touch, the contact, but also displays a certain kind of contentment with the safety and simplicity of a lonely life. Working as a line chef, living alone in a trailer, occasionally fixing up cars, the Minotaur has little to think of except himself, his own desires. However, the sense that reaction to another’s advances is not possible is also conveyed in the following lines:

(The minotaur’s blood) carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.

Through the Minotaur’s awkward experiences, we also explore the idea of how we cannot always be expected to find a place we belong, even among our own kind. In fact, it’s often among our own little sectioned social groups that we feel most out of place:

In the Minotaur’s mind the allegiance of men is pathetic. Is terrifying. Is seductive. Is unattainable.

I love this line because it just illustrates so well the conflict often experienced when feeling we should slot neatly into a specific demographic, the feelings that arise when looking around at our peers, thinking how little their words mean, how much our personalities clash, how we will never be a part of their world. And yet there is that little spark that burns with curiosity for what it must be like for these people who get along so well in their designated roles, how they have carved out such standardized personalities and roles for themselves.

There are also a few scattered references along the way to the existence of other mythical beasts in this desolate depiction of contemporary America. We get a little nod toward Satan, chasing runaway pigs along steaming tarmac roads, and the suggestion that Medusa has somehow been captured, encased in glass and placed on exhibit at a small town freak show.

Overall, this is just a lovely story about solitude and what it really means; how it doesn’t have to be as bad as society likes to make out (there’s nothing as horrendous or akin to discovering some weird bug under a rock as a single person, after all), and how at times it can also be the most crushing thing to experience. Steven Sherrill writes with a concise, often darkly comic mind interspersed with flashes of strange beauty. This book has also rekindled my love for minotaurs.