Last time I encountered Sofía Rhei, it was for the first time, through a collection of five stories themed around the use of language called 'Everything is Made of Letters', an earlier volume of Aqueduct Press's ever-fascinating 'Conversation Pieces' series. I found her work, even through translation, utterly glorious, and that may still remain my favourite 'Conversation Pieces' book, even after reading and reviewing many more of them. I've been aching to read more.

This time, she isn't new to me and the collection is a broader one than would fit into that series but it's still an Aqueduct Press release and it follows another theme, but a very different one. This is fantasy rather than science fiction and the tales it tells are fragments, none occupying a longer footprint than a double page spread (except perhaps through the changes wrought by translation). Most are shorter still, content to share their alloted pages with at least another, maybe more. This structure repeats across fourteen spreads in each of five sections, with the first of them, 'Paths', benefitting from an extra eight. That's a lot of fragments.

My immediate thought was of Techt, a highly condensed language in a story of the same name from 'Everything is Made of Letters'. An intersemiotic translator converts them into different form in Long Language, so that a Burton Machine can generate films from them. Each of these fragments feels like a fairy tale condensed down to its very essence, but a nascent writer who's not sure if they're ready to thrive on their own yet could expand the ones that speak to them loudest into more traditional pieces. Such exercise could demonstrate how ideas can grow into stories but also perhaps how stories should never lose sight of their core ideas.

So we meet the Bellmaker on the first page. His bells are custom-designed because he has the power to see everything he needs to know about a person in a single glance. He knows exactly what sounds will cure them or hurt them or sadden them and he crafts accordingly. That's just the first paragraph and there's only one more. The second he tells us that lives in the River of the Turtles and tries to fathom meaning from the patterns on their backs, as the first step to grasp the universe. The final line is that "Not once has he been able to make a bell for himself."

This story runs maybe a hundred words and it shows us, through fairy tale logic, how a man can understand everybody but himself yet want to understand the universe without knowing how. There are no names and only one character but it's trivial to see how easily this seed of a story could grow into something far more obvious, sprouting names here and characters there, but always returning to the sadness at the heart of it. However magical his insight is whenever it's turned on other people, making him uniquely talented at his craft, he's doomed to never turn that insight successfully onto himself. Who can fairly judge his value?

I've written more words on 'The Bellmaker' than 'The Bellmaker' uses, to spark discussion. And that's just the first fragment of three on the first double page spread of seventy-eight. This is no book; it's a box of delights. Whether you're a writer who uses these fragments as sparks for exercises or an epicure who tastes one nightly to savour it all day, returning to that ritual until there are no more fragments to taste, it's a gift that keeps on giving. That suggests that there is no way anyone can fairly review this book just like that, which is what I'm tasked with doing. It feels almost decadent to devour the whole thing in one sitting. It's too rich for that.

For instance, the two pieces that accompany 'The Bellmaker' are no less worthy.

The first that fills the rest of the opening page is about a king so horrified by a prophecy that his daughter will be made unhappiest by a man with one arm that he takes brutal action. The one armed men in his kingdom must lose their only arms to avoid this fate for his daughter. He naturally gains a reputation for brutality, making every potential suitor hesitant to approach his daughter and thus her acutely unhappy. Only after he's attacked at night by severed arms does he finally realise that the prophecy was talking about him.

The second, taking the facing page, phrases standard fantasy tropes in a stark way. The Girl of Thorns is asleep, safe and secure in a glass coffin, destined to remain so until someone kisses her awake. Whoever that is will die immediately but, in doing so, bring peace to the forest. As destinies in fairy tales go, it's pretty accurate, because exactly that happens, but the boy who becomes a man and kisses the Girl of Thorns awake and dies in the process takes her place and the cycle continues, with him becoming the Boy of Thorns. Peace, it seems, is always relative.

If we call these fragments perspective, realisation and cycles, then they're repeated over and over in this book, as are exchanges and desires, but they do change as they go and the lessons they impart change likewise. The detail I should add is that, while the component parts are all taken from fantasy and their tone is ruthlessly honest in the way that only folk tales can ever be, at least before Disney gets their greedy little hands on them and grows soporific songs in their bones, fairy tales tend to speak most powerfully to children and not all these are meant that way.

Some of my personal favourites are far more adult in nature, even if they're never explicit in a pornographic sense. There's a haunting one about a couple who find their deepest pleasure in others, a wolf and a bird respectively, without losing their love for each other. There's a killer fragment, quite literally, about eyes, which can be swapped through magical means to provide different insight, and that escalates gloriously and ironically. There's one about a dragon who rapes a human girl to get her pregnant that I won't explain just to let that live unexplained in your skull. Needless to say, not all of these fragments would play the same to children.

Some might. Three of my favourites are bundled together as Paths XVII and, while each speaks to sex, through conception, infidelity and seduction, they're told in such a way that kids could well get as much out of them as adults. None of them rely on the knowledge of what sex is and what it looks like. They're stories about lost innocence that could be told to the innocent.

Needless to say, not everything hits with the same depth or the same magic, but the hit rate is astoundingly good. Maybe I favour more of the fragments labelled Paths and Trees, but maybe that's just me or maybe it's just statistics. Some Fountains certainly spoke to me too, like the monstrous woman, like the wisest of the dryads and the pearl in the glass. Some Doors did as well, like the painter's baby, the beggar's hunchback and the girl without eyelids. And Hearths are no different, with the sculptor of the flame, the witch's sacrifice and the saviour of toys.

One observation that abides is that many of these favourite fragments are short, sometimes very short indeed. In fact, there are fragments here so powerfully condensed that they're over after a mere line or two.

Here's a one line example: "The hermit admired the splendid suit of the emperor, but he failed to understand why people laughed at him and said that the emperor was actually naked." I can see a number of ways to read that, as varied as an LGBTQ+ love story and a cosmic horror story. We recognise the fairy tale at its heart and that's about the emperor. This seems to be about the hermit, but maybe it's really about the people. Is it a commentary on taste or even art? It's astoundingly simple but masterfully deep nonetheless.

And here's one of my favourites that sprawls out to three lines: "When the girl grew older and no longer had those terrible nightmares, the monster found a way to escape. He then stole a body and asked for her hand in marriage. She did not recognise him." Sure, that fragment isn't remotely as deep but it's impeccably told and it carries a serious impact. Cycles don't manifest much more brutally than that. Well maybe the fragment about the fairy hunter's disguises is more brutal but that's a matter for debate. Or maybe the one about the cave called Dragon's Mouth because that's a perfect and ironically biting analogy to America today.

Let's just say that this is an absolute marvel of a book and you should buy it and dip into it. You could dive in and swim through its entirety, which is a joyous experience, but I'd argue that it's better to dip your toes here and there and let its magic wash over you. Please, Aqueduct Press, keep the Sofía Rhei coming. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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