The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo
PUBLICATION
25 August 2022
PUBLISHER
Peepal Tree Press
GENRE
Adult literary short stories
PURCHASE
Bookshop.org
I read The Dreaming in record time, especially for a short story collection. I’ve been having trouble getting into short stories lately, and this is the first one that has truly hooked me. The Dreaming is a collection featuring 12 compulsively readable short stories that explore the lives of gay men in Trinidad—the first story, Haircuts, does so through the narrator’s journey of looking for a hairdresser he could visit for his regular cuts. His life through a couple of years, as a journalist and as a lover, is written through his barbershop-hopping, a fascinating way in which to frame the story.
For a moment, he kept his hand in my hand. It felt like a soft bird. Then he pulled away.
In Conundrum, a poet is forced to pretend he likes his boyfriend’s poems for the sake of their relationship. Throughout the story, the reader is brought along to find out whether the narrator ends up telling his partner this truth or not. This adds to the story’s page-turning quality: it feels as if we’re waiting for a lit fuse to reach the end of the line, and are left to spectate what the ensuing explosion would look like. The story, too, has beautiful turns of phrase sprinkled throughout, like so:
Yet still, some of these men lingered in his mind, hard rocks in his sea of longings. If only one–just one–could find the courage to be truthful, to love him and to love him openly.
Andre Bagoo does not shy away from adding political nuance in his stories. In Simple Things, we briefly get a glimpse of Trinidad’s problems in medicine and healthcare. In The Forest Ranger, larger themes regarding nature and corporate environmental destruction are tackled, although it is beneath a plot that is only mildly interesting.
In Selected Boys: 2013-2016, the stories start intersecting, and characters from previous stories start to recur and appear, with varying degrees of screen time. I had fun picking out the people whose names seemed familiar, recalling what was said about them in previous stories. This story in particular is graphic and steamy, a quality it shares with several others in the collection.
Out of the 12, my personal favorites are Bad-talking Boys, MS., and Not Looking. The latter two are the two closers in the collection; it seems as though Andre Bagoo truly saved the best for last.
Bad-talking Boys is about the gay narrator’s relationship with his straight friend, an on-call cab driver whom the narrator met when he was a passenger. Despite the restraint in narrative (it’s all about their relationship and nothing else), the story is readable and addictive, carried by its two main characters and their unique dynamic.
MS. is perhaps the most entertaining story in the collection, about a writing group worried that their new member’s violent stories are autobiographical. The original writing group members are endearing, and how the introduction of their new member affected the group is fascinating to witness. Andre Bagoo’s humor is best displayed in this story, capped with the most memorable ending in the collection. The following quote is incredibly funny with the necessary context:
He would rename his manuscript My Life: An Autobiography in Stories.
Finally, Not Looking worked so well as the collection’s closer. The plot is intriguing from start to finish. It uniquely has a thriller slant, which I of course welcomed with open arms.
Overall, The Dreaming is a collection of interesting stories about interesting people—the lives they lead, their relationships, where they are from, and where they are going. It doesn’t care too much about a strict plot structure with a resolute ending. It feels vignette-y in this sense, especially knowing every story is set in the same contained universe, proximate with respect to each other.
