Book Review: One Person Away from You

Fazly Shah

One Person Away from You: Stories by Andrew Bertaina, Moon City Press, 2021

Reviewed by Andrew Gretes

Andrew Bertaina’s debut short-story collection, One Person Away from You (winner of the 2020 Moon City Short Fiction Award), is the answer to the counterfactual: “What if Proust wrote flash?” Like Proust’s wayward narrator, Bertaina’s characters are simultaneously pursuing and pursued by the past, and it’s precisely this position (smack in the middle of the temporal food chain!) that makes Bertaina’s characters so damn compelling.

In one of the more speculative stories in One Person Away from You — a story titled “Being and Time” — an angel falls in love with a human and is given a glimpse of time through his lover’s eyes: “I became aware suddenly of time, time washing over me, filling me, every crevice, in my nose and eyes, time pouring out of me like sand from a glass.” In another story titled “The Subtle Prison,” a group of friends, home on summer break from their respective colleges, take a swim in a river that (unbeknownst to them) is a tributary of time itself. As the friends immerse themselves in the icy water, premonitions of the future seep into their pores, offering them a key to where their lives are headed but also a deadbolt to alternate possibilities. In a more experimental story titled “Maybe this Time,” the narrator hypnotically evokes a mantra-like rhythm in which memories and experiences are taken apart and rearranged in successive paragraphs until tragedy itself is revealed as a failure of syntax: “Maybe this time we’ll read that poem by Philip Larkin at the beginning of our marriage instead of the end.”

I could go on (as you might have guessed, I’m quite smitten with the metaphysical moments in Bertaina’s collection), but One Person Away from You is far richer than any single theme, even one as vast as time. Throughout these thirty-four stories, Bertaina’s characters navigate parenthood, childhood, friendships, and marriages. They reenact scenes from Thelma & Louise; they go on leisurely strolls with dead mothers; they search for the voices of lost lovers in telephone wires; they are unexpectedly replenished by the sky opening up and washing them clean with laughter.

On the sentence level, Bertaina’s writing is particularly dazzling. His narrators offer an intoxicating blend of poetic attentiveness (“dust motes streamed in buttery light”), soulful yearning (“I feel like we are astronauts traveling through the vacuum of space, and I want to tell her everything, but I can’t take off my helmet or I’ll suffocate”), and confessional deadpan (“The translation, admittedly has a number of defects, which are at least partially attributable to the fact that I cannot read Italian”).

But perhaps the most resonant element of One Person Away from You is the way it balances hope and regret. Bertaina’s characters are (among other things) nostalgia-junkies. The past is an injection and an open wound — a fix and a withdrawal — and yet it’s precisely in between these highs and lows that a sea-level of the soul can be found: a place to measure our lives and fish for meaning. As the narrator of a wonderfully wistful story titled “The Note” tells us: “Every bit of the world is just a memory, an impression, a secret waiting to be unlocked.” Well, you know what else is waiting to be unlocked? This fantastic collection. Buy it. Be good to yourself. Secrets await.