It’s likely the award-winning literary fiction writer Simon Van Booy knows that the words “genius” and “genial” are related. They derive from the same Latin root that means beget or generate, and by the 18th century were used to denote sympathy and friendliness as well as intellectual or creative superiority. All these qualities figure — “ingeniously,” you might say — in Van Booy’s latest short story collection called Tales of Accidental Genius. There are seven in all, including a last extended one which is set in China, land of Van Booy’s ancestors, though the author grew up in rural Wales and now lives in Brooklyn and vacations on the East End of Long Island. Diverse? Wait 'til you read the stories!
The longer tale’s called “Golden Helper II” and is preceded by a short one called “Private Life of a Famous Chinese Film Director.” It’s about a man who decides suddenly to abandon the heavily financed movie he’s been working on, to write something that appeared to him in a vision. That vision becomes the last story in the collection, the full title of which is: “Golden Helper II: An Epic Fable of Wealth, Loneliness, and Cycling.” The title page notes that the story was translated into Chinese by a young woman from China at a Home for Blind and Visually Impaired Orphans. This is true – the author even includes a photo of her.
Van Booy writes that “Golden Helper II” was the “hardest piece of fiction” he’s ever written. Not only does it nest inside the preceding story, but it’s structured like a prose poem, with a varying number of lines on each page and occasional Chinese characters. The title, “Golden Helper II,” refers to a device for tricycles invented by a poor blind vegetable seller in old Beijing. After he dies, his son, Weng, who loves the bike, is approached by a businessman who sees its genius and turns Weng into a billionaire. Weng then uses his money to help those in need.
As Van Booy said, all the tales are about the “manifestation of genius through acts of kindness and feelings of compassion.” They show how sensitive people intuit loneliness and depression in others, usually older people who are ill, blind or deaf. In “The Goldfish,” for example, a poor Nigerian adolescent who works in a fish store overhears a distraught old man seeking help for his fish named Piper, swimming upside down. The boy quietly convinces the old man that the two small goldfish that suddenly appear in his tank are Piper’s issue.
Tales of Accidental Genius are no sentimental, moralizing parables, however. Filled with quirky humor and written in an elegantly simple prose style that mimics at times a linear translation, the stories humbly celebrate man’s humanity to man, a relative rarity in today’s literary world.