Some of you may remember the short short-story attributed to Ernest Hemingway, a six-word narrative that goes like this: “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.” Let that sink in - it’s kind of like what psychoanalyst Owen Renik says in a brief introduction to the stories of Irene Cairo, a psychiatrist, who has just published a debut collection of fiction. Called Inside-Out: Intimate Voices, the seven pieces that make up this slim, readable book reveal an author who appreciates irony and delay. Her stories, light and darker, immediately create curiosity about what will happen to the main character and then surprise in a way that seems both unexpected but inevitable. Typically, at the start, you don’t know the gender of the protagonist or age or setting or situation. Like “Breast Biopsy.” which begins “I can’t take my eyes off the rings.” The story has nothing to do with rings but a lot to do with how people displace anxiety.
Another story, “Doctor,” references a novel about a little girl who wanders into her sleeping mother’s bedroom and silently reads the phrase tattooed over her mother’s shoulder in German that says “Reserved for Officers.” The reference intrigues, causing a reader to google for information about, Malaparte. It turns out that “Malaparte,” the chosen name of an early 20th-century Italian journalist of German heritage, a one-time fascist partisan, then communist, then filmmaker, means “evil or wrong side,” and is a play on Napoleon’s name, Bonaparte, which means "good side." The doctor of Cairo’s story, a surgeon whose hands were mutilated as a torture victim, is dictating his life as a political refugee, There is a quiet simplicity here, as the doctor attempts to deal with his horror but also hopes to find humanity in despair.
In the opening story, “Waiting for Vermeer,” Cairo alternates surface conversation and interior monologue, as the narrator moves from a sense of “tender unspoken sexiness” between her and Kenny, the good-looking, all-around great guy she’s been seeing, and the growing truth of their relationship, as they stand on line to get into the art exhibition. Plausible, whimsical, charming, it has a delightful upbeat ending. The stories, which start out untethered, develop incrementally, with the author casually supplying information -- names, relationships, conflicts. Situations that seem ordinary become significant in their telling. Neither sketches nor case studies, the stories exemplify Cairo’s care to integrate the elements of fiction in an entertaining and instructive way.
Dr. Irene Cairo was born and educated in Buenos Aires and for decades has been a board-certified psychiatrist and psychoanalysis in New York. It’s admirable that as a woman of “un certain age,” she has decided to cull from her experiences and observations and create tales that reflect the intimacy we all seek, as well as suggest the compromises we should accept to go forward.
