by Eric Bies

In 2014, Semiotext(e) published a short posthumous work by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, an effort to circumscribe an entire universe of artistic loss in eighty breathless pages. That book, The Missing Pieces, does its darnedest, encompassing some five hundred items, from incinerated manuscripts and shredded letters to unfinished poems and vanished papyri. It’s the kind of book that will make one wonder whether, finally, more has been lost than found—whether, like the unfinished trilogy of Gogol’s Dead Souls, more shall remain destined to persist in the realm of ideas than ever come to exist.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, a beguiling new book by Diana Oropeza, is similarly slim, but it’s the opposite of breathless. With plenty of white space to spare, it’s a book to linger over, its relaxed arrangement calling to mind a line from Borges regarding The Book of Imaginary Beings: “Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”

Indeed, Borges presides as a kind of patron saint over Oropeza’s book as a whole; a quotation from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that exemplifies the Argentine maestro’s penchant for blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, serves as an epigraph. In the same way that Borges counterfeited entire bibliographies, crafting fragments from old books that never really existed while never allowing the reader to doubt his belief in their reality, Oropeza has devised a series of vanishings that might as well have happened. Some of her sixty-odd pieces of nanofiction strain while others shoot right past the limits of credulity, bleeding into surrealism here and magical realism there, but each piece’s tone is assured, sincere if not solemn.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is fun-loving enough to describe illusionist David Copperfield disappearing the Statue of Liberty (and obvious enough, at times, to incorporate such tired territory as the Bermuda Triangle), but at its deepest points, Oropeza’s half-page inventions are earnest invitations to bear witness to everything that slips away. Reading them might not produce laughter or tears outright, but the book’s valences—mourning, absurdity, liberation—are easy enough to detect.

Flash fiction lives and dies by a fire that has mere seconds to light up a space, so it would be a mistake to jump into this book expecting Chekhov. But the parables of Kafka, the riddles of W. S. Merwin, the microcosmic visions of Lydia Davis—these are Oropeza’s touchstones, and when she’s good, she’s as good as any of them. No one sentence does her associative and often syntactically surprising style justice, but a line like “I found myself speaking inside a poem of Akbar’s, speaking of an atomized absence, speaking of ants carrying home the names of new colors” can give you an idea. Many of Orozepa’s scenarios are so memorable, so exacting, so self-contained, it’s a wonder the author managed to pin them down at all: “As it is told, the ghost had bitten a child on the hand. The following day, the child shocked everyone by suddenly playing the piano like a master.”

That Oropeza has a flair for economy doesn’t mean the work is slight. A piece titled “Translation,” for example, all but demands to be read three times in a row. This is how it opens:

In Spanish, “ojos” are “eyes,” but my dad hears the word “ice,” which is the English word for “hielo,” which is pronounced like “yellow.” The word for yellow in Spanish is “amarillo,” which is also the name of a place in Texas, nearly 500 miles from the Mexican border. Which translates to a seven-hour drive from home, which is actually shorter than my father’s workday. At his job, he translates for the housekeepers who often don’t speak English so they often don’t speak to anyone except my father, except to say “housekeeping” before they knock on the door and “es clean,” to let the front desk know the room es clean. The hotel staff think it’s an accent causing the mispronunciation of “is” but actually “es” is Spanish for “is,” so the women are not wrong, they are translating.

Perhaps some things will always be lost in translation. Meanwhile, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance sheds new light on loss, clarifying fresh facets of our prismatic reality even as it complicates old ones. Orozepa’s signal debut can be read in an afternoon, but it will compel you to remain in its orbit.