My personal copy of this story was apart of a book of T.C. Boyle’s short stories called The Human Fly and Other Stories.
The story began with a quote by Franz Kafka in A Hunger Artist, “Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting.”
The Human Fly by T.C. Boyle is a quick read that spires readers into the world of a talent agent set as a less successful counterpart in a large entertainment business. One day he is approached by a man who refers to himself as la Mosca Humana, or the human fly. This man is portrayed to carry a certain estranged sadness within his cape and bathing cap. The character becomes known as Zoltan, but his full name is Zoltan Mindszenty. Zoltan has one object in mind throughout the story, and that is that he wants to be famous. This is made apparent from the very beginning of the story, a goal is set and the two have a reason to need one another. I won’t spoil anything and tell everything that happens, but i will say there are some absolutely sky high stunts portrayed scarily detailed by T.C. Boyle.
The tone of the book is the tone of the narrator for the most part, and that is Zoltan’s manager. The name of this character is never revealed, but I believe this adds to the story. The agent himself is much more caring and human than others in the business and this is portrayed by the worry the reader truly feels in all of the situations, for Zoltan. Money could be made off of Zoltan whether not he lives or dies at one point in the story, and that shows the human and relatable part to the narrator. Now, the narrator was not always this way. In the beginning he was in it for the money and spotlight, but you see the shift of character throughout the story. It is a un-pointed out, very important, change in voice and context he categorizes his emotions in.
I would recommend this story as a quick read with a lot of flesh and layers. The imagery is beautiful, a real sense in all of the story. There is an array of emotions to be taken away and given to this story, from sadness to hope and disbelief to anger. If you are looking to be given another universe in your mind for a minute, this is the story for you.
My favorite part of the story is the narrator describing Zoltan in this quote,
“A fine band of skin as blanched and waxen as the cap of a mushroom outlined his ears, his hairline, and the back of his neck, dead white against the sun-burnished oval of his face. His eyes were pale watery blue and the hair beneath the cap was as wispy and colorless as the strands of his mustache. His name was Zoltan Mindszenty, and he’d come to Los Angeles to live with his uncle when the Russian tanks rolled through Budapest in 1956.”
