One Sun Only begins with a trio of deaths. From here, death continues to populate the pages (Most Die Young is the title of the second story). This is not because it is a particularly dark collection, but a collection about life; and death, as we know, is the only certainty of life.
With One Sun Only Bordas, whose short stories feature frequently in the New Yorker, has created a collection that captures the zeitgeist of today, without being expressly “contemporary”.
“What’s with everyone planning for a major catastrophe these days?” an ophthalmologist asks, as she scans the “thief market” for her stolen goods alongside an “apartment therapist”.
A single mother is envious of her brother’s girlfriend, a colourblind orphan:“... to be able to look at the people who love you the most and not have to worry that you’ll turn out exactly like them must be amazing.
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“The truth of it was that sometimes, at fifty-nine years old, Andrés still missed his mommy and daddy”.
These are loners and the lives they exist alongside. Consumed by the oppression of ordinary anxieties, as they are by the existential; seeking and fearing sleep, grieving the relationships they lost and the ones they never had, entering lotteries (it’s not the money they covet but “the possibility, however minor, of being surprised”). Adrift without religion to make sense of the world.
Zadie Smith described Bordas’s writing as “slyly philosophical”. For a collection so preoccupied with death, One Sun Only maintains a gentle worldview (Bordas likes her characters!). If the collection probes why we continue to seek meaning amid the randomness of life, it counters this question with, why not? If God laughs while we make plans, why not give him something to laugh over?
The collection concludes with a story about an author, whose student criticises her writing: “… your stories, they’re always just about people talking and thinking”. It’s a playful, self-aware comment on Bordas’s own work in which neat narratives are rarely drawn. Things happen; they continue; at some point, they end, whether we notice or not. If drama is life with the dull bits cut out, Bordas has created drama of the dull bits.
I, for one, could listen to Bordas’s characters talking and thinking all day. One Sun Only is a truly effortless collection.
