In the introduction to his quirky book, “Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose,” Jefferson Navicky explains how he was influenced by an anthology of “modern parables” written by Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and other writers of peculiar narratives, which he found long ago in a visit to a used book shop in Manhattan. At first I believed it.

After reading “Antique Densities,” I’m not sure if this bookstore visit actually happened. And I’m not sure if Navicky is.

He’s a librarian (specifically, archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection of the University of New England), and it happens that librarians frequently turn up as the narrators or main characters in the book’s 60 or so writings in five sections – “Books,” “Maps,” “City Directories,” “Transcripts of Oral History” and “Special Collections” – all domains of librarians.

Few of the writings are more than a page in length. Most of them depict events that seem to be fictional, but not in any conventional storytelling sense. Many of them seem closer to prose poems than they do to prose narratives (for a brief discussion of prose poems see Off Radar, July 6, 2017, on Joal Hetherington’s skillful “On the Edge of No Answer: prose poems”. And despite the book’s title, hardly a handful of them are parables in the conventional sense of the word because, as Navicky suggests, few of them offer any Aesop-like or scriptural-like closure.

As it happens I know how to read these kinds of things. Decades ago I had a long, sweaty wrestle with Kafka, whose dark ironies can be as bewildering as bright koans. His shorter pieces are best read as if they are based on dreams – they may or may not mean anything you can summarize for a friend. But they are so disturbingly weird and true that once you start on them, you can’t stop. This is the nearest thing to a category Navicky’s parables fall into. And when you start saying Kafka is in a “category,” you know you’re in strange territory.

For one memorable example, “Catapult” (a half-page in length) begins: “The last student walks into the room. We sit in a circle. The harbor is waiting.” (“The harbor is waiting”?) “A catapult sits in the center of the classroom, spring loaded in plywood and leather.” The group talks and jokes wryly about the contraption, and then one by one the students are launched on it out into the harbor. “Someone should keep track of where they land.”

You can picture a school librarian participating in this launch party, and so it’s not a far bushwhack to the inference that Navicky himself has, somehow, actually witnessed this weird scene. It would have to have been in a dream, right?

Long, long ago “Trout Fishing in America,” by Richard Brautigan, blew the minds of young seeker kids who might also have been experimenting with psychedelic drugs. “Antique Densities” has the same sort of real, sort of unreal tenor, and any fans left of Brautigan, Kafka, Borges or other uncategorizable writers should really dig this book. It will throw your head for a loop.

Previous books of Navicky’s unorthodox narratives include “The Book of Transparencies” (2019) and “The Paper Coast” < (2018). Jefferson Navicky lives in Freeport and teaches at Southern Maine Community College. “Antique Densities” is available through local book stores and online. <https://www.deerbrookeditions.com/antique-densities-modern-parables-other-experiments-in-short-prose/>

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first and third Fridays of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at universe@dwildepress.net.

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