This past August, I went to Tbilisi, Georgia for two weeks. Many people asked me why my girlfriend, Oksana, and I wanted to spend our only vacation of the year staying in an attic room in the hundred-degree weather of a small, remote, post-Soviet city. All these things were true. It happened to me. I first read the story in the early s, in an undergraduate Modern Jewish Literature course. The narrator of the story is an inexperienced young man working a bureaucratic proof-reading job.
Tortured by lust, he solicits a prostitute he is infatuated with. Before the woman, Vera, sleeps with him, he has to accompany her around Tbilisi as she makes her rounds and spends his money. They spend the rest of the night making love, with the thirty-year-old prostitute tutoring the young man in the erotic arts.
From his perspective, this money is the first fee he has earned for writing a story. I learned a few secrets from the story myself. Real life is only too eager to resemble a well-devised story. Though referred to in rapturous language, the sexual experience is ultimately vague and secondary.
Babel walks us through the steps of crafting a plot, developing believable characters, adding detail, and revising to eliminate weak or unbelievable sections. I learned as much from reading—and rereading—this story as I did from many of the MFA workshops I later attended. For victories that were defeats, for defeats that turned into victories, for life and for death they paid me trifling sums.
Suspend Your Disbelief. FWR Partner.
