By Dennis Barone
Dennis Barone's novella, Temple of the Rat, features an unnamed
narrator at work on a research project whose exact nature and import he
carefully guards. He is--in this story where the past is like a river which
floods its banks--a history scholar. His story centers around his relationship
with the family living across the street from him. The elder of the two
sons, a cellist, first appears when he comes over to help the narrator get
rid of a rat that has run into his apartment. The rat's intrusion merely
prefigures the intrusions to come of poetic, dream-like passages into the
story's realistic framework.
Shortly after this episode with the rat, while looking out his window
one morning, the narrator sees a woman and a boy on the front stoop of the
building opposite. As the story progresses, he will learn more, both about
them and the cellist. For the narrator, the mystery deepens with each new
piece of information he receives, even as he becomes as compelling in his
own right as the supposed subject of his story: "The fragments add
up a little bit, enough to have brought everyone back on stage for a final
bow. Under my perfumed skin I have stapled my ivy-coated heartstring, the
yellow dust of memory. I once saw a woodpecker that pecked at the doors
of former kings. This was in Prague where I dined on so much rich food sold
in former monasteries that I became fat as King Tut. Wherever I went I saw
a cat that chased a rat and a man that stalked the cat."