Matthew Zanoni Müller | Toasted Cheese Literary Journal

Shelley Carpenter
Candle-Ends: Reviews

Drops on the Water (Apprentice House, 2014) is a collection of short memoirs written by father and son authors, Eric G. Müller and Matthew Zanoni Müller. The individual narratives are separated by sections detailing author and setting, closing with two final stories from each author and an Afterward by Matthew. Their parallel stories are told in tandem chronicling their early childhood, school years, and young adulthood in Western Europe, Southern Africa, and America.

I really enjoyed reading the two introductory stories where Eric and Matthew introduce each other to the reader. Also, the father and son authorship adds a cool dynamic to the collection because they often appear in each other’s stories. In Matthew’s story, “Dorian,” he knows something bad has happened and describes Eric’s anguish in the moments before he reveals it to Matthew. “His face was bright and open before us, guilty, ashamed of itself, and his big floppy dark hair was catching the light off the kitchen ceiling and his mouth was showing all his teeth, helplessly…”

Movement is a common theme as the Müllers moved frequently. Many of the stories have exotic settings such as the Swiss Alps where a young Eric learns about the power of prayer in “The Prayer”; “The Beach in Nicaragua“ where teenage Matthew jumps into the surf and learns firsthand about the classic conflict, man versus nature; and South Africa where Eric traverses the landscape and finds himself in trouble in “Busted.”

Family is also the landscape that both authors draw their experiences from. There is a strong sense of self from both Matthew and Eric as they move about. What does it mean to be German-American? A young Matthew grapples with this idea. Eric, however, seems content to be a global citizen. Time and maturity play key parts in Eric’s writing experience and Matthew’s, too, while both write from very different ages and vantages.

Their voices are distinct and so very personal. Many of Matthew’s stories are about being in the moment, what it felt like to be in that one place at that one time. In “My Grandfather’s Gift,” he is introduced to his German grandfather, Opa Willie, at the airport and they escape together in a charming game of airplane; later, an older Matthew visits him in Germany. In this moment, Matthew discovers isolation and fear in a bad choice:

I was scared because I was the bad person in the family now, and even though everyone was nice they all agreed that what I had done was wrong… It was scary now to be on the outside of everyone…

Matthew’s writing is honest and quite brave in that he hits the nail straight on, capturing the shadowy side of human nature with all of its angst and grace. He also layers his story with evocative detail and beautiful sentences:

The air would be dim and thick through the curtains and all that Texas heat outside, and the incredible emptiness he must have woken to in the mornings, the absence thick in the house, as though an explosion had gone off and left a stunned silence just hanging there. (“In Their Room”)

Eric is funny, ironic, full of wonder and wanderlust much like a character in a film—part musician, hippie, rebel, and poet rolled into one. In “Streaking,” he describes the thrill of running naked across a public mall. “I felt hunted. A strange thrill charged through my blood—the adrenalin-rush slashed my fear. The turbo jets in my muscles took over and I picked up speed. I became invincible—Superman!”

Aside from being engaging, Eric’s stories are also jam-packed with descriptive details and rich language. “We fumbled with our guns, reloaded and shot. Still it flew, defying each pop, bang and boom, the wide wings moving awkwardly, though it disappeared with uncanny speed behind a koppie. Gone… Shells ejected, we stared gobsmacked across the empty veld” (“The Pheasant”). And “By now I was utterly lost, though I scurried around the key of E flat major like a beheaded turkey, hoping to find my way back to the melodic path—anywhere along the way would do…” (“Debut“).

Eric’s voice, though rich in humor and irony, also reveals much about the human condition such as with a friend’s apartheid revelation in “Confession“ to taking care of a beloved grandmother in “After Midnight“ to the “addictive” attraction of traveling barefoot for a year in “Barefoot“ to sweet introductions to his future young sisters-in-law via a keyhole in “Meet the Sisters.”

Eric and Matthew Müller’s stories have an intimate feel to them as if they are being told or retold to family and friends gathered around the holiday table or in front of a blazing fire. Indeed, I felt like such a guest seated in warm corner as I read each one. This calls to my mind the expression that we are the sum of our experiences or perhaps, better said from a writer’s standpoint, that we may indeed be the sum of our experiences, but we are also the sum of our stories and others’ stories, too. The Müllers’ Drops on the Water: Stories about Growing Up from a Father and Son echoes this idea. Moreover, how very precious and important these big and small moments are in our making, along with the people—near, dear, lost, and far away who populate them.

Eric G. Müller was born in Durban, South Africa, and studied literature and history at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Currently he lives in upstate New York, teaching, writing and playing music. Apart from Drops on the Water he has written three novels and a book of poetry. Poetry, articles and short stories have appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, Gloom CupBoard, and various other journals, anthologies and magazines. Facebook: Eric Müller

Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and Upstate New York. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and is an Assistant Professor of English at Berkshire Community College. His writing has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, NANO Fiction, decomP MagazinE, fwriction: Review, Toasted Cheese, Prick of the Spindle, Halfway Down the Stairs, MiCrow, Literary Bohemian, Hippocampus Magazine, and numerous other magazines and journals. Facebook: Matthew Müller Twitter: @matthewzmuller

Shelley Carpenter is TC’s Reviews Editor. Email: harpspeed[at]toasted-cheese.com

Creative Nonfiction
Matthew Zanoni Müller

Photo Credit: Deb Collins

My father had a few shirts he wore all the time. I remember one in particular. It was black, and showed some form of wooden gate in the graphic on the front. It was the kind of gate you might see entering the driveway of horse breeders, only it was rustic, built out of rough-hewn logs, and said the name of a national park across the top. He always wore it under his collared shirts and in the summer would unbutton them, and leaning back in the sun on one of our weekend trips to Dorina Lake in Oregon, the shirt would be there, its yellow gate emblazoned on a black field. This shirt, as with the others, was worn until the collar frayed and split, the sleeves began coming apart, and the shoulders turned threadbare and grew holes. My mother always tried to get him to throw his shirts away but he never did. He wore all of the new shirts she bought him once and then the old ones would be back, their holes getting bigger and their fabric thinner. My father kept the things he liked, the things he felt good in, the things he felt connected to.

My mother, on the other hand, loved throwing things out. She loved clearing brush, weeding, taking things to the dump. At our house in Upstate New York she would always make brush fires and then carry anything she could burn out from the basement, any boxes or old furniture, anything that was taking up unnecessary space. My father was the opposite. Even though he had always been a nomad, he hated throwing anything out. His study was filled with little business cards from cafés and music stores, ticket stubs from concerts, every kind of imaginable instrument and rows and rows of books, many of them lugged across continents. It was common for my mother to come into his study and point to a dodgy old object found in the basement asking to throw it out and he’d rush to take it quickly from her hands and find a special place for it on his shelf.

Sometimes my mother would get incredibly inspired. She’d come in from clearing brush and throw her gloves on the counter. She’d say, “I feel so good today, everything is going so well, it just feels so good to clean!” Then she’d take a big drink of water and go back outside to throw more things on the fire, to sweep away the old. “You have to make space for new things to grow,” she’d say, her cheeks flushed with excitement. When my mother got like this my father would disappear into his study and bend his face down over his keyboard or stacks of corrections. He’d run his fingers through his hair until it formed a long horn hanging down over his forehead, and like an old skinny elephant he’d sit in the middle of all his treasures, surrounded by memories, stubborn to the dust being kicked up around him.

My mother knew my father well, she knew how he thought, what he cared about. But even for her it was difficult to understand why anyone would want to keep the two black moldy suitcases that had lived in our basement now for the past eleven years. Maybe she figured it wasn’t that important that they had lived in an old closet in Oregon for nine years before that. Maybe she even thought it was disgusting that they had survived long enough to live in a closet in the apartment in Germany where I spent my first few years, or the apartment in England where they had first met, or how they were the suitcases that had accompanied him from there to Switzerland where he had worked in a chocolate factory, and from the factory to his years in the band in Schwenningen, Germany, and from there back to Switzerland, and then back to Johannesburg where they had fled the draft with him after he had finished university; back to Stuttgart, Germany where he went to high school for a year; back to Empangeni, South Africa, to Cape Town; and finally back to Davos, Switzerland where his father had saddled him with the responsibility, at age seven, to go buy suitcases for himself, because they might be traveling quite a bit in the years to come. But my mother must have only seen the battered outsides, the infestation of mold, the old brass buckles, as she, full of delight, threw them into the fire.

She probably didn’t count on him coming outside just then, coffee cup in hand, only to see his two suitcases going up in flame, their flimsy ribcages pointed up to the sun, his twin companions cremated, gone forever, their memories sucked into the deep red and orange of the flames, a part of him lost. She knew what she had done, though, when he even rushed a few steps forward, tried to save them from the fire. All of her inspiration fell away when she saw the devastation spread across his face, all of the trains and mountains he had seen, the villages, the people, all somehow betrayed by this act, like their memory was no longer worth saving. A silence built between them for the next week as she watched him sifting through the coals after the fire had gone out, pulling the brass buckles from the feathery ashes and rubbing them gently off like sacred stones. She watched as he sat them on a shelf in his study, part memory, and part reminder of its importance.

Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and Upstate New York. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and teaches at his local Community College. His work has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, DecomP MagazinE, The Boiler Journal, Prick of the Spindle, Halfway Down the Stairs, MiCrow, Used Furniture Review, RED OCHRE LiT, Literary Bohemian and numerous other magazines and journals. To learn more about his writing, please visit matthewzanonimuller.com Email: matthewzanonimuller[at]gmail.com

Toasted Cheese Literary Journal

Est. 2001

Tag Archives: Matthew Zanoni Müller

Drops on the Water
by Eric G. Müller & Matthew Zanoni Müller

Suitcases