In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Drager

Like everyone I know, Lili Nebraska had never been talented at police work, and she surely didn’t jump for joy to know that, from now on, she would replace the police. But you can be sure that she is doing her best. Since being put in charge, if you need her, well, she does her best.

Reading the paragraph above, you might assume that Lili Nebraska is a human woman who has, through some sequence of events, found herself as the head of the police department. This is a reasonable assumption, and is also wrong. The next paragraph goes on to say:

For a long time, Lili Nebraska had been a street violinist, a virtuoso brown as gingerbread with adorable black patterning on her face and around her navel, and with a violin under her arm, a bow in her hand and no other clothing. Even behind the crate of vegetables, she had not lost this proud musician’s appearance.

In the Time of the Blue Ball is like this: lucid and peaceful at sentence by sentence level but surreal and unknowable when seen from a distance. There’s no complicated prose, no metafictional tricks, no intricate plotting. Each of the stories follows the same structure: the narrator Bobby Potemkine--who is also a private investigator--is given a job: find the man who created fire; save Auguste Didion, a sentient piece of macaroni(!); find out where all the baby pelicans are coming from since there are no grown pelicans anymore. He sets out on these journeys with the help of friends he meets along the way, like Lili Nebraska above, or Gershwin, a tiger that smells strongly of urine and can’t help but eat anything that moves like a rodent, or his dog Djinn, who accidentally eats a performing fly and becomes a virtuoso on the vaguely woodwind-sounding “nanoctiluphe”. Each story ends with the task being accomplished, and in the course of things Bobby always runs into the “very pretty” Lili Niagara, a “batte”--which I assume is a batlike creature--with whom he was infatuated in grade school and who may like him now. But of course Battes like to mock other people/creatures and she may just be gathering gossip material.

Of these three stories, I liked Our Baby Pelicans the best. It asks, in an absurd way, for us to consider various relationships: parent and child, friend and “lover”, wage slave and artist, oppressor and oppressed, but it provides very little in the way of concrete anchor points. Does Lili Niagara like Bobby Potemkine, and by the way, what even are all these characters we follow? There’s a sense of isolation and lostness about the whole enterprise, as whimsical as it is.

The last story ends with Bobby having convinced a large lake to become a mother to all the baby pelicans. Through his words and her sheer force of will, they are able to remake the world in a way that leaves everyone happy, or so it seems. But the story ends the same as the earlier two: with the mission accomplished, the companions cheerful, and Bobby alone.

The title refers to the passage of time. Rather than years, months, hours, minutes, periods are indicated by spheres of varying color. Blue, red, Azure, green, periwinkle. No reference point is given for these units, so these characters all, including Bobby, exist in a space outside our comfortable reference points, and sometimes, we suspect, theirs as well. It’s never explained why the world is as it is, or even how it was before. In the end, the people living there are as confused as the reader, and left grasping at the same fleeting moments of lucidity and hope--fire, love, a pretty face, a beautifully patterned belly, a musical fly, a stinky tiger, a baby pelican hung about the neck of someone who’s still alone.