THE HEART AND OTHER VISCERA

Palma, a Spanish writer best known here for the Map of Time trilogy (The Map of Chaos, 2015, etc.), returns with a book of imaginative stories.

In "Snow Globe," one of the stronger tales, a traveling encyclopedia salesman masquerading as the dead son of a senile and grief-stricken elderly woman describes the title item as "a toy world that obeys its own laws….Everything inside it works differently." It's a metaphor for the story at hand, but it could also apply to the book overall. "The Karenina Syndrome" unfurls an enigmatic tale about a man's dread of Sunday dinners with his wife's family into a domestic thriller centered around a love letter bookmarking his in-laws' tattered copy of Anna Karenina, deftly recalibrating the book's themes into something new and alarmingly grotesque. "Roses Against the Wind" expands a similar premise of how little family members actually know about one another into a fantastical meditation on compassion and escapism. But the title story—about a wealthy man who gives his wife pieces of his body over the course of their marriage—is indeed the standout and is practically dripping with black comedy and potential interpretations. Are the eyes, appendages, and limbs passed across the table over lavish dinners indicative of unbridled affection or "an act of tremendous egotism...akin to giving the church the clothes you no longer wear"? In Palma's tales, lecherous co-workers inevitably steal jilted wives waiting at the foot of a staircase with their suitcase, work crushes wind up the talismanic muses of magical figurines—all evoked with an onslaught of metaphor and simile that hits the nail so hard and so frequently that, in aggregate, they have some trouble signifying. Palma has a piercing imagination hampered only by plots that are borderline contrived and an unchanging narrative voice.

Twelve well-paced stories straddling the line between parody, magical realism, mystery, and farce.