A fresh slice of Øyehaug's work, ideal for seekers of spry experimental short fiction.
A collection of 25 formally diverse, wide-ranging short and very short stories from the always surprising Norwegian author.
In her fourth book to be translated into English, once more by Dickson—who handles its sly, fairy-tale–infused, theory-laced trickery with aplomb—Øyehaug again displays her playfulness and attention to form, revealing the literary scaffolding and ropes that support the scenery of the often unstable narrative surface. Beginning the collection (with a truly memorable opening line) is "Birds," in which an ornithologist who has been preparing to defend her thesis loses the piece of her brain that contains all her knowledge of birds. She embarks on a quest to piece back together her ornithological expertise in time for her defense, though what she learns about who she is—or perhaps was—in the process is the more vital and wounding knowledge. In the title story, what begins as a tale about a made-up bus driver and made-up passenger progresses to the "real" story, in which the narrator has broken the sesamoid bones in their feet after, they realize, picking evil flowers ("Oh no, evil flowers, I whispered to myself as I lay there"), which they assure us are very real, though everything else is made up, and though Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, from which the title is taken, were a metaphor. This leads into a description of Etienne Carjat's famous photograph of Baudelaire and an extrapolation of how Baudelaire might feel about the title of his work being appropriated for such a story. "A Bit Like This" follows, a "story" that consists only of a copy of this photograph, showing Baudelaire looking as described and seemingly displeased with the proceedings, with no caption, credit, or text of any kind. Motifs, imagery, and forms pinball throughout the rest of the collection, making a messily cohesive whole tied together by anxieties, absurdities, and death—but in a fun way.
A fresh slice of Øyehaug's work, ideal for seekers of spry experimental short fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60474-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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