A dizzying look inside the heads of people at the margins.
Wry and heady short stories.
Many of the stories in this collection—Tichý’s first to be translated into English—begin seemingly midbreath. The effect is like emerging from underwater to a series of manic, monologuing strangers. Tichý was born in Prague to Czech and Polish parents but lives and works in Sweden. This geographical sweep is present in his characters—a thief, a janitor, a neo-Nazi—who nearly all feel mismatched with their cities, their occupations, or modernity. “I wish there was a scene I could call upon to illustrate my experience of class,” confides one. But no climax comes to mind, only the cumulative indignities of daily life. Most characters submit to their circumstances, even as many, especially men, imagine or threaten violence. After enduring a stranger’s verbal abuse on a bus, one speaker goes home and serially rewrites the encounter: One version wonders, “Is the monster going to beat the shit out of me?”; in another, they “fight, in silence…over the little armrest between the seats” on a train. Tichý has a gift for evocative juxtapositions, though his prose-poetic tone can sometimes trigger a double take. When a paragraph nests a story within a story, one speaker’s abrupt recollection of someone else’s experience, it’s easy to lose track of whose thoughts are being voiced. Grotesque descriptions of the human body further flatten the experience of being alive. One character pictures “the digestive tract, this, like, system of organs, that goes from the mouth to the anus and I wonder if this is the essence of a human.” Another lists a vivid series of possible methods for dying by suicide: “The plastic bag, seen from the inside, the moisture.” Don’t forget to come up for air.
A dizzying look inside the heads of people at the margins.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781913505981
Page Count: 124
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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