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PEOPLE LIKE US

SHORT STORIES

Rather painful.

Six glum stories of brutality laced with erotica make up Valdés’s first collection to appear in English.

The publicity claim that Valdés, a former Mexico City dentist, penned short stories while waiting for patients’ anesthesia to take effect may explain these relentlessly numbing tales. The language (or translation?) is plodding and cliché-riddled and the stories are pulp dressed as allegory. In the overlong title story, two writers, the narrator Javier and his girlfriend, Ana Laura, rent a century-old house in the mountains. In the attic, Ana Laura discovers drawings indicating that there is a hidden cellar beneath the kitchen. Prodded by disturbing identical dreams, the couple access the cellar through an outside well. In an underground chamber, they discover the desiccated corpses of the original owner, Bernabeu, and his wife. There’s also a treasure cache, which the narrator must kill for. Moral? Corruption is its own reward. In “Neighbors,” the strongest of the six, the virtuous Lotzano family, including daughters Purísima and Virgen and son Fidel, buy a condo not knowing that Mephistopheles lives upstairs in the persons of con-man Señor Casquivan, his rakish and drug-dealing sons, siren daughter and slutty mistress. With nary a Faustian struggle, the Lotzanos succumb. Devil’s bargains are not for amateurs. Call girl “Cornelia” is recruited by client Federico to cure his brother’s alcoholism. Since Federico acts out of selfless, if misguided, motives, his comeuppance at the end seems unfair. The motto of “Beat me to Death” is “live by the sword, die by”—krate, switchblades, pistols. “Flidia” is kidnapped by Tornillo, who can’t decide if he wants to get back at her for ignoring him at parties or for being the best lover she ever had. The closing innocuous vignette about rigorous pre-date screening in a crazed Catholic family’s parlor is a welcome relief.

Rather painful.

Pub Date: June 6, 2006

ISBN: 0-7432-8646-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006

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WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS

For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...

These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).

The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.

For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.

Pub Date: March 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016

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THE HIDDEN GIRL AND OTHER STORIES

A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.

Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.

Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.

A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020

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