Exquisite: beautifully, perfectly imagined and written. Weird, too. A little heavy for the beach, perhaps, but perfect...
Vollmann (The Book of Dolores, 2013, etc.) turns his considerable intelligence and skill to a broad genre that doesn’t get much respect—namely, the ghost story.
Not all the pieces in this collection are ghost stories as such, mind you; not everything here goes bump in the night. But the very title is suggestive of Vollmann’s intent: These are not his last stories, or so we hope, but instead the last stories of men and women who are soon to become dust. Vollmann’s omniscient narrator instructs us, early on, in what to expect, intoning, “[t]o the extent that the dead live on, the living must resemble them,” and adding, to the list of axioms, the observation, “[c]onfessing such resemblance, we should not reject the possibility that we might at this very moment be dead.” In the first story, a blameless young couple, newly married, find themselves mowed down by sniper fire in a grassy lot in Sarajevo. Says that narrator, having darkly admired the skill of the gunner and raised a speculation or two about the events, “everyone agrees that the corpses of the two lovers lay rotting for days, because nobody dared to approach them.” The two hapless Bosnians needed La Llorona, the ghost of Mexican folklore, to warn them away from dangerous places; she turns up in another story, in which Vollmann ingeniously retells her legend, noting her bad habit of stealing away innocent children: “So La Llorona kept little Manuel, who was quite fetching except for the fact that his face resembled a death’s-head.” Small wonder those calaveras are so prevalent south of the border. After traveling the world, Vollmann brings us to an America in which death has definitely not taken a holiday: A dying man, having seen much of death before, finally gets to have a conversation with the love he’d lost track of ages before; that closing story is long, pensive and, like the others here, utterly haunting.
Exquisite: beautifully, perfectly imagined and written. Weird, too. A little heavy for the beach, perhaps, but perfect reading for the Day of the Dead.Pub Date: July 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01597-9
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
