A whimsical story collection from a gifted writer with a keen eye and a playful sense of humor.
Eleven esoteric stories from prizewinning Japanese writer Motoya.
Playwright-turned-novelist Motoya has been steadily making her presence felt in the English-language market in literary magazines like Granta. Here she offers a deft combination of magic realism and contemporary irony, dosed with some surreal humor. The opener, “The Lonesome Bodybuilder,” is something of an outlier as a Carver-esque study on the inner life of a largely invisible wife who yearns to become the titular bodybuilder. “Fighters are so beautiful,” she writes. “Incredible bodies, both of them. Taut bone and flesh, nothing wasted.” But then things go slightly askew in “Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing,” about a boutique clerk and a customer who refuses to leave the changing room, and “Typhoon,” about a surreal encounter with an old man at a bus shelter who knows the secrets of flight. Imagination runs away with an advertising executive in the supershort and creepy “I Called You by Name.” The book is centered by a nearly novella-length story, “An Exotic Marriage,” a Kafkaesque depiction that shows how even those closest to us can wind up completely alien in the end, a disturbing sentiment that is also reflected in the final story, “The Straw Husband.” There is a bit of twisted, violent dystopia in “Paprika Jiro” and anime-flavored ultraviolence in “How to Burden the Girl,” while “The Women” takes on notes of Quentin Tarantino in showing how love is strange. Finally, Motoya offers an arch satire on “agony aunts” in “Q&A” and produces spare, dark prose in the collection’s finest story, “The Dogs,” a pitch-dark meditation on isolation and alienation set in a remote wilderness.
A whimsical story collection from a gifted writer with a keen eye and a playful sense of humor.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59376-678-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Novelist and short-story writer Flanagan retains her acerbic tone and dark vision in this second collection (after Bad Girls, 1985), with results alternately incisive and blunt. An ``ages of woman'' theme loosely binds these diverse tales, whose female protagonists range from terrified children to old ladies on the lam. The stronger offerings turn an expatriate American's cold gaze on English xenophobia. In ``Mrs. Tiggywiggle Goes to Town,'' for example, a struggling single mother resents her best friend, Alison, a normally kindly, upper-middle-class homemaker who nevertheless later cracks and assaults a Pakistani mother and child. ``The Octopus Vase'' shows English homebuyers virtually destroying both a Greek island and an idealistic woman— in a genteel way, of course. Racism mingles with misogyny in the title story when an English editor rants against ``yobs'' in a Greek cafe, then turns his venom on his young lover: ``You'll sit in cafes, wrinkled and ridiculous and menopausal.'' Professional men come off poorly, from the abusive husband of ``When I'm Bad'' to a slick urbanite who treats a young drifter to a chic restaurant meal in ``Alice's Ear'' (that severed appendage is found the next morning in the park). Despite a flair for dialogue and visual detail, Flanagan often fails to make her emotional landscape convincing. ``Bye-Bye, Blackbird'' closes with a genteel Mrs. Dallowayesque character, forsaken by children and a male friend, on her knees in garden mud, trying to rescue a wounded bird from a tomcat. Here and elsewhere, though, the victim is treated dismissively—where she seeks to be dispassionate, the author seems instead to abandon empathy. It's as if Flanagan is in a hurry, trying to let extremity in situation or detail—a purple wedding dress, say—substitute for emotional resonance. A readable collection that chooses sensation over depth.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03803-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A second collection from Kirschenbaum (after Married Life, 1990): l6 stories, some of which have previously appeared in magazines like Outerbridge and the Indiana Review, that self- consciously chronicle female city-sophisticates' quests for identity and meaning. With one exception, the pieces here, though often bearing significant titles—``History on a Personal Note,'' ``The Zen of Driving,'' ``Get Married, Get Divorced, Find Jesus''—and equally weighty intentions, are shallow reflections of PC orthodoxy. The title story, as it moves from 1984 Germany—East and West—to rural Virginia, chronicles the failed romance of Lorraine, an American, with Peter, a German travel operative, and offers glib opinions on US politics and European history. Lorraine reappears when, back home in Virginia, she marries Doc, a stereotypical redneck whose crudeness serves (in ``Halfway to Farmville'' and ``Rural Delivery'') to illustrate the finer sensibilities of the urban narrator and the horrors of poor Lorraine's sojourn in the benighted South. ``Get Married, Get Divorced, Find Jesus'' describes the quirky relationship between Harold, who seems to know everything, and Nadia, who ``prefers to think things are as they are not''; and ``The Zen of Driving'' tells of a woman, unfaithful to her husband, who fantasizes about different cars while learning to drive in the city. ``White Houses'' reflects on a suburban childhood during the Kennedy years as a way of making a commentary on racial and religious prejudice. The best story here, meanwhile, is ``Courtship,'' which movingly describes the narrator's parents' ``wondrous love'' for each other while ruefully acknowledging ``that for me, such a love would never be enough.'' The kind of narrowly focused writing that declares sophistication but, in its way, is as parochial as any.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-88064-169-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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