Two mentions in less than a week - brought up by one of the new book club members, one Ariella, and also Believer's book award for last year - and then happening across it while browsing in a bookstore and opening to this passage -
Truthfully, I was not pleased with his book. I had just finished reading it for the first time, in galleys, and within the first forty pages, the protagonist had slept with three women, none of whom even remotely resembled me ...
- was enough for me, and I'm glad it was because this is an exceptional collection, destabilising, insightful and human.
The titular story is a particular highlight - all it is, is a dinner party description, and yet I can't remember the last time I read anything so liberally sprinkled with exquisite little lines and images, at once direct and mysterious. And "Fialta", a poetic and deeply satisfying boy meets girl, also stood out. For all of them, though, the meanings of the stories are seemingly all there for the grasping, and yet they defy any easy explication - the apparently pellucid prose and clearly signposted narrative beats in fact cover for deeper structuring lacunae and a logic which has more in common with poetry or perhaps the unconscious than with most literature, and which turn out to be just as much what the stories are 'about' as their surface lines, and as a whole continuing to work on me in the days since I finished them.
Truthfully, I was not pleased with his book. I had just finished reading it for the first time, in galleys, and within the first forty pages, the protagonist had slept with three women, none of whom even remotely resembled me ...
- was enough for me, and I'm glad it was because this is an exceptional collection, destabilising, insightful and human.
The titular story is a particular highlight - all it is, is a dinner party description, and yet I can't remember the last time I read anything so liberally sprinkled with exquisite little lines and images, at once direct and mysterious. And "Fialta", a poetic and deeply satisfying boy meets girl, also stood out. For all of them, though, the meanings of the stories are seemingly all there for the grasping, and yet they defy any easy explication - the apparently pellucid prose and clearly signposted narrative beats in fact cover for deeper structuring lacunae and a logic which has more in common with poetry or perhaps the unconscious than with most literature, and which turn out to be just as much what the stories are 'about' as their surface lines, and as a whole continuing to work on me in the days since I finished them.
