Collection is visceral, gorgeous
Maria Mutch’s latest fiction deconstructs and reimagines
In 2014, Maria Mutch was a Governor General’s Award finalist for her memoir “Know the Night.” Among other topics, the book explored insomnia and polar exploration, both themes that make an appearance in her wholly original debut collection of short fiction, “When We Were Birds.”
“When We Were Birds” deconstructs and reimagines the short story, in much the same way Anne Carson’s work reimagines the possibilities of the poetic form. Formally experimental stories come to life between retro historical sketches, quotes from the likes of Homer and Montagu Browne’s “Practical Taxidermy,” and Mutch’s own ethereal photographs.
These visual pieces are arranged as critical counterpoints to Mutch’s stories, which, in their lushly layered prose and dreamy narratives, share an impulse toward excavating and bringing to light complex, unconscious desires.
The collection as a whole is a fierce and often brutal examination of personal transformation, rendered visceral and gorgeous by Mutch’s exceeding talent and focus on the body.
In the opening story, “The Peregrine at the End of the World,” a woman struggles to conceal the fact that she is turning into a killer bird. In the harrowing “The Bastard Notebook,” the seventh wife of a sadistic killer, held under constant surveillance at his high-tech country estate, dreams of escape in the face of savage brutality. In the final story, the inventive and elegant “Messages from the Snow,” a woman caring for her elderly mother discovers printed messages from a dead explorer emerging through her skin.
Throughout,
Mutch channels the dark arts of Angela Carter, combining elements of gruesome fairy tale, an emphasis on the corporeal and a critical feminist lens on the world.
In Mutch’s work, we find narrators caught in the magic portals and bloody interstices between night and day, living and dying, love and loss. These are stories that thrum with weird, otherworldly power.
Reading “When We Were Birds” is like peering too long into the sun, to the moment your vision blurs and the world takes on a dangerously surreal and mortal beauty.