SHORT STORIES
EITHNE FARRY
HUNTER IN HUSKVARNA by Sara Stridsberg, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner (Quercus €14, 288pp) THERE’S a dreamy quality to these death-stalked tales from Swedish author Stridsberg, which marry old-world mysteriousness to modern sensibilities.
This is a world where dead whales go on tour in the back of articulated lorries, offering a respite for a child of an alcoholic mother, who feels a healing awe as she steps into the hall of its ribs (The Whales).
It’s a place where a dead sibling’s body is covered in ‘teeth and claw marks, as if she had fought with bears and angels’, where a boy keeps company with a wolf (Hunter In Huskvarna), and a young, grieving man visits his sister’s murderer on death row in a Texas prison (Lone Star State) in search of a kind of happiness, a semblance of peace.
THE BODY OF THE SOUL by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Yale Univeristy Press €18.99, 168pp)
DEATH, disappointment and the decline of faculties are the shades that haunt 80-year-old Ulitskaya’s collection of economical, honest stories.
They are all tinged with a sense of loss, but her spirited characters are determined to spit in the eye of bad faith.
This is evidenced in the delightful The Dragon And The Phoenix: two lesbian lovers happily marry in tolerant Amsterdam, while their unforgiving families quick-march back to Azerbaijan and Armenia, refusing to ‘participate in the forthcoming blasphemy’.
Equally, oddly optimistic is the wonderful Alisa Buys Death, where a daughter decries her overly passionate mother’s ‘indecently literary suicide’, and plans a more decorous ending until an unexpected love in later life changes her final plans.
WALTER BENJAMIN STARES AT THE SEA by CD Rose (Melville House €22.99, 208pp)
DISGRUNTLED photographers, bored philosophers, and a social media-obsessed Saint Augustine star in these teasing, twisty tales, where uncanny coincidences abound and narratives meander into surreal meta-fiction.
In The Neva Star, three sailors, all named Sergei, are marooned on a ship in the port of Naples, pondering their pasts and waiting for their futures to begin; in What Remains Of Claire Blanck, the tale is told in a series of footnotes at the bottom of otherwise empty pages, while in I’m In Love With A German Film Star, it’s vinyl records that unspool the history of an obsession.