By Camilla Grudova
I read this in May and June 2024. It’s a blue Fitzcarraldo, and consummately odd. I couldn’t tell you what the stories were about. They’re haunting and grotesque. None of the characters have inner motivations. Their lives are a series of flashing vignettes, their emotions and desires painted and shallow and invariably the worst of human impulse. The men are awful monsters, selfish, callow, filthy, and repulsive. The women are meek, accepting, weak, trapped in relationships until (in most of the stories) some magical-realist transformation which frees them.
For all that, I didn’t dislike it. They were the sort of story I wouldn’t normally lead, and some of the flights of fancy were very good - one was of a spider-human hybrid in a city, who is so desperate for someone else like him that he finds a sewing machine like him and eventually kills himself using it to sew his cuts up, and another was of a man so terrified of losing his possessions, and finding food cans difficult to open, that he puts all of his stuff in cans of varying size and ships them, only to find that due to an error they have been distributed all over the continent.