Solipsistic coexisting fictions, seductively crafted. As intriguing and disturbing as a mouth that devours itself.

A breathless tale, related at fever pitch from start to finish, Prokop jealously guarding the secret of his infernal substance just as others are jealously guarding him.
 
Although it’s less about the destructive power of unchecked science and more about Čapek’s romantic fantasizing. Nary an episode goes by without the unbecoming and typically delirious scientist having some young woman fall in love with him, not least the princess, whose extreme obsessive passion is more explosive than krakatit itself. I lost account of how many times she throws her arms around his neck. The book was published in 1922 Czechoslovakia, so they never go further than agonizing alone, then storming each other’s rooms to rage and accuse, before covering each other in kisses and swooning.
 
Expect no relief other than that of closing the book after the final page.

My first encounter with Joyce. It’s taken a while.

Phrases that entrance, and a deeply tragic sense underlying the ordinary lives the writer so carefully observes. When Eveline trapped by conditioned duty, cannot board the boat to Buenos Aires with Frank, she stands at the barrier “passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”
 
In The Dead, at the old aunts’ dance, Gabriel is clearly respected, trusted, a bit stuffy but a decent man, who married, clearly for love, a woman his mother disapproved of. It is the way Joyce presents Gretta that is so interesting, because he does so implicitly. Amidst the social chatter and convention, we feel, just by her presence, a woman who is amiable, calm, desirable. Her composure and unobtrusiveness set her apart from the other women with their fussiness.
 
After the party, Gabriel wants to cut though the mannered theatre of the evening to direct, shared intimacy, only to be unintentionally rebuffed by her heartbreak at the memory of a true love. The fresh wave of admiration and passion that arose in her husband is beautifully described, so that when his heartfelt urge is not requited, we are as saddened as he. His respect, his desire, his anger and his care are multiple aspects of the same uncrossable distance between them.
 
For Joyce’s Dubliners, it seems, life can never be how they would like it to be.

Sometimes a read is easy because it’s well-written. And sometimes you don’t take much away from it.
 
An unromanticised and rather lugubrious, clever, secret underworld, rather dated of course since its publication in 1963.

I often finish books with a feeling of admiration. This one just left me sad.

A great read that I’m not sure I recommend.
 
There are three cases with Deputy Sheriff Ogden as the central character. You get to like Ogden early on and the dialogue and the pacing are as good as it gets. That you get to the end of an investigation with it incompletely resolved makes it more credible, if unsettling.
 
It’s the last one, “The Shift”, that makes you realize that Everett means to undermine the classic detective story. The ending is quite the shock. You might love it. I didn’t see it coming and it didn’t work for me. Ogden deserved better than that.

A Muhammed Ali of a book. Hard-hitting and beautifully done. I feel physically better for having read such writing. I don’t remember ever rooting for a character like I did for Cora, knowing that the truth-witnessing of the author was never going to pull any punches.
 
The one gripe I had was when Cora’s story jumps forward to Indiana. Colson Whitehead has a penchant for introducing a new scene and sketching in the backstory to it later, which is fine, only this time it comes unstuck. I was quite lost, looking around at the new farm and new characters and not knowing where I was, or who they were. I even flipped back several pages to see if I might have accidentally skipped a brief intervening chapter, but nope.
 
That’s by and by. The Underground Railroad is one hell of a story. I guess it’s just me, something I had pending, but for some reason, it feels appropriate to be reading about slavery in America right now.

Is sci fi having some kind of steampunk cyborg moment, or is it simply coincidence that I read Karin Tidbeck just after Ted Chiang?
 
If Chiang’s “Exhalation” playing with the idea of a piston-driven non-organic life form left me cold, Tidbeck’s penchant for amalgamating the organic with the mechanical left me queasy. Human-machine love and engine cables clung to by blubbery flesh tend to creep me out. If you like weird tales, you’ll probably like these, but I found there was too much freakishness for its own sake. All the fat and flab seemed gratuitously excessive to me.
 
Human relationships in these stories with abnormal creatures of unnatural birth would work better if they were more relatable, or exciting. But that is not the Swedish way, I think, and you certainly get a strong feel of Nordic otherness and Sehnsucht.
 
But then there’s “Rebecka”, which knocks the spots off any story I’ve read this year. I occasionally do preliminary judging for a short story contest: I would award this one first prize. It packs something massive into its eight pages.
 
It starts off with a cracking guess-how-things-ended-up-this-way scene and thus we meet Sara, reluctant confidante to the troubled Rebecka, after whose suicide attempts she is always cleaning up: “the worst kind of friendship, held together by pity.”
 
Added to the obvious tension of the scenario are Sara’s impatient, sardonic humour and the sharp minds of both women, but that’s not all.
 
Sara recalls a phone conversation—before her friend’s first attempt to kill herself—in which Rebecka asserts having met the living Lord in a church.
 
The truly wonderful thing that happens in this conversation is a shift that thrusts a huge ambiguity into the reader’s mind. At first, Sara appears to be humouring Rebecka, but then she starts talking as if Christ’s second coming were an established and fairly recent fact.
 
When we learn what torture Rebecka suffered at the hands of her husband, we take her more seriously and her suicidal nature seems more than comprehensible. So that when the strangely level-headed Rebecka tells Sara that “the Lord is fucking with me” and won’t let her die, we don’t know where this could possibly lead.
 
That it does lead somewhere conclusive and unexpected is superbly accomplished by Tidbeck.

I had just given up on time travel.
 
I’d been reading Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” and his irrefutable exposition of how nudging just a single atom can impact nearby air molecules, producing a knock-on reaction that extends far and wide, going on to affect the weather and ultimately, with that, people’s decisions and actions. Any retroactive micro-change would thus alter the course of the world, creating another, divergent timeline.
 
So adiós, I thought, to any lingering fictional flirtation of mine with that idea.
 
But then Octavia Butler comes along and does it effortlessly. The trick—if you can call it that—is to have your time-travelled character far too caught up in the danger and drama of what they land in to begin to worry about the physics. And it actually helps that Dana, her protagonist, doesn’t seek to explain it herself. It’s a damnable thing she’d rather be rid of.
 
The real interest is how Dana, a black woman from 1976 Los Angeles, can deal with and survive a 19th century Maryland slave plantation.
 
There are some people whose company you simply enjoy and it doesn’t matter what the hell you talk about. I feel that way reading certain writers, albeit only a very few, and Octavia Butler is becoming one of them. I admire and like the natural storyteller in her that makes the outlandish perfectly believable.
 
What gives the story depth is that Dana is not a one-dimensional black-female-victim cipher, but a complex character whose outrage is susceptible to being tempered by contradictory feelings and understanding — and the fact that she has a vested interest.
 
I imagined while reading—I don’t know—that Butler’s depiction of life on the American plantation has reliable verisimilitude, and seeing that world through the eyes of her time-shifted heroine was that much clearer for not being didactic.
 
Reviving that period in fiction certainly makes for a cautionary tale. Don’t jump back there in time and space if you can avoid it.

Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” gave me an insight into what it is about Philip K. Dick’s style that I like so much. It starts off like one of Dick’s novels and I was immediately interested and wanted to figure out why.
 
Nat is working in a store when a man walks in with an advanced prism he wants to sell. Nat’s coworker is late back from lunch, so she has to deal with it on her own, but she knows the technical specs and is able to value the item.
 
What I like here is: the regular person in a regular everyday urban setting is instantly believable. It’s a neighbourhood store and the colleague getting caught up in traffic or whatever tells you this is the everyday, unremarkable world. The employee is knowledgeable in her field and that professional competence gives further clarity to the situation and a sense of order. But enter the prism, and an almost otherworldly element is introduced: one that is scientifically comprehensible, but challenges one’s sense of the possible. Here is Nat powering the prism on, checking it out and giving the customer a quote, as though a household device that sees into another, divergent, timeline was the most normal thing in the world. After a couple of pages, though, the story itself diverges from its initial Dickian quality and accrues intellectual content that makes it feel top-heavy, if you know what I mean.  
 
Of all these pieces, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” was the only one that worked really well for me, because it reads like a classical Eastern folk tale.
 
Otherwise, what we’ve got here are thought experiments in story form. The challenge is intellectual and abstract. You have to be careful with this sort of writing or your characters, like in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, risk ending up as voice boxes for ideas. And present tense narration can be interesting when there’s a good reason for it, but it bombs here. It’s like someone sketching out a speculation ad nauseum.
 
Inorganic life forms are the proposition in “Exhalation”. Expounding it at length as a story didn’t really add anything to the original premise.
 
It’s clever and well-thought-out material, but I want stories that make me care and these just didn’t. So meh!

Nine honest, moving stories about people struggling to negotiate relationships and unprivileged lives.
 
Rebecca Ivory is very good at dissecting and laying bare feelings that often lead her characters nowhere. Young women who see the systemic limits on their ambitions and lack the motivation to work at all, or who expect little in a new relationship with a boy and don’t even get that. The disconnect between people is no more evident than on a first date.
 
Tellingly, being imperfect, neither do her people give much of themselves. In this way, Ivory gives a voice to the voiceless many without making them into victims, neither bitter nor definitively resigned, but certainly lost to insecurities and a general feeling of helplessness in a society that does not know how to support one another.
 
The stories tend to end with situations unresolved, leaving us with a sense of having seen into someone’s life during a brief, real connection.
 
This is Ivory’s first published collection. If the arresting cover attracts attention to her book, it is well deserved.