“I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.”
3/5 stars.
190 pages, Hardcover.
Read from Oct 13, 2017 to Oct 24, 2017.
This book had been sitting on my shelf for way too long. I was only vaguely familiar with the author and unsure what the stories might be like it so I avoided it. I guess I was expecting some thought-provoking literary fiction as I was not prepared for the morbid and fascinating content that this book contained. Or for the cliffhangers. God damn, nearly every single story left you hanging.
The book is broken down into four parts and seems to carry similar themes: Part one looks at inward conflicts and decisions in relation to others; Part two delves into life-changing interactions with others; Part three looks at the intricacies of human relationships. Part four is the least morbid of the parts and focuses on kindness and strength in relation to the bigger world of human interactions. In fact, one of my favourite stories is in this section, Three Girls. The story starts by following two girls in a bookstore who recognize Marilyn Monroe, who is clearly attempting to keep her identity a secret, and the two girls decide to not approach her and allow her to keep her privacy.
The majority of the stories, especially the suspenseful and morbid ones often left you with a cliffhanger ending. Sometimes this approach worked and other times I found it aggravating and annoying. Just as some of the stories highly successful while others were completely unmemorable. The story that stuck with me the most is The Instructor. A new teacher at a college teaching a composition class has an unusual and strange student who leaves her intriguing but highly personal and disturbing poetry for his assignments. He was a former prisoner who now appears to be stalking her, which, she strangely does not seem to mind.
The abrupt cliffhangers and the occasional boring story was just enough to stop me from giving this book four stars. However, there are some real gems in this book if you enjoy something a bit more on the dark side.
The Pluviophile Writer 