Today I'm back with two books to share with you. After a little break from the Read the World challenge, I'm now feeling completely energized again to get on all these books. These two were from a huge stack I picked up at the library.
The first is a collection of short stories from Danish author Dorthe Nors called Karate Chop, and the second is a grand sort-of novel by Argentinian author Pola Oloixarac. Here are my thoughts!
Title: Karate Chop
Author: Dorthe Nors
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Genre: Short Stories
Blurb: These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.
Me: I picked up this book because I saw that another work of Nors' had been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. I had no idea it was a collection of really short stories, but after reading it, I was completely blown away.
Like the blurb says, each story is such a perfect observation of the strangeness and beauty of our everyday lives. Each moment and interaction is accentuated with meaning, and while that can seem excessive and almost pretentious when done wrong, Nors made me fully believe in the gravity of every small detail.
These stories are very short, but almost all of them struck a chord in me. It helps that Nors seems to be a master of last lines: some of them were just such a perfect end that I just sat in wonder for a little bit. My favorites were The Winter Garden, The Ducking, and Nat Newsom.
Usually when I read a book from another country, I'm immersed into that culture and discover some sense of place. Many of Nors' stories were actually set in the U.S. as well as Denmark, and I didn't sense any major hints to Danish history or culture. So while I'm still largely clueless about Denmark, I am so excited to have found such a masterful, inspiring voice when it comes to short fiction.
Rating: 5 kisses!
Title: Savage Theories
Author: Pola Oloixarac
Publisher: Soho Press
Blurb: Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel's beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle's Metaphysics, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor with a highly charged blend of eroticism and desperation. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group sex, video games, and hacking.
Savage Theories wryly explores fear and violence, war and sex, eroticism and philosophy. Its complex and flawed characters grapple with a mess of impossible, visionary theories, searching for their place in our fragmented digital world.
Me: I am honestly just confused. There were so many positive critic reviews about this book (many of them quoted on the back cover) so it felt pretty promising when I just borrowed it off the shelf at my library.
That being said, I somehow made it through this book with understanding probably about 1/5 of what was going on. The story is told in alternating chapters from Pabst and Kamtschowsky's relationship to the narrator's search to wow her professor by reinventing his theories. Pabst and Kamtschowsky not only have very strange names but also continuously speak and theorize in intellectual jargon while also satisfying their sexual pleasures. I began to wonder if over-intellectualizing everything became a coping mechanism for them to accept their place as self-proclaimed misfits.
The narrator was, if possible, even more bizarre: all she seemed to really want was for her professor to accept her new interpretation of his theory of how humanity has developed through predator/prey relationships. Ironically, to get her professor's attention, she manipulates others by inverting those predator/prey dynamics.
In general, both lines were confusing but not bad until they somehow collided in the end with no apparent reason or explanation. The book's length of jargon and attempts to be strange and unique were tiring. I was able to get through it because I recognized a lot of it was satirical, but I wasn't sure why such extensive pseudo-intellectualism was necessary.
The one thing I enjoyed was the historical and cultural aspect of the book. It discussed Peron and other Argentinian historical figures that I had known very little about, and opened the doors to research them. In one scene, they describe a Google Maps program that allows them to publish photos of usually terrible or unappealing things around Buenos Aries in the location they found them. The list of the images and their places, snapshots of people's lives in the city, was something I really liked.
Rating: 2 kisses!
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