PositiveFull StopAlthough some stories appear to stand alone, what binds all the sections together is the very self-awareness of their collection, the organization of minuscule pieces into something that feels like looking at a display of curios. With its exhibit-like section titles, the stories’ obsessive focus on physical objects and Polek’s literary curation process, reading this book really does feel like walking through a museum ... Polek’s closing lines, like the one above, tend to be perfect — produced, framed, polished ... Her characters, too, feel smooth, perhaps in the way of mannequins in a history exhibit: frozen in a very specific moment, in a way that says little about an individual as singular or whole, but plenty about a particular experience. Interiority is rare with Polek’s characters. Although when Polek’s precise arrangements of her objects and humans-turned-objects work, they work the way a spectacular diorama might; like a snapshot of quotidian life that is so perfectly framed that it becomes surreal and elevated. Nevertheless, there are times in which these narrow frames feel disappointing. It’s hard to know what readers will make of Imaginary Museums. Despite, or maybe purposefully emphasized by, Polek’s wonderfully neat curation, the stories of this collection push against categorization ... Polek is a writer of enviable skill, and at the very beginning of her career, I leave you with this statement: get excited.
Nona Fernandez, Trans. by Natasha Wimmer
RaveFull StopSpace Invaders is short—tiny, even ...That length and the intensity of the structure, which introduces so much in such a short span, is a bit like a dream itself. You come out of it, blinking, a little confused, a little scared, certainly devastated, but feeling like you’ve already forgotten the most important threads. The structure is brilliant, as it needs to be with such a difficult approach to narrative-building. There is incredible compression here, and at the same time the gaps between chapters and sections, the space between the days and years and the dreamers themselves, stretches wide. Fernández’s greatest achievement, though, is the shared voice between her characters.
Samanta Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
PositiveThe Masters ReviewImpatience can be a great virtue in the domain of the short story. Readers, after all, don’t have much patience themselves. In a few of the twenty stories here, the feeling that things are moving too quickly works very well ... In others, the result is more skeleton than story. This can be its own aesthetic ... You get the sense that [Schweblin] feels deeply involved with her characters, even as she tortures them ... These are dark tales, full stop. Sometimes someone happens to do something funny. Schweblin’s work with parental fear and obligation is inspired, especially when she blends it seamlessly into environmental anxiety ... Other themes feel incompletely approached. The absurdity of class differentiation, for example, doesn’t really hit its mark in ... The one thematic vein that runs through all these stories is that of slow entrapment, be it within a particular situation or a greater societal system. Reading them can feel, at the best of times, like being tipped forward on a great slide that ends in complicity. There is a resonance, in this way, with the queasy helplessness of Kafka or of Camus.
Cristina Rivera Garza, trans. by Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
RavePloughshares\"Some writers who invoke fairy tale do it for the trance-like rhythm and rich symbolism, some do it for the thrill of recognizing an old story retold, for the sheer necromancy of it. But the best authors use it to talk about story itself. They do it because they are obsessed with what we’re really doing when we draw a narrative frame and call something a story. This is exactly what is happening in The Taiga Syndrome ... It’s hard to make out the roots and branches of Garza’s literary family tree. There is something of Borges in her combination of detective story, dizzy philosophy, and dream logic. Then, too, her use of language and her treatment of a woman’s self-narration becoming madness reminds me deeply of reading Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond. Of course, The Taiga Syndrome wasn’t available in English when Bennett was writing Pond, and besides, there’s something darker and queasier and more universal in Garza’s vision. It seems that she really might have a new way of telling, as The Taiga Syndrome’s narrator would say, the truth. \
