PositivePloughshares... gives us an important, comprehensive picture of the stages of a woman’s learning, suggesting, that over time, teachers will be rejected, new ones sought, and the student might herself become a teacher. The need to adapt, however, to be on guard, to figure out new methods of surviving will be life-long, the way it is for an animal in the wild, hyper-conscious of its vulnerability.
Lina Wolff, trans. By Saskia Vogel
RavePloughsharesWolff’s stories are more than quirky lessons in how to turn your life around offering a simple recipe for fighting existential dread: Be outrageous! Instead, Wolff shows us that while conventionality is, indeed, death, the opposite isn’t true: unconventionality isn’t life, and it won’t automatically make you happy—however much Wolff’s characters believe it will ... In a collection where emotion is often refracted through the lens of irony and humor, the ending song in \'Nuestra Señora de la Asunción\' and the tragedy of \'Year of the Pig\' are rare instances of a more earnest signal of how Wolff’s characters could navigate a world in which many people are experiencing a kind of living death. It’s not necessarily a concrete lesson or a bit of parting advice, but simply another way to respond to the ubiquitous melancholy hanging over their lives, our lives. We’ve addressed death with morbid humor and oddity—flings, murders, and a DIY porn channel—and now we stave off death with morbid hopefulness, just another way Wolff gives us to respond to the inevitable.
Seong-Nan Ha, Trans. by Janet Hong
PositivePloughsharesHa is invested not in the myth itself but in what it helps us see. In her hands, the fairy-tale works as a photo filter, bringing into clearer relief her actual subject: the horrors of daily contemporary life. This is a place where at your most vulnerable, you will encounter no fairy godmother, no knight will rush in on a horse ... Ha is not concerned with updating fairy-tales, she is not seeking to transport readers to a mythical realm. A concise lesson, the neat happy bow of a fairy-tale ending, is never offered. She instead uses myth to make visible the human condition—one marked by disappointment, loneliness, and loss.
