Alomar is a visionary writer, extending metaphors every which way. Nothing is dead, nothing is inert — his limpid prose pulses with psychedelic life. Animals and inanimate objects alike are personified ... Alomar’s longer flash fiction is equally powerful, careening between political and moral concerns, and occasionally delving into love and other human considerations ... It takes immense skill to forge work that creates meaning by distilling life to its essences. In the best moments of the collection, including the title story, Alomar illuminates our common humanity, and our refusal, at times, to recognize it.
If Kafka had rewritten Aesop’s fables, the result might have looked like this thought-provoking new collection of literary allegories and aphorisms ... Timely and timeless, The Teeth of the Comb is a masterly collection by an urgent literary voice.
The stories in The Teeth of the Comb vary in length from single sentences to a few pages, and over the course of the book Alomar covers a great deal of subjects with graceful precision ... In Alomar’s world, human behavior seems destructive, even to people, as long as they’re not the ones they’re observing. The change in perspective is what reveals human beings as ridiculous: If it is ridiculous for a comb to be vain, how ridiculous is it for a person? ... The effect is that Alomar’s stories give brief flashes of insight into the magnitude of human evil, like staring directly into the sun for a moment before having to look away ... the hope that exists in these stories exists alongside the cruelty, despair, and foolishness. Their uneasy balance is what gives Alomar’s work its disquieting power.
Swamps and streams, lightning and dogs all play a part in these beguiling, suggestive fables. The stories are of perfect length, but one wishes the book went on for much longer.
His book, The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories, is a delicate, sometimes hilarious, and often starkly heartbreaking collection of modern fables ...Alomar manages the trick I never can: his parables are never didactic. They’re warm, human, occasionally terrifying, but at no point do you feel the author sitting you down to deliver wisdom ... The book’s darker themes become apparent quickly, and are returned to often ... It isn’t even so much the shadow of war that hangs over this book — it’s the utter fact of human destruction ...this book is incredibly funny, and that’s part of the point.
There are no wasted words in Alomar’s beautiful collection of very short fictions. Philosophical and subversive, these tiny parables deconstruct human failings with a keen insight ... These stories deliver the kind of stunning maxims that a cunning master might spout to an eagerly waiting acolyte. By working together with C.J. Collins on the translation, the author succeeds in highlighting the inherent poetics of his prose. This lyricism obfuscates some narratives, and there are instances in which Alomar seems to sacrifice clarity in favor of playfully testing the limits of style. However, gorgeous, paradoxical metaphors reveal more depth with further consideration, and the apparent contradictions often reflect incongruities prevalent in society ... These brief narratives are not nihilistic; they convey a plea for progress and improvement. Alomar’s writing brims with hope, and this slim volume is full of compassion and depth.
