... an excellent book from a perceptive and unshowy writer ... fascinating ... It's an accomplished book, filled with bone-dry humor and incisive observations about people who desperately need to connect, but have no idea how. It's also a powerful literary reminder that nostalgia and magical thinking both threaten the way we relate to one another, and to ourselves.
Puntí’s searing short stories, set mainly in Spain, feature characters searching for control, in spite of their general oblivion, navigating moments of regret alongside unexpected grace ... Puntí is unafraid to explore the uncomfortable rifts of his characters’ lives, particularly the lies they tell themselves to embolden or confront their justifications of their situations.
Puntí here expands his English-language repertoire with a compilation commissioned (and in some cases rewritten) between 2000 and 2016, deriving its title from a 1985 song by David Bowie and Pat Metheny. The wry humor makes it an appropriate introduction to the works of a rising Iberian writer.
Their settings might be firmly rooted in the domestic, but the nine stories in Catalan writer Puntí's collection read as though they are arriving from another world or being broadcast from a chillier, dystopian future ... Although the stories are well written and studded with wry observations, for the most part Puntí's language clears out of the way to make space for his great gifts of imagination and plot ... Subversive stories in which the simplest interactions have dark preoccupations roiling underneath.
... thoughtful ... Though the stories often blend together, one not particularly standing out from the other, memorable instances occur throughout ... Although the collection lacks variety, the stories make for a consistently pleasant reading experience, especially when consumed in small doses.
