Someone travels through the night in a place where anything can and apparently will happen, a sister mourns her older brother who disappeared shortly before his wedding, and a woman steps on a snake which then moves in with her. This is a collection of three surrealistic novellas that are loosely connected by the themes of love and loss.
Reading this is a real experience, it’s going through the rabbit hole and just having to roll with anything that happens afterwards. The first story is the most extreme; it is a dreamscape, filled with rich imagery and fantastic happenings like transformations into trees and horses and talking animals, which at once baffles you with its beauty and creativeness while simultaneously putting you off with its bizarreness and haphazard meandering. There was no emotional impact, it rather felt like an intellectual exercise or experiment where the mind is allowed to roam free and jump from one thought to the next in a random pattern.
The second and third story are more accessible and grounded in human experience although magical realism is still the foundation on which they are built. Still, in these two stories the same problem as in the first one arises. I think they show great craftsmanship and imagination but there is an emotional void at their centre that took away part of my enjoyment. I was not as deeply invested in the stories or the characters as I wanted or needed to be. Maybe everything was still too surreal, or the fact that there seems to be not much point to the whole goings-on is what left me feeling detached.
Nonetheless, I am glad that I read it because it is a book that takes you beyond the conventions of traditional storytelling, and one that rewards you with sometimes beautiful and sometimes horrid images and a bunch of surprising events. Where else are you going to find a human turning into a loach, and only turning back after being thrown to the floor seven times by a child, or a woman shrinking a little every day due to her unhappiness which is a seemingly normal occurrence in her family?