This book of thirty short stories is odd and sometimes funny and definitely grew on me: I read it quickly, and wasn’t sure how much I liked it, and then I read it again and I liked it more. (Though, as the blurb on the back cover from Helen DeWitt puts it, “Heti’s stories don’t care if you like them: they were Cleopatra in a former life.”)
Some of the stories have elements of fairy tales or nursery rhymes in their titles/characters/situations, but they’re fairy tales gone strange: the first story, for example, is called “The Princess and the Plumber” and involves a plumber who builds a “marriage contraption” (whatever that might be), a talking frog, a bus ride home from the castle, and a sudden plague. “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” is about a woman, who, well, yes… but she’s not old and doesn’t have children: she’s single and gets courted by a man who brings her roses.
On the sentence level, I love the starts and ends of some of these stories. Here’s the start of “Mermaid in a Jar” (which you can read in full here: the pace/tone of this is so great:
I have a mermaid in a jar that Quilty bought me at a garage sale for twenty-five cents. The mermaid’s all “I hate you I hate you I hate you,” but she’s in a jar, and unless I loosen the top, she’s not coming out to kill me. (19)
And here’s the end of “The Fundamental Race”:
She would not pit a cow against a bouquet of roses. Whatever for? The cow would win, surely. (39)
Overall, I think my favorite stories are the less weird ones, the ones that are primarily about people and how they relate to one another (or don’t): stories like “The Girl Who Planted Flowers,” which is about a girl waking up between two guys the night after a party, or “The Raspberry Bush,” which features a phone call between an old woman and her sister and is vivid and surprisingly sad, or “What Changed,” (full story here), which starts like this:
After all, they were a man and a woman. There was no reason for them not to fall in love.
When the man fell, the woman fell, and when the woman fell, the man fell. It is hard to say now who fell first.
As they were falling, other things happened in other places, but where they were it was just he for she and she for he, and that very night they went out for pasta.
They could barely order, which irritated the waitress, but it was only because they were so much in love, and so leaning over the table, and so fondling each other’s hands, and so fondling each other’s arms, and so staring into each other’s eyes, and so smiling dopily.
They were doped. Or they were falling in love. (93)
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