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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
A very well written set of thematically salient dulleries.
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
For me rating short storie collections are hard. I like some, and some I didn’t, but overall I think it was a strong collection. I wish goodreads had half star rating bc for me it’s between 3 and 4
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Laura van den berg's short story collection truly spans "that border between magic and annihilation,", as described in the specific story "Slumberland". These eleven short stories features characters that are on the verge of losing their tethers to the world, facing an unmoored future, or grappling with what is means to anchor themselves to the world as it currently exists. I truly believe it is the best to go into these stories blind and let them dig under your skin, becoming circular and surreal in nature.
‘We had our whole lives in front of us — maybe. If we chose to.’
-from Last Night
‘No one here gets out alive’
-[a:Jim Morrison|7855|Jim Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1429658456p2/7855.jpg]
Far too many of us find ourselves tired and torn in the gears of modern society, on the verge of a breakdown or existing in the fringes of our own lives. Laura van den Berg’s third story collection, ‘I Hold a Wolf by the Ears,’ is teeming with tattered souls trying to keep themselves together as the anxieties, griefs, and fears that have become all too familiar are writ large across these eleven stories. With a cutting sense of humor and admirably polished storytelling, van den Berg brings the women in her stories to life in ways that may be surreal and surprising but always astutely human in their struggles. While the reader will feel they have ‘eavesdropped nightmares,’ there is undoubtedly a swell of empathy that will resonate from it. Through this haunting kaleidoscope of stories, there is a yearning for identity amidst the tensions and tribulations of society and it’s ableist and patriarchal enforcers that unifies the themes into one of the best collections of stories in a year where self-doubt and ethics of survival have wormed their way into everyone’s life.
‘I didn’t yet understand that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.’
There is something so pleasing about this collection despite the sinister and often surreal events that transpire within it. Laura van den Berg is an expert storyteller and these short stories feel anything but bite size, instead succinctly weaving multiple threads together in each story in a way that creates something greater than the sum of its parts that rivals many novels ten times their length. The story The Cult of Mary--one of my favorites from the collection and one certainly deserving to be anthologized and discussed in classrooms for years to come--takes a slice-of-life moment from a tense tour of Italy to thread the lives of several tourists who are each coping with their respective griefs with a wide variety of external big issues then ties them all together with a few enviously perfect sentences all in the span of six pages.
A real authentic sense of emotion and empathy shines through these unsettling and uncanny stories. The women that populate this book are assailed by--and coping with--frustrated relationships and marriages, deaths, gaslighting, violence and other slews of griefs and they will stick with you for a long time to come. They feel like someone you know, could be yourself even. Scratch their name on the page and they might bleed. These are people trying to get by, even if it might mean running from one’s past or thinking of ‘those ghosts I killed to survive’. There are women impersonating their sister towards bizarre consequences (and a blurring line who she really is), impersonating dead wives as a job to pay the bills, befriending strangers who take them far away, escaping a bad living situation to take eerie photographs in the night (‘these are not illegal per se...but they are troubling all the same’), navigating bizarre marital tensions, or hijacking a vacation just to see a volcano because it is what they want. These quests for identity are fraught by self-doubting investigations whether their trouble are of their own making--’she can roll along for months and then be party to something so wholly fucked-up her sense of self is unsettled for a long time after, leaving her afraid of her own company, her own thoughts’--or imposed by the society at large.
What is quite admirable is the way van den Berg is able to effectively address important social issues. It doesn’t come across as an “Issues book”, but by carefully balancing them into the natural flow and logic of the stories she is able to demonstrate how so many awful aspects of society have been normalized. ‘That is how evil first creeps in,’ warns the tour guide in Cult of Mary, ‘through the falsification of beauty,’ and van den Berg examines the ways evil has already seeped into our lives.
Lizards is a stunning achievement of this. A stirring meditation on life and the briefness of human history compared to the lizard kingdom, this story features an insidious act of a husband secretly drugging his wife with sedative-laced sparkling waters. The wife has been focused on the appointment of a supreme court justice who has been accused of rape by multiple sources (she does all but directly say it is Brett Kavanaugh) and is, understandably, very angry. The husband, however, does not appreciate her anger and simply wants her to stop talking about it, as if her anger is somehow irrational. ‘Women should be angry about the violence and fear that inform so much of our lives,’ author and activist [a:Soraya Chemaly|7824894|Soraya Chemaly|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1529548775p2/7824894.jpg] writes in her book [b:Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger|38532207|Rage Becomes Her The Power of Women's Anger|Soraya Chemaly|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1536485995l/38532207._SY75_.jpg|60165024], ‘so should men.’ The story is a perfect example of how women are not entitled to their own anger in our society, and how it is often used against them when they reveal anger, which is not the same as when men are enabled to show anger. ‘A society that does not respect women's anger,’ writes Chemaly, ‘is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.’
The husband buys these sedative drinks from a neighbor who openly gloats in displays on misogyny. By retaining a sense of ‘better than’ towards this neighbor, he pushes aside any feeling of actually being a misogynist, as if patriarchal enforcement over women is only something that happens overtly and not systemic in society. ‘He likes to think of himself as more evolved,’ van den Berg writes, ‘he’s a registered Democrat.’ (though he has a classist disdain for his wife walking places because ‘only poor people walked’ ). This sort of self-justification is what lets abuse perpetuate itself in society, similar to the way one can be complicit with racism without going out of their way to ‘be racist’. The result, in Lizards, becomes an unsettling parking lot scene of women half-conscious sleep walking aimlessly through the night while their husbands enjoy themselves at their expense. Slumberland has the best example of this, featuring a call-girl who cries in faux-agony on the phone for men to masturbate to--dacryphilia--which is such a bluntly perfect expression of patriarchal exploitation. In the end, despite the bad actions of men, it is women that are made to feel the shame and regret for the oppression put on them: ‘the truth is that she is angriest at her own anger,” van den Berg explains, “which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use.’
In fact, the policing of women disproportionate to the freedom of men to their own emotions appears in many stories as a source of tension. In The Pitch we watch a husband gaslight his wife, telling her to deny evidence she sees with her very own eyes and then becoming angry at her for not complying. In the titular story there is a background thread of a man running around the city serial-slapping women while in Volcano House a gunman opens fire in a park (it is pointed out ‘the police didn’t shoot John Evans on sight’ which is a subtle but effective nod at race relations as well). In this last incident, his violence is actually blamed on women in the public eye, that he ‘was disenfranchised by feminism and the alienating ways of modern life.’ The reader is right to scoff at the audacity of this, which is carefully placed halfway through a collection that demonstrates the additional perils women experience comparatively in modern life.
But van den Berg doesn’t just settle here and also explores further intersections, such as the way ableism appears. In The Cult of Mary, we find that the mother’s bad moods are in-part caused by feeling excluded from society.
Your Second Wife is such an excellent piece, reverberating with humor and social criticism that feels akin to [a:Hilary Leichter|17333434|Hilary Leichter|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1567635113p2/17333434.jpg] brilliant lampooning of the gig economy in Temporary which was another of my absolute favorites from this year. A woman uses her acting skills to pose as men’s dead spouses and take them on dates for money, though--almost inevitably--this leads to a kidnapping and fight for survival. It seems everything has become commoditized--there is even a humorously passing note about a communist-themed bar because capitalism will even profit off communism--and our entire lives are pressured into being ground out in the gears of the economy that we are losing our sense of humanity.
Laura van den Berg has delivered an amazing collection with I Hold a Wolf by the Ears that feels so urgent and timely with our current state of affairs. The big issues are addressed, though it never feels preachy, and she is able to probe deep into dark affairs without it ever feeling unbearably heavy. There is such a playful humor that rings through each story and we seem to find ourselves laughing through a graveyard, aware of the darkness but emboldened to bravely trudge through and understand it. Easily one of my favorites from this year, I look forward to anything Laura van den Berg will write.
4.75/5
'I hoped she was not yet dreaming of death, but of gardeners wrapping strands of their own hair around dirt-clotted roots and fascist sheep and a life carved from a single block of wood and a man struggling to wash the shame from his feet.'
-from Last Night
‘No one here gets out alive’
-[a:Jim Morrison|7855|Jim Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1429658456p2/7855.jpg]
Far too many of us find ourselves tired and torn in the gears of modern society, on the verge of a breakdown or existing in the fringes of our own lives. Laura van den Berg’s third story collection, ‘I Hold a Wolf by the Ears,’ is teeming with tattered souls trying to keep themselves together as the anxieties, griefs, and fears that have become all too familiar are writ large across these eleven stories. With a cutting sense of humor and admirably polished storytelling, van den Berg brings the women in her stories to life in ways that may be surreal and surprising but always astutely human in their struggles. While the reader will feel they have ‘eavesdropped nightmares,’ there is undoubtedly a swell of empathy that will resonate from it. Through this haunting kaleidoscope of stories, there is a yearning for identity amidst the tensions and tribulations of society and it’s ableist and patriarchal enforcers that unifies the themes into one of the best collections of stories in a year where self-doubt and ethics of survival have wormed their way into everyone’s life.
‘I didn’t yet understand that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.’
There is something so pleasing about this collection despite the sinister and often surreal events that transpire within it. Laura van den Berg is an expert storyteller and these short stories feel anything but bite size, instead succinctly weaving multiple threads together in each story in a way that creates something greater than the sum of its parts that rivals many novels ten times their length. The story The Cult of Mary--one of my favorites from the collection and one certainly deserving to be anthologized and discussed in classrooms for years to come--takes a slice-of-life moment from a tense tour of Italy to thread the lives of several tourists who are each coping with their respective griefs with a wide variety of external big issues then ties them all together with a few enviously perfect sentences all in the span of six pages.
A real authentic sense of emotion and empathy shines through these unsettling and uncanny stories. The women that populate this book are assailed by--and coping with--frustrated relationships and marriages, deaths, gaslighting, violence and other slews of griefs and they will stick with you for a long time to come. They feel like someone you know, could be yourself even. Scratch their name on the page and they might bleed. These are people trying to get by, even if it might mean running from one’s past or thinking of ‘those ghosts I killed to survive’. There are women impersonating their sister towards bizarre consequences (and a blurring line who she really is), impersonating dead wives as a job to pay the bills, befriending strangers who take them far away, escaping a bad living situation to take eerie photographs in the night (‘these are not illegal per se...but they are troubling all the same’), navigating bizarre marital tensions, or hijacking a vacation just to see a volcano because it is what they want. These quests for identity are fraught by self-doubting investigations whether their trouble are of their own making--’she can roll along for months and then be party to something so wholly fucked-up her sense of self is unsettled for a long time after, leaving her afraid of her own company, her own thoughts’--or imposed by the society at large.
What is quite admirable is the way van den Berg is able to effectively address important social issues. It doesn’t come across as an “Issues book”, but by carefully balancing them into the natural flow and logic of the stories she is able to demonstrate how so many awful aspects of society have been normalized. ‘That is how evil first creeps in,’ warns the tour guide in Cult of Mary, ‘through the falsification of beauty,’ and van den Berg examines the ways evil has already seeped into our lives.
Lizards is a stunning achievement of this. A stirring meditation on life and the briefness of human history compared to the lizard kingdom, this story features an insidious act of a husband secretly drugging his wife with sedative-laced sparkling waters. The wife has been focused on the appointment of a supreme court justice who has been accused of rape by multiple sources (she does all but directly say it is Brett Kavanaugh) and is, understandably, very angry. The husband, however, does not appreciate her anger and simply wants her to stop talking about it, as if her anger is somehow irrational. ‘Women should be angry about the violence and fear that inform so much of our lives,’ author and activist [a:Soraya Chemaly|7824894|Soraya Chemaly|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1529548775p2/7824894.jpg] writes in her book [b:Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger|38532207|Rage Becomes Her The Power of Women's Anger|Soraya Chemaly|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1536485995l/38532207._SY75_.jpg|60165024], ‘so should men.’ The story is a perfect example of how women are not entitled to their own anger in our society, and how it is often used against them when they reveal anger, which is not the same as when men are enabled to show anger. ‘A society that does not respect women's anger,’ writes Chemaly, ‘is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.’
The husband buys these sedative drinks from a neighbor who openly gloats in displays on misogyny. By retaining a sense of ‘better than’ towards this neighbor, he pushes aside any feeling of actually being a misogynist, as if patriarchal enforcement over women is only something that happens overtly and not systemic in society. ‘He likes to think of himself as more evolved,’ van den Berg writes, ‘he’s a registered Democrat.’ (though he has a classist disdain for his wife walking places because ‘only poor people walked’ ). This sort of self-justification is what lets abuse perpetuate itself in society, similar to the way one can be complicit with racism without going out of their way to ‘be racist’. The result, in Lizards, becomes an unsettling parking lot scene of women half-conscious sleep walking aimlessly through the night while their husbands enjoy themselves at their expense. Slumberland has the best example of this, featuring a call-girl who cries in faux-agony on the phone for men to masturbate to--dacryphilia--which is such a bluntly perfect expression of patriarchal exploitation. In the end, despite the bad actions of men, it is women that are made to feel the shame and regret for the oppression put on them: ‘the truth is that she is angriest at her own anger,” van den Berg explains, “which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use.’
In fact, the policing of women disproportionate to the freedom of men to their own emotions appears in many stories as a source of tension. In The Pitch we watch a husband gaslight his wife, telling her to deny evidence she sees with her very own eyes and then becoming angry at her for not complying. In the titular story there is a background thread of a man running around the city serial-slapping women while in Volcano House a gunman opens fire in a park (it is pointed out ‘the police didn’t shoot John Evans on sight’ which is a subtle but effective nod at race relations as well). In this last incident, his violence is actually blamed on women in the public eye, that he ‘was disenfranchised by feminism and the alienating ways of modern life.’ The reader is right to scoff at the audacity of this, which is carefully placed halfway through a collection that demonstrates the additional perils women experience comparatively in modern life.
But van den Berg doesn’t just settle here and also explores further intersections, such as the way ableism appears. In The Cult of Mary, we find that the mother’s bad moods are in-part caused by feeling excluded from society.
‘we both knew that she was too frail to be touring Italy and our shared knowledge of her weakness made her enraged by her own body, which in turn made her enraged by all the places that had no interest in accommodating bodies such as hers.’Overall, van den Berg seems to address how all these sources of frustration, shame, guilt, violence, etc. are all lurking under the umbrella of neoliberalism. Life has become an extension of the economy and those who do not fit its hyper-specific desires are regulated into the shame chambers. ‘This is the problem with the gig economy,’ the narrator of Your Second Wife thinks, examining that the rules of ‘civilized behavior’ have crumbled under the weight of society: ‘we have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.
Your Second Wife is such an excellent piece, reverberating with humor and social criticism that feels akin to [a:Hilary Leichter|17333434|Hilary Leichter|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1567635113p2/17333434.jpg] brilliant lampooning of the gig economy in Temporary which was another of my absolute favorites from this year. A woman uses her acting skills to pose as men’s dead spouses and take them on dates for money, though--almost inevitably--this leads to a kidnapping and fight for survival. It seems everything has become commoditized--there is even a humorously passing note about a communist-themed bar because capitalism will even profit off communism--and our entire lives are pressured into being ground out in the gears of the economy that we are losing our sense of humanity.
‘The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.’This is a plea to be aware of what has befallen us, to pay attention to our relationships and not submit to the role of oppressor simply because society deems it acceptable, and to address our own survival with the survival of all in mind.
Laura van den Berg has delivered an amazing collection with I Hold a Wolf by the Ears that feels so urgent and timely with our current state of affairs. The big issues are addressed, though it never feels preachy, and she is able to probe deep into dark affairs without it ever feeling unbearably heavy. There is such a playful humor that rings through each story and we seem to find ourselves laughing through a graveyard, aware of the darkness but emboldened to bravely trudge through and understand it. Easily one of my favorites from this year, I look forward to anything Laura van den Berg will write.
4.75/5
'I hoped she was not yet dreaming of death, but of gardeners wrapping strands of their own hair around dirt-clotted roots and fascist sheep and a life carved from a single block of wood and a man struggling to wash the shame from his feet.'
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Lizards
Volcano House
Karolina
I Hold a Wolf By the Ears
Volcano House
Karolina
I Hold a Wolf By the Ears
I wish I had been able to read this in book form, but the only option I had from my library was audiobook, oddly enough. I’m not the best listener when it comes to audiobooks, so I definitely lost the thread in some of these stories.
I enjoyed the tone overall. Feminist and weird. Often unsettling more than overtly horrific. The two longer stories were the weaker ones for me. The shorter ones felt like they had more punch for being concise.
I enjoyed the tone overall. Feminist and weird. Often unsettling more than overtly horrific. The two longer stories were the weaker ones for me. The shorter ones felt like they had more punch for being concise.
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Along with an excellent title, this was a great collection of stories. I really enjoyed the realistic foundation of the stories, each focused on women and gender, not always pleasant but something mildly hopeful. I found this collection got stronger with each story, with “Karolina” as one of my favourites that challenges familial bonds in considering domestic violence.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt
Moderate: Domestic abuse, Gun violence, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, Medical content
Minor: Miscarriage
I couldn't recall any story from this collection even if you put a gun to my head!
An extraordinary short story collection. Haunting and poignant, with elements of mystery and horror that never overshadow the writing. Cult of Mary was my favourite, despite its short length.