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A review by larkais
Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories by Lindsay Wong
adventurous
dark
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
2.5
I wish the identity and story cohesion of these were better because the premise of hauntings was really neat. The author sure had a rough family life too, there were repetitive topics of abuse, incest, and family tensions throughout the anthology. I feel like the stories could have been more cathartic. The short stories usually end without resolving much tension.
My favourite story was the title one - Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality. I thought the limited scope to have a more aged and cynical storyteller was great. She treated the entire situation like one long punishment for not dying with her sisters. Yet, it seemed like her sisters were equally pleased that she lived long enough to take vengeance for them. The ending was a bit strange but I feel like it was trying to get the idea of how women need to be immortally beautiful and only remembered that way despite their wishes.She was literally falling apart and asking for death. It seemed like she finally got it in the end after 38 decades but then they take her head and refashion it with a body to be displayed in a museum. She cannot speak, but is still sentient as people photograph her.
I liked the themes in The Ugliest Girls who are sold into an emotion drainer for the rich to feast on their sadness. They think about lies and pleasant things about how worshiped they were instead of all their sad life experiences to trick the parasites from sucking them dry and find a different host.
I thought Sinking Houses was an interesting story on a meta level. It was about a woman who was contractually married and moves to the States to her new husband's house. Unfortunately the apocalypse starts and it's her survival on the line when a couple ends up taking her captive after she breaks into their house accidentally. The man ends up lusting after her since his marriage is failing. As for the meta level, the song that the main character ends up repeating is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQaaLppoLN8&pp=ygUbemFpIG5hIHlhbyB5dWFuIGRlIGRpIGZhbmcg - 在那遥远的地方 with the first two lines being repeated: "Zai na yao yuan de di fang, you wei hau gu niang". This song was written after a man sees this lady herding sheep and fell in love with her beauty. The other lines in the song would be how he is willing to give everything up to raise sheep with her, or even just be a lamb that she leads. Two men clearly fell in love with the main character in a strange way, obsessive even with the latter one. Though, I feel like this song can also be about the mc's mother who is in a land far away. The mc would give anything up to be by her side again. They can be far away together.
And the bads: I didn't like some of the over the top, sometimes cartoonish descriptions of gore and casual writing style. The first story, Happy Birthday!, was pretty weird and unsatisfying in that way. Furniture made me think of the short film: The House, where the parents turn into furniture in one of the films.
The loosey goosey translations/romanization choices were weird to me. Red-tongued ghosts was probably the most egregious. There was "chuang" which just means bed or wooden bed in this case, but it was kept as just chuang. There was also an attempt at humour with the nicknames, "Zisha wenquan" which the author translated it to be "Very Hot Suicide Spring". "Suicide Hot Springs" is definitely more apt, "zisha" is literally suicide, "wenquan" is literally hotspring. There was also "diao si gui" which got translated into Red-tongued ghost, but it's literally "hung dead ghost". I fail to see where the red-tongue comes from??
My favourite story was the title one - Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality. I thought the limited scope to have a more aged and cynical storyteller was great. She treated the entire situation like one long punishment for not dying with her sisters. Yet, it seemed like her sisters were equally pleased that she lived long enough to take vengeance for them. The ending was a bit strange but I feel like it was trying to get the idea of how women need to be immortally beautiful and only remembered that way despite their wishes.
I liked the themes in The Ugliest Girls who are sold into an emotion drainer for the rich to feast on their sadness. They think about lies and pleasant things about how worshiped they were instead of all their sad life experiences to trick the parasites from sucking them dry and find a different host.
I thought Sinking Houses was an interesting story on a meta level. It was about a woman who was contractually married and moves to the States to her new husband's house. Unfortunately the apocalypse starts and it's her survival on the line when a couple ends up taking her captive after she breaks into their house accidentally. The man ends up lusting after her since his marriage is failing. As for the meta level, the song that the main character ends up repeating is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQaaLppoLN8&pp=ygUbemFpIG5hIHlhbyB5dWFuIGRlIGRpIGZhbmcg - 在那遥远的地方 with the first two lines being repeated: "Zai na yao yuan de di fang, you wei hau gu niang". This song was written after a man sees this lady herding sheep and fell in love with her beauty. The other lines in the song would be how he is willing to give everything up to raise sheep with her, or even just be a lamb that she leads. Two men clearly fell in love with the main character in a strange way, obsessive even with the latter one. Though, I feel like this song can also be about the mc's mother who is in a land far away. The mc would give anything up to be by her side again. They can be far away together.
And the bads: I didn't like some of the over the top, sometimes cartoonish descriptions of gore and casual writing style. The first story, Happy Birthday!, was pretty weird and unsatisfying in that way. Furniture made me think of the short film: The House, where the parents turn into furniture in one of the films.
The loosey goosey translations/romanization choices were weird to me. Red-tongued ghosts was probably the most egregious. There was "chuang" which just means bed or wooden bed in this case, but it was kept as just chuang. There was also an attempt at humour with the nicknames, "Zisha wenquan" which the author translated it to be "Very Hot Suicide Spring". "Suicide Hot Springs" is definitely more apt, "zisha" is literally suicide, "wenquan" is literally hotspring. There was also "diao si gui" which got translated into Red-tongued ghost, but it's literally "hung dead ghost". I fail to see where the red-tongue comes from??