Laughter echoes through medical and corporate dystopias as well as suburban living rooms in this impressive American collection
“As you live your life,” remarks one narrator in Ben Marcus’s brutal and brilliant story collection, “you will, on occasion, be cut open and explored. It is what life is, part of the routine.” Elsewhere, a woman, Ida, visits her father in his care home and tells him that his ex-wife is ill. “Illness is the only category,” he says, and later, wandering the halls, Ida confronts the stark truth of that statement: “She saw people in beds all alone, connected to bags, mouths agape, struggling to breathe. She saw men in ill-fitting gowns, sprawled on the floor. Women with no hair, sobbing in their chairs.” Reading this, you won’t be surprised by Marcus’s own description of his stories, given at a recent event in London: “Some are grave and bleak, some are graver and bleaker.”
He was being at once funny and serious, a characteristic blend. Despite his predilection for life’s darker currents, laughter does echo through the hospital wards, strip-lit offices and crisis-struck suburban homes he describes, although it’s usually the kind heard in the gallows’ shadow. “Along comes tomorrow, with its knives, as someone or other said,” a woman tells herself. A quotation that didn’t occur to her, but would also fit, belongs to the pessimistic philosopher EM Cioran: “The interval separating me from my corpse is a wound”.
Continue reading...
via Science fiction books | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PwVdEG
