I got to 10 pages til the end at lunch yesterday, and I just couldn’t go on with my day until I had finished The Insult. I then spent the rest of the day thinking about this strange and wonderful book. Maud was right, this book was better than The Divided Kingdom, though I still love that one, maybe because it was my introduction to Rupert Thomson. Thomson has elements in his writing similar to Haruki Murakami, you know that dreamworld in which his stories take place. But Thomson’s dreamworld is darker and dirtier, tinged with grays and sepia tones (sorry, that’s how I imagine it). I can’t explain the plot too much, but it involves a man, Martin Blom, who has been shot in the head as he walks toward his car in the supermarket parking lot. Rendered permanently blind, he has to find his way back into the world. But one night, he discovers that he can see, but only at night or in the dark. At some points you think Martin has gone crazy. At some points you don’t know what to believe. And the book takes strange turns, but I loved every minute of the journey.

I asked Mr. Bookdwarf to write reviews for me of books he’s reading. This might be a new feature or a just a one time thing. Who knows? Recently he read Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, which incidentally you can now download for free, and this is what he thought:

Fantasy and science fiction ask us to imagine what might be possible if things were slightly different: What if you could really become a part of the internet? What if instead of jail time and fines we forced criminals to have weird plastic surgery to denote their crimes? What if a parallel magical world existed hidden from everyday sight? What if dragons existed, and we could fly them, and use them to defend our planet against space-fungus that fell from the sun?

Kelly Link’s collection of short stories, Stranger Things Happen is a different sort of animal altogether, although I’m still trying to figure out exactly what to say about it other than “it’s wonderful, you need to read it.” Her characters certainly have some very strange things happen to them, but the sensibility is probably closer to magical realism, and definitely has its dose of fairy tales with their original Grimm Brothers death-blood-and-sex unhappy endings.

Her fairy-tale elements mix with a sly, contemporary humor: a woman’s lover runs off with the Snow Queen in a sleigh pulled by geese, and she walks halfway across the world on broken glass to tell him she’d been faking all her orgasms the whole time; Cinderella’s prince is unhappily married and satisfies his shoe fetish with prostitutes. Other stories, especially those about children observing the emotional or physical collapse of the adults around them, carry intense emotional weight without drawing on a specific mythos.

Each of these stories is disconcerting in a carefully honed manner, and after each one, I find I have to put the book down and breathe carefully and catch my balance before I continue to the next.

Highly recommended.