JAGANNATH
(2012) by Karin Tidbeck
Karin
Tidbeck is an award-winning Swedish writer, whose works have been
published in English. JAGANNATH is a collection of Tidbeck's short
fiction. Tidbeck has won critical praise from writers such as China
Mieville and Elizabeth Hand - and Ursula K. LeGuin (see the cover photo).
My personal taste in literature
tends towards science fiction, but also what I like to call
”surrealist” fiction – stories with a dreamlike quality or
logic, where the nature of reality itself is blurred or challenged.
These stories may be SF, horror, or fantasy, or magical realism, or
defy simple categorization. They leave the reader mystified yet
haunted, as if by some strange dream.
All of the stories in
JAGANNATH are surreal in some way. Mythical beings from Scandinavian
folklore may appear in present-day Sweden. Or a person will go to his
daily work in an office, but the work itself is an impossible task.
Or... a protagonist will fall in love with a non-human machine (no,
not something as obvious as a robot). Or... a nightmarish pocket
universe exists somewhere, that makes the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft
seem tame by comparison.
All that, and more, is offered in
this collection of stories. What made me enjoy them was not
just the ideas and imagination, but the execution of the stories.
Tidbeck's prose is spare, restrained and focused – a talent I have
always admired. (Bad writers tend to flail around as they struggle to
express what they wanted to say, and their prose ends up being both
vague and overlong.) To clarify: this is not ”iceberg prose” in
the sense of, say, Hemingway. I mean that there is no excess of
words.
The author has included an afterword which describes the
challenge of translating these stories from Swedish to English –
and how hard it can be to convey the original nuance or ”mood” in
translation.
I noticed what seemed like recurring themes in
JAGANNATH, and wondered whether these were going to be Tidbeck's ”big
subjects”; most successful writers have some themes that they keep
returning to. I shouldn't spoil the book by telling you what they
are, because I recommend you read this very original book and find
out for yourself.
JAGANNATH compares well to the works of other
outstanding ”surrealist” writers such as Jorge Luis Borges or
Philip K. Dick.
Other
works by Karin Tidbeck:
AMATKA (novel) - reviewed here.
#bookreviews #books
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