This anthology is not for readers with a weak stomach for pushing sexual boundaries in fiction. The stories are challenging and absurd, the relationships unconventional, almost as if the author is daring us to keep reading.
This is a very strange book. I loved Australian author Krissy Kneen’s memoir, Affection, and after hearing her read excerpts from her new book, Triptych, I felt prepared for the confronting sexual situations I was about to encounter. And yet at the end of it all, I just felt…dissatisfied.
Triptych is a collection of three novellas inspired by works of art. The three stories are linked, but each looks at different types of sexual expression.
In ‘Susanna’, inspired by the painting Susanna and the Elders by Gentileschi, a woman googles her ex-lover and discovers the world of ChatRoulette. Susanna, also the protagonist’s name, finds comfort and sexual excitement in this world, and begins to suspect that her online lover lives in her building.
This story starts off beautifully and has, depending on your sense of humour, a spectacularly funny end. Susanna’s attempts to discover her lover’s real identity are alternately sweet, funny and more than a little creepy. It’s not your conventional romance, but I found it quite romantic in a mad kind of way.
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Without any discernible plot or direction the story is all icing and no substance. And not particularly sweet icing at that.
Rose Edelstein has a gift: when she eats, she can taste the emotions of the person who made the food. Her mother’s lemon cake has never tasted more desperate, and Rose becomes the keeper of her family’s secrets—including her own.
I picked this book up for the Goodreads Aussie Readers Summer Reading Challenge as my Oprah book. The title is just so delicious. Some of the descriptions of food and emotion are scrumptious. For example, Rose envies her best friend Eliza’s turkey sandwich:
I’d tasted that turkey sandwich before. The whole thing was just a sonata of love—the lettuce leaf, the organic tomato grown on a happy farm, even the factory mayonnaise took on such delicacy of feeling it seemed like an exquisite violin solo. It was difficult, and rude, to hate my friend so much.
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This fable about following your heart works wonders as a palate cleanser when you’re in the reading doldrums.
Yes, I bought Heartless because Tasma Walton is married to Rove and I saw her interview plugging the book. I also loved the cover and the blurb: ‘about the power of the human heart, the worthiness of its desires and the often dire consequences of ignoring them.’
I finally picked up Heartless after going through a bit of a reading slogfest, and it was perfect timing. I read it in less than a day and was left enchanted by Walton’s narrative voice.
The heroine, who narrates her story in the first person, is never named in the book. Her story unfolds as snapshots of her life every seven years. At seven, she has ‘a big, loud, red, dancing heart’, and it’s impossible not to be charmed by this exuberant, quirky girl with an imaginary friend and an irrepressible spirit.
But it’s not long before her heart endures the first of many sorrows.
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The most startling thing about this anthology is that most of the works feature love stories. I rode the weekend on a wave of literary pleasure.
It’s worth buying a book listed in this year’s Book Alive Guide just for this anthology, 10 Short Stories You Must Read, which isn’t available for individual sale.
The collection starts off with Robert Drewe’s brooding story of unrequited love, in which the object of the protagonist’s desire happens to be his best friend’s wife. I very much doubt I’d read this as a novel, but the beauty of the short story is that it usually ends before properly resolving the central dilemma. A View of Mount Warning is no exception, which means I can cheerfully imagine the unfaithful husband dying from a Viagra-induced stroke, thereby freeing his wife and best friend to have their happily ever after.
I found the stories by male authors to be darker, moodier, more … well, self-indulgent. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I found many of the protagonists a challenge to relate to. (Also, none of the authors have websites!)
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Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer prize-winning British-American novelist of Bengali (Indian) descent whom I discovered one day when, while wandering through Borders, I picked up The Namesake and started reading the first paragraph. I was immediately hooked and had to buy it. I think it took me a day at the most to finish it, and it has since been made into a movie (that I haven’t seen).
Lahiri writes books few and far between. While The Namesake was written in 2004, Unaccustomed Earth came out last year and languished a bit on my TBR pile before I finally picked it up—and like her other books, I read it straight without putting it down. I’m not fond of reading books without happy endings, and Lahiri is probably one of the few exceptions. It’s not that the endings are depressing, it is just that they are more bittersweet, more real.
Most of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth have human relationships at their core. Lahiri does an excellent job of making the characters’ underlying emotions flow through the story. Universal themes of community, family, togetherness, and love pull you in, and you feel a sense of connection with the characters.
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