(no subject)

jothra lent me Yoko Ogawa's Revenge after warning me that it was extremely creepy, and I should not read it late at night.

Of course I did not listen and now LOOK WHERE THAT GETS ME. No, I was mostly OK, until the short story where a girl visits a torture museum and nothing bad actually happens at all except an internal realization on the part of the protagonist that torture sounds kind of like fun, but the descriptions made me so uncomfortable that I had to put the book down for a while and stare at kittens or something.

Revenge consists of eleven short stories. Most of them are about obsession to some degree or another. Some of the stories have murders; some of them have weird magical realism; some of them have both, and some of them have neither! Even the ones that have neither are creepy to a certain extent.

Some of the stories stand more or less alone, but most are loosely connected -- a death in one story will frequently show up as a background event in another; more metatextually, a character in one story occasionally turns out to be the writer of another. I am perhaps most fascinated by the story in which a character, who says she is an author, who seems to have written several of the stories in the book, complains to the protagonist about another woman who steals her work and goes about promoting it like her own. Yoko Ogawa, what are you trying to say ...?

Anyway, I imagine that reading these stories as individual pieces when they were originally published must have been a very different experience than reading them in collection. Some stories I think I would flip through if I was reading them solo as either having no point, or dropping the DUN DUN!!! too heavily on the last page, but having them woven together made a deeply surreal whole that was greater (and creepier) than the sum of its parts.