SONG FOR THE UNRAVELING OF THE WORLD BY BRIAN EVENSON

In Song for the Unraveling of the World, Brian Evenson explores what it’s like to be unsettled in one’s own home and skin. His story collection is part horror and part psychological thriller, exploring both the obsessive thoughts and the uncanny situations the characters face, coming about in many different ways: a man is visited by his therapist in the middle of the night for several nights in a row; a film director goes to any length to record the sound of a room; a sister prevents her brother from opening a secret door in their home; and, in an attempt to understand human culture, alien sisters trick-or-treat for the first time. In the title story, a father can’t find his daughter, yet still hears her voice coming from her room, and must not only accept her loss, but also the loss of his sanity—as is the case with many of the characters in this book: “Did he even want to live in a world like this, one that was always threatening to come unraveled?” In these moments of unraveling and unrest, Evenson projects into the unknown. Here in “Shirts and Skins,” a story about a man trapped in a manipulative relationship, Evenson leaves readers feeling most disturbed and empathetic: “She would find him eventually. . . But for a moment at least he could pretend, could enjoy the glorious feeling of crouching alone beneath someone else’s skin. Maybe it would give him something to look back on. Maybe it would give him enough to sustain him through at least one or two of the long and bitter years to come.”

Coffee House Press.

—Review by Patrick Font

RAIN AND OTHER STORIES BY MIA COUTO, TRANSLATED BY ERIC M. B. BECKER

Mia Couto’s Rain and Other Stories maps out a Mozambique that’s torn with war, heartbreak, and loss. While some of the stories read as fables, offering meditations on the lives of men and women grappling with displacement and rebirth, a Chekhovian subtly is achieved, even when their realism turns to the magical: “The flowers, the one’s with a blue glimmer, began to swell and soar toward the sky. Then, all together, they plucked the girl. . . She was swept away into the same womb where she’d seen her father extinguished, out of sight and out of time.” In other stories, readers witness the departure of characters as Couto’s narrators suggest an uncertainty of their return. And it’s this uncertainty, and the motif of rain and all of its implications, that connects one story to the next.

However, what’s most successful about this collection are the ways in which Couto repeatedly asks unanswerable questions, piquing reader curiosity. Take “War of the Clowns,” a story of two manipulative clowns who, through their arguing and violence, profit off an entire city and incite war and inquiry. “What’s going on?” ask the spectators of the clowns, and although Couto describes to readers what occurs, he never tells us why. Instead, confusion swells among spectators until the “supporters divided into two camps, [and] little by little, two battlefields began to form.” By the end of the story, answers manifest through subtext, and the effect is both chilling and tragic. In this collection, Mia Couto, via Eric M. B. Becker’s aesthetically rich translation, packs an emotional resonance in each story—despite brevity, many only reaching five pages—that lingers with readers long after putting the book down.

Biblioasis.

—Review by Patrick Font