Ariadne<\/a>: What’s a kick?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nI started reading The Dangers of Smoking in Bed<\/em> while I was reading Wild Abandon<\/em> while I was reading Kairos<\/em>. Real life-Inception. <\/p>\n\n\n\nI was struggling with the stoic, academic prose of Booker Prize Winner Kairos<\/em>. So I took a little break during the intermezzo and plunged into the swampy depths of Wild Abandon,<\/em> written by Australian author Emily Bitto. Instead of being scrubbed fresh and new with grit, I found that I was merely mucking about, slimy and directionless in Bitto\u2019s quagmire. I distracted myself by starting yet another book, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed,<\/em> and, with great relief, finishing it. And so now I pull myself up through the layers, going on to complete the levels Wild Abandon<\/em> and finally the finale of Kairos.<\/em> Only then may I break the curse of average novels.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Dangers of Smoking in Bed<\/em> isn\u2019t actually a novel; it\u2019s a collection of short stories by Argentinean author Mariana Enriquez. Most are quite small \u2013 less than 20 pages. These smaller stories rarely engaging. All have a \u2018horror\u2019 bent designed to highlight the nastiness of crime in Argintina, though many lack the suspense and the satisfying endings I expect of the genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere\u2019s usually just one pretty fucked up thing happening (ghosts\/curses\/cannibalism). The anomaly is announced early in the story. The plot fleshes out a little bit about how the \u2018normal\u2019 characters react to this event. And then the story will wrap up pretty abruptly with the resolution being \u2018we just let the weird shit alone and moved away\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not terrible writing but there\u2019s often a distinct lack<\/em>. Short stories are meant to feel surprisingly expansive \u2013 where what is unsaid should speak as strongly as what is said \u2013 and part of that expansiveness will come from the unexpected turns the stories take. Where you think you are reading one thing and then in only a few pages you realise you are reading something altogether different and more meaningful. Enriquez couldn\u2019t construct those moments of surprise in these smaller stories. The journeys she took you on were typically on a straight road without much in the way sightseeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere are pleasant exceptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our Lady of the Quarry<\/em> is narrated in the past tense, first person plural of a gaggle of women recalling an event that occurred when they were fervid teenagers. The narration is demented. It is warped by the way it sounds as if they are all one entity (\u201cBut we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed<\/em>\u201d) and warped further still by time that has elapsed (\u201cThe details came soon enough, and they were nothing spectacular\u201d<\/em>). All this adds the depth and intrigue which is missing from some of the other stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDespite the experimental title of the collection and its bizarre cover art, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed<\/em> only features a few interesting plots. The weakest story is actually the first, Angelita Unearthed<\/em>. Here an ancestral specter appears and haunts the protagonist for no great reason and to no great effect. Later on, the plots do improve. Meat <\/em>was a standout. It was so unique it ironically reminded me of Izumi Suzuki\u2019s Hit Parade of Tears<\/em>. In Meat, <\/em>a weirdo pop musician attracts a weirdo fanbase and he commits suicide in a weird way and his fans\u2019 reaction to his suicide is weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe longest story is Kids Who Come Back<\/em>. This was much better than the average shorter story. The roughness of South America strengthens all the stories in the collection but it\u2019s most satisfying in Kids Who Come Back. <\/em>An employee of a muesem-like organisation preserving oral histories of the missing children of an Argintinean city finds all the missing children chilling in a park, nevermind if they had previously been recorded alive or dead. Enriquez invests more time in the world of this story. We get to have beers in the park before it is defiled. We meet side characters and watch love interests fizzle into friendships. There is an ooze of disquiet that pervades without dominating. The plot, again, is not incredible and the ending feels underdeveloped, but the care taken in the rest of the aspects elevates this to be nearly the best work of the collection. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe best, I argue, is No Birthday\u2019s or Baptisms<\/em>, a tiny ten page story. It opens confidently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nHe was always around, the kind of acquaintance who turned up at parties although no one knew him, but I only became friends with him that summer when all my other friends decided to become assholes \u2013 otherwise known as the summer when I decided to hate all my friends.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I love openings to short stories that deliberately misdirect. They emphasise one small aspect of the plot, as though that were going to the basis of the entire story, and then pull you into something with a grander scale, occasionally harking back to that unobtrusive opening when you knew nothing. Here I am thinking \u2013 what happened to her other friends? Why was this man at parties when he didn\u2019t appear to be invited? What has made our narrator cold and bitter? None of that really matters, of course, because the story then weaves in a different direction. I am drawn in!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is never unbelievably good, and sometimes it sinks below-average, but The Dangers of Smoking in Bed<\/em> can be a delicious read. <\/p>\n\n\n\nI heard Enriquez speak on a recent live Bookshelf podcast and she was brilliant. On the podcast, the hosts were spruiking some event called the \u2018Best 100 Books\u2019 where the audience votes on their favourite books and they asked Enriquez why it was important to recognise modern and old classics. Enriquez, charmingly, replied, \u201cIt\u2019s not. Lists are silly. We like them because they are silly.\u201d She was essentially saying: this whole hour of discussion is not as serious as you are trying to convince yourself, and that\u2019s not a bad thing at all. To reply so honestly, and with such an upbeat spin, is damn endearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though The Dangers of Smoking in Bed <\/em>didn\u2019t wow me in the way that Enriquez did on that podcast, I am going to continue reading her. This is a collection of her early work. There are definite signs of promise here. I can see a future where I read her later works and say, \u201cah\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He replied that weird or disturbed people would understand. He was sure. And he was right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1273,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions\/1273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}