The deadpan tone of that narrator's voice implicitly urges readers to "just roll with it" and so we do. And lastly, the largest but ugliest wing, extending behind the house like a gnarled, broken arm, is where my 100 ex-boyfriends live. The east wing is where the children and their attending au pairs live. The west wing is where the Husband and I live. The house in which we live has three wings. Take the opening story, called "Los Angeles." Here's how our narrator introduces herself and her world: In one of those short stories, "Office Hours," a film professor declares to his class: "It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality." That pronouncement could serve as an epigram for this entire collection, an apt way to characterize its distinctive aura. And, so, I felt reluctant, but compelled to pick up her new book, a collection of short stories called Bliss Montage. Ma's writing, in short, stays with you whether you want it to or not. The novel was already disturbing in and of itself because of its sardonic tone and its mundane imagery that smoothly morphed into the macabre. By early spring of 2020, Ling Ma was being hailed as an oracle of the pandemic.īut the prophetic quality of Severance only enhanced its power. Ling Ma's 2018 debut novel, Severance, imagined a world ravaged by the sudden onset of something called "Shen Fever" - a fictitious infection that originated in Southern China.
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