Dark Paradise by Rosa Liksom
My rating: 4/5 cats
so i don’t know much about finland, apart from tove jansson and arto paasilinna. it seems nice—plenty of hills and snow and salmon. long healthy lives and peaceful calm people. nice brisk weather.
but then i read this book.
and it’s not all
and
it turns out, finland is also like this:
that last one may not actually be from finland, but it made me laugh, so into the review it goes!! i am not a purist.
this is a collection of shortie short stories mostly about lonely people committing acts of violence. frequently unexplained, often unprovoked, violence. and in a two-and-a-half page story, i suppose the explanation would be clutter, but still, it is chilling to have that absence of psychological motivation. these are like o. henry stories, except instead of a “twist” it usually ends in bloodspill or reader discomfort, or as the back cover fancily states: “…an emotional intimacy that draws the reader into uncomfortable empathy with the extremity of their deeds”
so what i said, only better.
they aren’t all violent—i don’t want to give the wrong idea. maybe 3/4?? the rest are simply bleak, or at their mildest, nostalgic.
so, more like this:
are there more pictures than words in my review?
yup.
and you know you love it like cotton candy, as insubstantial as it is.
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