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jodar's review
challenging
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
If you’re in the mood for petty narratives of ordinary people of various genders, ages, places and recentish times, this collection of previously published short stories should delight you, as it did me.
The reader learns of the characters’ hopes, fears, frustrations and fantasies that arise from interpersonal relationships with family, loved ones or acquaintances. Pervading throughout is somewhat grimy cynicism and hopelessness.
But there are moments of light humour, too, and fabulously inventive words and phrases: puffinosity, spuknikoid chandeliers, toddler Doppler effect, lactic light, [boots] of a nearly malign softness ... [that he put] on her with pantomime uxoriousness. Only one inelegant phrase caused me to reread: “looked at first Jack and then Sadie” instead of “looked first at Jack and then Sadie” or “looked at Jack first and then Sadie”.
The last story has a striking passage about the book a main character is reading that could be regarded as mockingly self-referential: she describes her book as “fascinating and boring”. The stories in Souvenir Museum, though character-driven, are certainly fascinating. In them you enter the thoughts of people who meet their current struggles without any expectations that there will be a very blessed future for themselves, for others bound to them or for the world as a whole.
The reader learns of the characters’ hopes, fears, frustrations and fantasies that arise from interpersonal relationships with family, loved ones or acquaintances. Pervading throughout is somewhat grimy cynicism and hopelessness.
But there are moments of light humour, too, and fabulously inventive words and phrases: puffinosity, spuknikoid chandeliers, toddler Doppler effect, lactic light, [boots] of a nearly malign softness ... [that he put] on her with pantomime uxoriousness. Only one inelegant phrase caused me to reread: “looked at first Jack and then Sadie” instead of “looked first at Jack and then Sadie” or “looked at Jack first and then Sadie”.
The last story has a striking passage about the book a main character is reading that could be regarded as mockingly self-referential: she describes her book as “fascinating and boring”. The stories in Souvenir Museum, though character-driven, are certainly fascinating. In them you enter the thoughts of people who meet their current struggles without any expectations that there will be a very blessed future for themselves, for others bound to them or for the world as a whole.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness
Moderate: Death