A review by ashyoung555
Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh
5.0
I think this is my favourite book I've read in 2017 so far. Julie Koh is whipsmart, clever, funny, and the perfect amount of weird. These stories are strange AF. They hit on so many real world issues, like patriarchy (The Fantastic Breasts), consumerism (Cream Reaper) and racism (The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man). She reimagines Australia and the world in darkly funny and exceptionally strange ways, but the connection to our reality is concrete and, as a reader, you are able to pin it down.
The last story in the collection, The Fat Girl in History, is especially good. It is a work of autofiction, a term I had not heard of before, which seems ridiculous seeing as I've spent the last four years of my life in a Creative & Professional Writing degree. I have been learning about all of the wrong things, because I now want to write a piece of autofiction. (Okay, we may have touched on writing where the fictional bleeds into the autobiographical and vice versa, but it was always referred to as creative non-fiction. Autofiction is a much better term and I am adopting it.)
Koh's prose is sparse, somewhat detached, and effortlessly readable. Nearly every story starts with one sentence in its own paragraph, which sets the tone perfectly for the story to come. There are nods to it having been called "bland", which baffles me because it is quite the opposite. It is evocative without being over-the-top, and the mild detachment works well to engage the reader with stories that could be too strange to relate to.
My bitter feminist heart appreciated her comments on "The Difficulties of an Objectified Existence in a Patriarchal World" in The Fantastic Breasts. I loved the absurdity of a cat cafe seceding from the Australian nation in Slow Death in Cat Cafe, and the mind-numbing, crazy scary future world of Civility Place. I enjoyed the unique ways Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods and Cream Reaper were delivered - by an inquiry report and journalistic feature respectively. Satirist Rising, the story from which the title is drawn, is an intersting look into the "dying arts" of the future.
I loved every story in the book, even the ones I haven't mentioned in this brief review (forgive me), but my two favourite would have to be the opening story, Sight, and The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man. I love Sight for its strangeness and its heart, for the little lizard boy and the Tattoo Man, for the ghosts and the third eye. It's an exceptional story. I love The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man for its portrayal of racism in Australia. The entire story is so clever and nuanced.
This has to be the best short story collection I've read. Often, I'll pick up a collection and love a few stories, but find the rest fall kind of flat. I loved every story in this book. There was not one that I wanted to skip over. There was not one that I didn't enjoy. Some were quite short, like The Procession, while others were quite long, like Two. This variation worked well for continued reading. I read this book in two sittings - Sight on its own, and then the entire rest of the book the next time I picked it up. There are little things that turn up more than once - references of "glass towers" and "neorealism", and others I didn't jot down when I noticed them pop up.
Overall, I adored this book. These stories are the kinds of stories you could read over and over and find something new in each time. Beyond the absurdity and strangeness are a lot of themes and questions to think on and unpack. This is an intelligent, beautifully-written, weird AF collection of stories, and I love every word of it.
The last story in the collection, The Fat Girl in History, is especially good. It is a work of autofiction, a term I had not heard of before, which seems ridiculous seeing as I've spent the last four years of my life in a Creative & Professional Writing degree. I have been learning about all of the wrong things, because I now want to write a piece of autofiction. (Okay, we may have touched on writing where the fictional bleeds into the autobiographical and vice versa, but it was always referred to as creative non-fiction. Autofiction is a much better term and I am adopting it.)
Koh's prose is sparse, somewhat detached, and effortlessly readable. Nearly every story starts with one sentence in its own paragraph, which sets the tone perfectly for the story to come. There are nods to it having been called "bland", which baffles me because it is quite the opposite. It is evocative without being over-the-top, and the mild detachment works well to engage the reader with stories that could be too strange to relate to.
My bitter feminist heart appreciated her comments on "The Difficulties of an Objectified Existence in a Patriarchal World" in The Fantastic Breasts. I loved the absurdity of a cat cafe seceding from the Australian nation in Slow Death in Cat Cafe, and the mind-numbing, crazy scary future world of Civility Place. I enjoyed the unique ways Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods and Cream Reaper were delivered - by an inquiry report and journalistic feature respectively. Satirist Rising, the story from which the title is drawn, is an intersting look into the "dying arts" of the future.
I loved every story in the book, even the ones I haven't mentioned in this brief review (forgive me), but my two favourite would have to be the opening story, Sight, and The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man. I love Sight for its strangeness and its heart, for the little lizard boy and the Tattoo Man, for the ghosts and the third eye. It's an exceptional story. I love The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man for its portrayal of racism in Australia. The entire story is so clever and nuanced.
This has to be the best short story collection I've read. Often, I'll pick up a collection and love a few stories, but find the rest fall kind of flat. I loved every story in this book. There was not one that I wanted to skip over. There was not one that I didn't enjoy. Some were quite short, like The Procession, while others were quite long, like Two. This variation worked well for continued reading. I read this book in two sittings - Sight on its own, and then the entire rest of the book the next time I picked it up. There are little things that turn up more than once - references of "glass towers" and "neorealism", and others I didn't jot down when I noticed them pop up.
Overall, I adored this book. These stories are the kinds of stories you could read over and over and find something new in each time. Beyond the absurdity and strangeness are a lot of themes and questions to think on and unpack. This is an intelligent, beautifully-written, weird AF collection of stories, and I love every word of it.