Welcome to Litsy!

"The door opens, and they walk in on a fan of light that disperses them across the bench and folds back together in a golden string along the doorframe."
-"Bad Mexican Dog" (2)

"Over Cancún, the sky contracted into a gray-black mushroom with a whitish stalk of rain."
-"Bad Mexican Dog" (2)

""What?" I said when her gaze started to feel greasy on my neck."
-"Bad Mexican Dog" (2)

"And finally, OreCore (2009) revolves around a cult, the worshippers of the "Sun-Sun": the prophesized union of the sun and the fiery core of the earth, which the cult has been tasked to accelerate and prepare. They travel around, leveling houses, churches and crosses into the ground, "turning all erect edifices to dust.""
-"Rachel, Nevada"

"That alarming sensation of a rupture in continuity, having taken place without one‘s knowledge, like waking up behind the wheel of a car about to collide with another car. Or the endangered elephants awakening groggy on a television show with chains around their necks. If anyone believed in aliens, it had to be those elephants."
-"Rachel, Nevada"

"A raving look of bliss would come over her, as if her organs were being replaced one at a time by small pieces of sunlit glass."
-"Rachel, Nevada"
Today in odd similes.

"She pays him a fixed salary, and they‘ve started to develop what I think you‘d call a personal relationship. He learns ten new French words a day. She asks about his life, also about the time before he started at the club. She‘s like a pool in your backyard, says Manu, that you can‘t use anyway, so you might as well throw your trash and old furniture in it."
-"Bad Mexican Dog"

-"Bad Mexican Dog"

"The ocean is beautiful without the power to keep itself blue and postcard-like all the time. It‘s beautiful without the will to spare the ships sailing on it tonight. A massive pool of complete obedience. The contract it‘s signed. And at the same time, I know there are sides of the ocean I can‘t see, there are sides of the beach chairs and parasols that withdraw and turn their backs to me, and there‘s a hole in every boy."
-"Bad Mexican Dog"

"So, the next morning I‘m standing there looking at the beach with its 480 beach chairs, 24 rows of 20. The rows look like giant tapeworms, each chair its own segment, or they‘re running through the sand like rivers of meltwater trickling into the ocean. They‘re the ribs of the coast."
-"Bad Mexican Dog"

"Squirt of thick white juice, first Immanuel and then me, turns orange in the sun lands in the pool-blue pool under our feet, as if the horizon is emanating from our groin, and for a second I remember a room behind the ocean."
-"Bad Mexican Dog"

Very unsettling - I feel like I read most of the book on edge, waiting for something terrible to happen. Loosely connected stories that are bookended by two halves of the same story, exploring technology, human desires and how power dynamics impact interactions. I think he seems to want to keep the reader on her toes, and he definitely succeeded in doing that for me.

Four short stories (one is in two parts) and I didn‘t like any of them … polite thing to say in this case would be - that this book wasn‘t for me 🤷🏻‍♀️
#InternationalBookerPrize2022

A tough one to review. I didn't like it, but I was interested. The stories are strange & surreal, or hyperreal—that disorienting space where reality & simulation are indistinguishable. Each one left me feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. There's always a sense of alienation—a persistent mood throughout. The ideas embedded in the stories are intriguing, but the execution of those ideas were often less than satisfactory.

I didn‘t like this short story, nominated for the #InternationalBookerPrize2022, at all. Each story started out interesting but all soon became too absurd to my taste.

#52BooksIn52weeks #DontJudgeABookByItsCover (or maybe do 😉)