I don't recall where I first heard about Yoko Agawa's Revenge, but it was recommended online and I added it to my must have list. When I was in New York in January, I realized I was walking distance from The Mysterious Bookshop, so of course I headed over there as soon as I dropped my stuff off at my hotel! Surprise, surprise, they had Revenge on their shelves :)If bleak and add are your bag, this is the book for you. It's eleven interconnected short stories, each as bizarre as the next.
In the first story, "Afternoon at the Bakery," we meet a woman who is buying a cake for her son. She waits and waits, but no one comes to help her. Finally, another woman enters the bakery and the two of them talk for a bit. The first woman tells the second woman the story of her son.
Now, I've struggled with this kind of story since the birth of my own son. But something about Ogawa's writing kept me turning pages.
Most of the stories have a bit (or a lot) of tragedy in them. All of them are weird. There's a man who runs a museum full of torture artifacts. There's a writer who spies on her landlord. There's an old post office filled with kiwis!
For a lot of people, I will admit this book is going to be too dark and dismal for distraction right now. But for the right audience, this is going to be just the kind of quirky and bizarre read they'll need to completely forget the real world around them!
This is one of just five of Ogawa's books to be translated into English. I highly recommend it (again, if this is your genre!) for fans of short fiction. Her latest, though, is a dystopian novel called The Memory Police that sounds fabulous! I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but if you're short story averse, that one might appeal!
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