Baboon
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex—but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Naja's collection, which won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, offers 15 slice-of-life stories ranging on subjects from infidelity to assault to grocery-store theft to child abuse. All her stories are precise and evocative, often inspiring a strange balance between curiosity and anxiety in the reader. Naja pokes at everyday suffering "Candy" traces a man's spiraling fury following his wife's detainment for accidently stealing sweets. Despite the humor, Naja's stories frequently veer toward more challenging subject matter. In "Honeymoon," a psychopath molests a woman while her boyfriend helplessly watches. "Interruption" tells the story of a terrified woman who intrudes in a man's apartment and is willing to do nearly anything in order to stay. As novel as Naja's perspectives are, some of her stories lack a clear intention the result of her characters' often confusing or obscure inner lives. This collection is for those who delight in the eccentric and the atmospheric; Naja inspires readers to read between the lines.
