Swallowed by the Cold
Stories
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The intricate, interlocking stories of Jensen Beach's extraordinarily poised story collection are set in a Swedish village on the Baltic Sea as well as in Stockholm over the course of two eventful years.
In Swallowed by the Cold, people are besieged and haunted by disasters both personal and national: a fatal cycling accident, a drowned mother, a fire on a ferry, a mysterious arson, the assassination of the Swedish foreign minister, and, decades earlier, the Soviet bombing of Stockholm. In these stories, a drunken, lonely woman is convinced that her new neighbor is the daughter of her dead lover; a one-armed tennis player and a motherless girl reckon with death amid a rainstorm; and happening upon a car crash, a young woman is unaccountably drawn to the victim, even as he slides into a coma and her marriage falls into jeopardy.
Again and again, Beach's protagonists find themselves unable to express their innermost feelings to those they are closest to, but at the same time they are drawn to confide in strangers. In its confidence and subtle precision, Beach’s prose evokes their reticence but is supple enough to reveal deeper passions and intense longing. Shot through with loss and the regret of missed opportunities, Swallowed by the Cold is a searching and crystalline book by a startlingly talented young writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In "The Apartment," Beach writes, "Our individual memories of a shared event mean such different things to each of us." This idea drives Beach's overly ambitious but mostly solid second collection, both thematically and structurally. In the first part of "The Village of Elmsta," a man's swift death following a bicycle fall near a canal is ignored by a group of revelers passing by on a boat. The story's second half, told from the perspective of Henrik, the captain, shows why: he was too preoccupied by his mistress, Helle, to notice the tragedy unfolding ashore. But their affair isn't all passion and bliss; a later story, "Anniversary," alludes to insecurities and unequal footing between Henrik and Helle. Throughout the rest of these 16 interlinked stories set in Sweden, characters' morally ambiguous actions continue to simultaneously provoke readers' judgment and invite compassion. In "The Apartment," a woman named Louise gets sloppy drunk while remembering an old fling with a newly deceased neighbor. But in "Kino" and "In the Night of the Day Before," which occupy earlier spots in the collection, we know why she's dissatisfied: her closeted husband, Martin, ignores her in favor of frequenting a gay club showing X-rated videos. While some of the offerings are more grounded than others "February 22, 1944" and "The Right-Hand Traffic Diversion," though vividly described, seem too removed from the main story line the collection memorably depicts how selfish humans can be, and how often we're alienated from one another.
