Hypothermia
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Shocking, erudite, and affecting, these twenty-odd short stories, "micro-novels," and vignettes span a vast territory, from Mexico City to Washington, D.C. to the late nineteenth-century Adriatic to the blood-soaked foothills of California's gold-rush country, introducing an array of bewildering characters: a professor of Latin American literature who survives a tornado and, possibly, an orgy; an electrician confronting the hardest wiring job of his career; a hapless garbage man who dreams of life as a pirate; and a prodigiously talented Polish baritone waging musical war against his church.Hypothermiaexplores the perilous limits of love, language, and personality, the brutal gravity of cultural misunderstandings, and the coldly smirking will to self-destruction hiding within our irredeemably carnal lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the chill promised of the title, this collection of short stories from Mexican writer Enrigue ex-udes a warmth that fluctuates throughout and culminates in a scorching final installment. However, the temperature of the plot and language follows a converse trajectory to the subjects' interiority: the ice is simply below the surface, freezing over the characters' hearts and minds. Enrigue's protagonists coolly observe their fellow man, as well as their own place in society, their careers, and roles they've found themselves in, with a detached sense of superiority and emotional distance. In "Gula, or: The Invoca-tion", a doubtful father reluctantly writes a story which sacrifices his pet cat in order to save his fami-ly; in "Outrage" a mentally unhinged garbage collector goes on a crime spree; and in "The Extinction of Dalmation", we find Tuone Udina, the intellectually- and hearing-challenged last living speaker of the Dalmatian language in a remote corner of Croatia. Udina, the subject of a study by a heartless ar-cheology professor, is also the most unexpected and poignant story in the collection. Throughout, En-rigue imaginatively explores identity, isolation in contemporary society, and the breakdown of com-munication.
