Bezoar
And Other Unsettling Stories
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- ¥1,500
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
One of the most important and watched writers of today.
Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel's stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. "Ptosis" is told from the point of view of the son of a photographer whose work involves before and after pictures of patients undergoing cosmetic eye surgeries. In "Through Shades," a woman studies a man interacting with a woman through the windows of the apartment across the street. In one of the longer stories, "Bonsai," a man visits a garden, and comes to know a gardener, during the period of dissolution of his marriage. "The Other Side of the Dock" describes a young girl in search of what she terms "True Solitude," who finds a fellow soul mate only to see the thing they share lose its meaning. In "Petals," a woman's odor drives a man to search for her, and even to find her, without quenching the thirst that is his undoing. And the title story, "Bezoar," is an intimate journal of a patient writing to a doctor. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nettel's latest (after The Body Where I Was Born) is full of shock value, but only occasionally gets under the skin. The stories span the globe and always find the darker corners of their geographies from the side streets of Rome to dilapidated Mexican beach towns, mysterious Tokyo gardens to a psych ward in an unnamed European city. In "Petals," a man sets out to find the woman whose scent he has fallen in love with; the search traces her across a neighborhood's worth of public restroom stalls. In "Ptosis," a young candidate for eyelid surgery becomes the obsessive object of a photographer, until her new look ruins all he admired. And in the title story, a diary chronicles the life of a supermodel recently admitted to a psychiatric institute for her addictions, and slowly reveals her underlying, all-consuming habit of tweezing her hair. While individually the stories are striking both for their bodily candor and their surprising, abrupt endings, the dissociated first-person voices of each character blend together too easily, no matter how individual each narrator and their respective plot may seem to be. Taken together, the stories begin to lose their sheen.
