| Title | : | Den mörka zonen |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9789198432510 |
| Language | : | Swedish |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 34 |
| Publication | : | First published May 16, 2016 |
Den mörka zonen Reviews
-
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
boilerplate mission statement intro:for the past two years, i’ve set december’s project aside to do my own version of a short story advent calendar. it’s not a true advent calendar since i choose all the stories myself, but what it lacks in the ‘element of surprise’ department it more than makes up for in hassle, as i try to cram even MORE reading into a life already overcrammed with impossible personal goals (live up to your potential! find meaningful work! learn to knit!) merry merry wheee!
since i am already well behind in my *regular* reviewing, when it comes to these stories, whatever i poop out as far as reflections or impressions are going to be superficial and perfunctory at best. please do not weep for the great big hole my absented, much-vaunted critical insights are gonna leave in these daily review-spaces (and your hearts); i’ll try to drop shiny insights elsewhere in other reviews, and here, i will at least drop links to where you can read the stories yourselves for free, which - let’s be honest - is gonna serve you better anyway.
HAPPY READING, BOOKNERDS!
links to all stories read in previous years' calendars can be found at the end of these reviews, in case you are a person who likes to read stories for free:
2016:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2017:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
scroll down for links to this year’s stories which i will update as we go, and if you have any suggestions, send 'em my way! the only rules are: it must be available free online (links greatly appreciated), and it must be here on gr as its own thing so i can review it. thank you in advance!
DECEMBER 4
I tried to tell my children a cautionary tale about a little girl who fell into a well and had to wait a week until firefighters could figure out a way to rescue her, something that maybe actually took place back in the dimness of my childhood, but the story was either too abstract for them or I wasn’t making much sense, and they didn’t seem to grasp my need for them to stay in the cabin, to not go anywhere, if the very worst happened, the unthinkable that I was skirting, like a pit that opened just in front of each sentence I was about to utter. They kept asking me if the girl got lots of toys when she made it out of the well. This was so against my point that I said, out of spite, Unfortunately, no, she did not.
this is a less gross/boring version of
Stephen King’s
Gerald's Game*, which is about what happens when a woman handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin for sexxytimes becomes trapped after her husband has a fatal heart attack and she has to be resourceful and clever enough to escape but also resilient enough to endure her own thoughts and hallucinations as her body is deprived of the things a body needs and starts to go a little mad. its main problem (for the reader - the main problem for the character is the whole ‘being handcuffed to the bed’ thing) is that while
Stephen King is great at writing many things, the interiority of a woman’s mind isn’t one of them.
Lauren Groff, however, is tremendous at it. this story (which also appears in her most recent collection,
Florida), could have been novel-length, and i don’t think i would have felt bored by it at all. the situation is a little different - a woman is vacationing with her family when her husband is called away for a couple of days and she is left alone with her two young sons (and a puppy) in a wild part of florida where a panther has been seen stalking about. she falls off of a chair while changing a light bulb (the details of which make it much less dumb than that sounds), hits her head and sustains a concussion, trapping her in a very
Gerald's Game scenario - she can’t really move, she can’t send the kids for help, there’s no way to reach her husband or medical assistance, and unlike king’s lady, she can’t (or shouldn’t) sleep, so things get really tense as night falls and she’s responsible for more than just herself, and, we learn, so ill-equipped for that responsibility even on her best days.
and even though it is a mere fraction of its length, and as fragmented and meandering are this character’s thoughts, it’s a millionbillion times better and more intense than
Gerald's Game. there's so much depth of characterization, so much symbolism and psychological weight, so many questions left unanswered in the best, most mentally invigorating way. i like that there’s no way to know how this experience changed this character (or if she even has the option to change, depending on how you read it).
it reminded me how much i love her writing, and i really need to stop staring at
Florida in the mighty stack o’ books and get to it ASAP.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
* or, with the possible-panther, a combo of
Gerald's Game and
Cujo.
*******************************************
DECEMBER 1
DECEMBER 2
DECEMBER 3
DECEMBER 4
DECEMBER 5
DECEMBER 6
DECEMBER 7
DECEMBER 8
DECEMBER 9
DECEMBER 10
DECEMBER 11
DECEMBER 12
DECEMBER 13
DECEMBER 14
DECEMBER 15
DECEMBER 16
DECEMBER 17
DECEMBER 18
DECEMBER 19
DECEMBER 20
DECEMBER 21
DECEMBER 22
DECEMBER 23
DECEMBER 24
DECEMBER 25
DECEMBER 26
DECEMBER 27
DECEMBER 28
DECEMBER 29
DECEMBER 30
DECEMBER 31
come to my blog! -
Struggling with an unspecified illness, (I’d lost so much weight by then that I carried myself delicately) a mother on Spring-break vacation with her family at a remote (no internet, land-line, or accessible cell signal, and hubs has the car) Florida hunting lodge has a concussive fall while her husband is away for work. She must cope with keeping herself alert enough to be a mother to her two boys until her husband returns in two days. Motherhood is a challenge for her, even before a major head injury (And while it’s true that my children were endlessly fascinating…being a mother never had been). A reported panther sighting presents as the manifestation of existential threat. (Safety was twenty miles away and there was a panther between us and there, but also possibly terrible men, sinkholes, alligators, the end of the world. ) She pines for the strong mother she had had as a kid (a person who had blocked out the sun. ) Her boys enjoy a nature show and tell her about the layers of water, the deepest being the midnight zone where the fish are blind. Extant light diminishes (The batteries of one lantern went out and the light from the remaining lantern was sparse and thwarted. I could hardly see my hand or the shadow it made on the wall when I held it up… The lantern flicked itself out and the dark poured in. ) Is she dying?
While not necessarily the most emotionally grabbing tale, it is, nonetheless, a fascinating read that rewards close reading.
The story can be found at the New Yorker site
here. In a related item in the same issue of The New Yorker item, Groff is interviewed by Cressida Leyshon about the story
here. -
Though I’m not sure what our main character actually learns or if she changes at all (though maybe she actually dies?), I do love how we spend this concussed night with her as she drifts out of life and time, her children asleep around her.
We begin the story with some imagery that will come into play later in the story. First is the panther which represents stalking death. Later when she’s trying to stay awake the thought of that invisible predator is ever present at the edges of her life. And like the Alice in Wonderland reference, though it’s all a bit on-the-nose, it works to serve the story of someone who seems to be slowly disappearing.
The disappearing is important because we learn at the beginning she’s lost a lot of weight: "I loved eating, but I'd lost so much weight by then that I carried myself delicately, as if I'd gone transparent." And the word ‘transparent’ is important here because that is what she becomes as the story goes on and she falls off the stool. Even the word itself is a sort of pun, trans (changing) and parent (as in literally a parent).
When I first put this down I assumed our narrator lived through the night, but the more I think about it I’m not quite sure. At the start her husband leaves to take care of a suicide and so at the end it’s possible we have another death, one he could have prevented had he been there. Then again, I feel it’s at most ambiguous as to what is going on at the end. We are told she opens her eyes, but we were told earlier about her floating about outside - what’s to say her spirit isn’t still aware though her body is dead?
And it’s the last line of the story that gives me pause: “... like the wind itself, like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt.” What does this mean, the “silk of my pelt?” For me I get a cold, deathly image, a pelt of fur, cold, mouring (it’s morning, too), black, the panther’s fur. Everything is transitory, fleeting, but ominous, too: her husband fills the door, and earlier her mother was "a person who had blocked out the sun."
We also get a Blake reference (actually many poets are mentioned, though I’m most familiar with Blake so I’ll stick to him) and it reminded me of “The Tyger” (the panther here stands in for a tiger). With all the darkness of her world (the night blocked doors, the sun blocked) juxtaposed with the “burning bright” of the predator outside (the panther = the tyger), I feel a strong correlation between the images of life and death, the fear and wonder our narrator feels.
I don’t feel we learn anything profound, however and that is this story’s weakness. We have some very beautiful language and wonderful images to unravel, but it amounts to very little. It is sad and beautiful, but I don’t feel I learned anything very interesting about her situation, I don’t feel the narrator taught us something unique about her life and dying. I ask why are we told this story? Just so we can read this very beautiful scene where she slips around consciousness and are left with an ambiguous ending? Will she be a better, more substantial (not transparent) parent? We never know.
Still I did enjoy the beautiful moments of this story even if they don’t add up to a lot. -
A short story from the latest issue of the New Yorker, written by the author of Fates and Furies, finalist of National Book Award. I read the story so I can decide if F&F should move upper in my TBR pile. I am still undecided.
-
A short story published by the New Yorker, which I listened to in the audio version. I am not much of a fan of audio, as I find the readers pace and pronunciation, and accent distracting (not a criticism of the reader, just how it effects my listening to the story), but as it is a short story, I managed.
Without giving too much away, a woman with her two young sons is staying in a remote cabin, her husband having needed to return to the city for a couple of days. She has an accident, is knocked out for a few hours, and is then incapacitated, although conscious and able to communicate.
The story plays out, taking us into her thoughts, and how her children react, awaiting the return of her husband.
I found the story a little over-written - sentences like "I made scrambled eggs with a vengeful amount of butter and Cheddar, also cocoa with an inch of marshmallow, thinking I would stupefy my children with calories, but the calories only made them stronger." or "I’d been a soccer player in high school, a speedy and aggressive midfielder, and head trauma was an old friend. I remembered this constant lability from one concussive visit to the emergency room."
Just a bit wordy for a simple fellow like me, although the sentences don't look so bad, perhaps it was the audio effect...
2.5 stars - rounded up to 3. -
This speaks to me in a lot of ways. I find it genuinely terrifying.
-
A wonderfully uneasy tale, with throwaway lines that are more ominous than they first appear and an overall tone that makes you dread reading the next line.
-
A family outing story, fraught with misadventure and having an atmosphere of vague menace, a little group of people very much out of their usual element — ordinary city folk finding themselves disconnected with the familiar elements of urban life and immersed in a corner of the natural world. Groff's prose, is imaginative, nuanced; her story line, told in first person by the young mother of two small boys is tight and compact.
My one real complaint is her decision to refer to her children only as "the little boy" and "the bigger boy", never giving them the dignity of names. They are thereby rendered less consequential as people, remaining items of responsibility or artifacts of her life; even the puppy emerges as a complication in their lives. For me, the effect was jarring; it rendered the (also unnamed) protagonist a remote figure. -
And still
State of consciousness
Explodes into brain injury
Endlessly, I test myself
Why -
So that I keep my children safe
Oh, I might stop breathing!
Who will be saved?
There are no mothers and fathers
I will save myself.
#poem
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint of the Great Egret People -
It took me 3 days to read this story. baah!
-
"The rain increased until it was deafening and still my sweaty children slept. I thought of the waves of sleep rushing through their brains, washing out the tiny unimportant flotsam of today so that tomorrow’s heavier truths could wash in."
This is the perfect combination of a haunting idea and beautiful writing. -
Slušala sam audio, što je bila greška. Smetao mi je Lorenin glas i nisam mogla da se fokusiram na priču. Čitala je skoro nezainteresovano i kao da je bez daha.
Lepe rečenice, ali sam izgubila nit i poentu priče negde odmah na početku. -
I read this story as part of The Best American Short Stories 2017, edited by Meg Wolitzer. Lauren Groff’s writing is beautiful. A family vacations at an isolated hunting camp in Florida where a panther has been seen wandering the woods. The husband leaves to attend to an emergency and we see what happens to the wife and two kids while they’re alone. But what is this actually about? Subjectively, I think it’s about rejecting / feeling trapped by the constraints of motherhood, and feeling inadequate and ambivalent about typical gender roles. Lauren’s writing is outstanding.
“I was everything we had fretted about, the Queen of Chaos with her bloody duct-taped crown.” -
This was a short story emailed to me over 4 days, but there's a link available if you want to read the story in full.
So, it's not a bad story, and it's written well, but there was nothing here that makes me want to read more by the author. I know
Fates and Furies was a big deal for a bit, and
Arcadia was on my to-read list for a little while, but there was nothing so spectacular (for me) to make me want more.
Sorry. -
I really really wanted to like Lauren Groff, I really did. I had high hopes for “Fates and Furies” but I couldn’t get through the first half of the book. When I started this short story for class I didn’t even look at the author’s name (oops), but the writing style was so familiar and unpleasant that I went back to check half way through. Upon seeing Groff’s name everything clicked. No wonder this short story was such a struggle to get through. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m glad I only had to sit through a short story and not an entire novel.
-
”Det var en gammal jaktstuga som kapsejsat
tre mil in i en buskskog. En vän till oss hade
sett en puma smyga omkring bland träden
några dagar tidigare. Men vi hade haft det slitigt
en tid, och stugan gav frihet och ro, så jag
viftade bort det motstånd jag mötte från min
försiktigt lagde man och mina små pojkar,
som hade önskat sig ett vårlov med eremitkräftor
och drakar och wakeboardar och sand.
I stället möttes de av gamla slukhål fulla
av ormbunkar och risken att bli rov för kattdjur.” -
This is the first time reading anything by this author; and I really didn't care for the writing style of this short story. I do love the picture of the panther, though. I liked the quote, The forest was not dark, because darkness has nothing to do with the forest—the forest is made of life, of light—but the trees moved with wind and subtle creatures.. I've always loved forests and wondered why so many stories have dark and scary forests??
-
Sad tale and incomplete ending
-
Dumb. Rambling. Is she dead or not?
-
sad and depressing; I hated it.
-
Enjoyed the concept, disappointed by the execution.
-
"For a half breath, I would have vanished myself. I was everything we had fretted about, this passive Queen of Chaos with her bloody duct-tape crown."
-
Lauren Groff, like Karen Russell, has a unique voice, but it is undercut by the lack of imagination and story-telling ability that is essential for such novelists. In this story the narrator, a mother of two, describes what happens after she falls off a stool. One thing that irked me about the story was the way the woman never referred to her sons by their names, like a dog they are known as bigger and small son/child. Also, Groff tries to relate the woman's predicament to that of a wild cat that prowls about the house (supposedly, only a shadow seen). She also goes into a hallucinatory dream-like part that is pretty in description but leaves the question: why? I feel that Miss Groff has an interesting view that is not fully developed; her diction is somewhat off and the plot is not committed to an analysis of family life. The woman is not a very good mother, and depends upon the husband (apparently like her father) to take care of his loved ones, while she focuses on her job. I do not think I shall read her again (if Fates and Furies and this is anything to go by).
-
pretty, tense, though a bit lacking in something.
6/6/16
After thinking about this more I really wanted to like this, I still want to like this. It was dark and creepy, a bit surreal and magical, but what was the point? The lack of a real message or meaning took away from it, which is unfortunate because I actually enjoyed the writing. -
Tense tale about a woman forced to put on a brave front to reassure her children.
-
Here's an interview Groff gave about this short story.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
