The mysteries of kinship (families born into and families made) take disconcerting and familiar shapes in these refreshingly frank short stories. A family is haunted by a beast that splatters fruit against its walls every night, another undergoes a near-collision with a bus on the way home from the beach. Mothers are cold, fathers are absent — we know these moments in the abstract, but Adaui makes each as uncanny as our own lives: close but not yet understood.
Translated into English for the first time by celebrated translator, Rosalind Harvey, Katya Adaui’s HERE BE ICEBERGS is a collection of twelve short stories and a Wunderkammer of connections imperfectly made. With a style that finds beauty in those cold flashes of reality and that uses an arsenal of remarkable narrative elements (grammatical inversions, theatrical set pieces), Adaui finds poetry in the weird, fetid, familiar discomfort of family.
My review:
Here Be Icebergs is something a little bit different for me and it’s been a while since I’ve read a book of short stories but when I read the description for this book it had me intrigued. There’s 12 short stories in this collection all about the mystery of family.
I took my time reading these stories and decided to read one a night instead of devouring the book, at only 130 pages it would be quite easy to do so. I’m pleased I chose to read it this way as some of the stories were quite unsettling and I don’t think I would have appreciated them if I’d rushed them.
The stories were all very different, some I liked more than others, some I found I wanted to know more about and some I felt were just the perfect length and left you satisfied.
This is a beautifully narrated book with a range of stories that I think many would find intriguing, there’s a story for everyone whatever you may like.
It's all about the books 