Contemporary Fiction Views: Vivid dreamscapes

One unexpected aspect of this unexpected stay-home months has been vivid dreams. Not just any kind of dream, but the kind that make sense while they are unfolding, continue even if you know you are dreaming, but dissipate upon awakening. I have actually told myself to remember the dream while it was taking place, and, of course, forgot it by morning.

Laura Van Den Berg's new collection of short stories, I Hold a Wolf By the Ears, is like that kind of dream.

Many of the stories revolve around lost women, sometimes as narrator, sometimes as subject, sometimes both are in the same story. Both are certainly in The Volcano House, a story of twins. One of them was shot by a rampaging lunatic with a firearm who went berserk in a nature preserve, and is now on life support. Her sister, who often comes up to Maine to visit her in the hospital, while staying with her sister's husband, keeps revisiting a trip the two took to Iceland. The narrator wanted to see a volcano and ditches her sister more than once, even though her now-comatose sister financed the trip. Her sister was the "point on a map I could return to." Without that point, the point of it all is difficult for the narrator to find.

Many of the stories involve aimlessness, an apt state for these days and nights out of time, as the women are on the verge of losing their desire or ability to carry on normally. One woman can't sleep and spends nights taking photographs, especially around an abandoned house. One of the neighbors in her complex sobs loudly all night. But it's a job. Another isn't sure how she became friends with another woman in a new town. Then the woman talks her into an adventure, which includes a punishing train ride that the narrator isn't sure she doesn't deserve.

The stories are all honest examinations of unsettling feelings, of emotions that aren't often admitted, let alone detailed. Conversely for stories that center on aloneness, they are a strong reminder that when it comes to trying to maintain oneself in the world, we are not the only ones.

As the narrator in one story notes, when a mosiac piece of art is broken, people sometimes gather the pieces and create a new work of art. 

Meanwhile, it's not our imagination that reading has been difficult for so many of us. It's all in the frontal lobe.

And, for anyone contemplating having a go at reading, The Guardian asked several authors what they are reading. Their booklists include fiction and nonfiction, classic and newly published, noir and SF.

RIP: Carlos Ruiz Zafon has died of cancer. His novel, The Shadow of the Wind, is the start of a four-book set that is centered on the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Masterful storytelling awaits if you've not read them.