The stories of Camille Bordas's One Sun Only are powered by everyday absurdity and accentuated by sharp observational humor. They explore creativity and family via comedically myopic characters.
In the darkly funny "Most Die Young," Julie circles the question of whether anxiety can kill while explicitly avoiding the question with regard to her own anxiety. Instead, she works on a human-interest essay about the Pawong, a Malaysian tribe in which fear is highly valued. In "The Lottery in Almería," Andrés is visited by his sister in the house they inherited from their father in the titular city, a small-town vacation destination where "it was not every day that two different things happened." He moves through his day observing others' irrationality while oblivious to his own illogical beliefs about what might impact the likelihood of winning the lottery.
In "The State of Nature," an optometrist sees a patient who wants LASIK so he can be better prepared for societal collapse and a return to a more natural state, which he's excitedly anticipating. Here, Bordas's deadpan style reaches its peak. When the optometrist finds out her patient got the surgery, she tells him with apparent sincerity, "I'm happy for you.... Now you can just relax and wait for the world to collapse."
Bordas's collection thoroughly understands the strange subtleties of human psychology, affectionately poking fun and letting readers in on the joke. It's a nuanced and compulsively readable work from a celebrated contributor to the New Yorker and the Paris Review, full of humor and insight. --Carol Caley, writer