Laura van den Berg (The Third Hotel) leads her characters into bizarre and life-changing situations--all the more powerful for their underlying emotional resonance--in her thrilling and uncanny collection of stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.
The 11 stories all feature women protagonists who seem caught in the unrelenting machinations of patriarchy. But this collection isn't a feminist manifesto. Rather, it is an exploration of women confronting the strangeness and danger lurking in their own lives. In this way it compares favorably with Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. But van den Berg is less a fabulist and more a gritty realist who just happens upon the inexplicable. In the title story, a woman stuck in a remote Italian village pretends to be her sister for a night, with devastating consequences. In "The Pitch," a woman confronts her husband about his troubled past, forcing an otherworldly reckoning.
The surreal permeates these stories in masterful fashion, as if each narrative, grounded in the real, slowly slips into the fantastical. The author admits this much in a sly, almost undetectable self-consciousness. "And this is the problem with translating experience into fiction, the way certain truths read like lies," the narrator says in "Last Night." In "Hill of Hell," the narrator explains "the way we are walled in by our secrets and the implacability of our judgments." When these walls come down, the experience for van den Berg's characters is both terrifying and liberating. When the world's expectations finally lay broken like a husk, each character emerges anew, shocked but utterly alive.
In one of the best stories, "Slumberland," a woman who has been photographing her Florida neighborhood at night discovers her neighbor has been crying for the pleasure of strangers on the phone; "dacryphilia," it's called. Like so many of van den Berg's stories, the plot twist provides an eerie but powerful form of human connection. In "Volcano House," a woman whose sister falls victim in a mass shooting forms a powerful emotional bond with her sister's grieving husband. In "Karolina," a woman discovers her former sister-in-law living homeless in Mexico City. They share a touching night together before the relationship once again falls into disarray.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is not only a testament to the power of the short story, but to how, cumulatively, a collection can sustain an entire ethos and atmosphere. Van den Berg is a maestro of the form, and these stories shouldn't be missed. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset
Shelf Talker: In Laura Van den Berg's uncanny collection, women confront a bewildering world to both terrifying and cathartic effect.