Sample Translation Available

Dorine Bertrand’s accomplished debut contains nine stories in which the constant level of anxiety is matched only by the author’s unrelenting dark humor. The collection opens with a man nervously waiting for the unconventional birthday that will mark the exact mid-point of his life: thirty-nine and a half. Having calculated his life expectancy at seventy-nine based on a radio study, he muses wistfully and sarcastically on the fast-approaching moment after which he “will no longer be able to say ‘my life.’ There will only be ‘the rest of my life.’”

In another story told in daily journal entries, we meet a housewife chronicling the lead-up to her dreaded, weekly love-making session with her husband. She loves him just fine, but simply sees sex as a necessary evil to endure on Sundays if she is to enjoy any peace the rest of the week. Thursday, Friday and Saturday roll along and bring with them his constant, increasingly aggressive advances until the story concludes in a hilariously deflating climax.

Other tales involve a consuming jealousy, teenage suicide, a young woman persuading herself to have an abortion, an ex-soldier who would like nothing more than to relive his war days, and a wife who, one day smelling death on her husband, and sees removing her sense of smell as her only solution to revulsion. Bold, crisp and haunting, this collection is suffused even in its darkest tales with mordant wit, providing certain proof of the young Bertrand's daring and talent.