Maybe This Time (Paperback)
$13.30 - Save $0.71 (5%) - RRP $14.01 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 24 hours | |Short Description for Maybe This Time A man becomes obsessed with observing his neighbours. A large family gathers for Christmas only to wait for the one member who never turns up. An old woman lures a man into her house where he finds dolls resembling himself as a boy. Mesmerizing and haunting stories about loss of identity in the modern world.
Full description- Publisher: Peirene Press Ltd
- Published: 01 November 2011
- Format: Paperback 110 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Contemporary Fiction | Short Stories | Fiction In Translation
- ISBN 13: 9780956284051 ISBN 10: 0956284051
- Sales rank: 233,637
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Reviews for Maybe This Time
This is the rabbit hole and Alice is so far outside her comfort zone - it hurts.
You are walking down a road, you take a turn, let's say for examples sake, left, and carry on walking, gradually something, some feeling, starts to disturb your equilibrium, you let it go, and continue walking but this feeling starts to grip, it's as if something saurian is using your spine as a percussion instrument, there's an eight millimetre drill bit slowly boring into the back of your skull turn by turn. You spin round tracing your route back with your eyes glancing off every surface, tracing every obstacle - it all looks the same, in the distance the traffic appears to flow as before, the sun is still shining, you about turn and face your intended route, willing whatever's making you feel this way to show itself. Nothing does, to all intents and purpose this is just a route to your destination, it has the same cars, the same road furniture, the houses line up as regular as soldiers on parade, the same as elsewhere, the same curtain twitches as the same old lady turns from the window - and yet........
Somehow you've entered the universe of Alois Hotschnig, this is the rabbit hole and Alice is so far outside her comfort zone - it hurts. These nine tales have an interior logic of their own, like dreamscapes they inhabit that hinterland just outside our line of sight, just beyond our awakened selves and can easily trip over into a nightmare realm. Hotschnig comes over as a bored and decadent God playing a malevolent game of Sims . . . .
In the first tale the narrator appears obsessed with his neighbours, following their every movement, he is disturbed by their complete disregard of him, yet feels himself under surveillance. In another an old woman invites a man into her house and although he doesn't know her, she appeared to be expecting him, then introduces him to a doll with the same name and looking exactly like him, in another tale we follow a beetle and through the cold observations of the narrator we watch it die as it's attacked & eaten alive by ants. Meike Ziervogel states "Outwardly normal events slip into drama before they tip into horror" and this rings true, these tales confound, bemuse...unsettle and like some poltergeist that has taken up residence in your mind, they bang and clatter, long after the book is back on the shelf. by parrish lantern
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