Years later, when the narrator is a student in an MFA program, she writes a short story about an incident she witnessed when a creepy salesman came to the door and fixated on her mother. There, the narrator's father goes to graduate school and her mother works as a nanny. from China as a child and living with her parents in Utah, as Ma herself did. In it an unnamed female narrator recalls moving to the U.S. 'Peking Duck' is a dazzling box-within-box story that reads like auto-fiction. But beware: Another story, called 'Peking Duck' explicitly warns against asking of any story, 'What's the lesson here supposed to be?' What does this story mean? Maybe something about the truth of most of us living with memories of people - old lovers and others - populating our headspace, except here the memories and the space are made literal. The Husband, who our narrator tells us she met on, only speaks in '$$$,' not words, which is very funny on the page.īut nothing is just one thing in Ma's writing: Satire swirls into savagery a gimmicky premise into poignancy. The deadpan tone of that narrator's voice implicitly urges readers to 'just roll with it' and so we do. Take the opening story, called 'Los Angeles.' Here's how our narrator introduces herself and her world:īook Reviews 'Severance' Is A Sardonic Wake-Up Call For All Of Us Stuck In Routine In one of those short stories, 'Office Hours,' a film professor declares to his class: 'It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.' That pronouncement could serve as an epigram for this entire collection, an apt way to characterize its distinctive aura. And, so, I felt reluctant, but compelled to pick up her new book, a collection of short stories called Bliss Montage. Ma's writing, in short, stays with you whether you want it to or not.

The novel was already disturbing in and of itself because of its sardonic tone and its mundane imagery that smoothly morphed into the macabre. By early spring of 2020, Ling Ma was being hailed as an oracle of the pandemic.īut the prophetic quality of Severance only enhanced its power. Ling Ma's 2018 debut novel, Severance, imagined a world ravaged by the sudden onset of something called 'Shen Fever' - a fictitious infection that originated in Southern China.

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