Nothing stays constant except the desire to transform.
Friends and lovers leap in and out of guises, revealing trap doors in their personalities, inexplicable quirks in their daily habits. Characters and images reappear across stories, bridging time and space, reality and make-believe. Rather, on a deeper level, these stories are bound by a subconscious connective tissue.
They twist and turn in unpredictable ways and although the ride wasn’t always smooth, I never regretted getting on.The eight stories in Ling Ma’s collection Bliss Montage are linked, not only because their protagonists tend to be Chinese-American women on the brink of autonomy, or because they drift in the same sea of anomie and escapist fantasy. Despite their nagging loose ends, Ma’s stories stay with you - evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility. Each of these stories leans un-self-consciously into the speculative, illuminating Ma’s phantasmagoric interests. Wry, peculiar stories like Los Angeles and Yeti Lovemaking confirm that Ma’s imagination operates on the same chimerical frequency as those of Helen Oyeyemi, Samanta Schweblin, Meng Jin. The connections between them are loose, tethered by similar leads. Some stories are confident in their strangeness and ambiguity, a handful feel like promising sketches of sturdier narratives and the rest fall somewhere in between. an assured follow-up, a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal, but it often lacks Severance’s zest. The eight wily tales mark the return of an author whose inventive debut, Severance, urgently announced her as a writer worth watching. As they move languorously through the world, observing and operating with a cool detachment, their questionable choices - stalking an ex-lover, having sex with a Yeti, living with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends - fuel the narratives, and heighten their stakes. The women populating these stories are not merely at the center, they are the center.
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