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Beneath the Liquid Skin
Immerse yourself in what has long enraptured both the sensualist and the scientist-the natural world. Seismic in its permeable temporal and geographic states, Beneath the Liquid Skin examines humankind's response to the environment: our pursuit of milder emotional, political, social, and cultural climes; our flight from ecological catastrophe; and our refuge in safer mythical domains. Although her habitat is exotic, Berit Ellingsen saturates-with humanistic and preternatural harmony-a remarkably vulnerable yet enduring surface.
108 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2012
126 people want to read
About the author
Berit Ellingsen
24 books122 followersBerit Ellingsen is the author of three novels, Now We Can See The Moon (Snuggly Books 2018), Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio 2015), and Une ville vide (PublieMonde 2014), a collection of short stories, Beneath the Liquid Skin (Queen's Ferry Press), and a mini-collection of dark fairy-tales, Vessel and Solsvart (Snuggly Books). Her work has been published in W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unstuck, Litro, Lightspeed, and other places, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Berit is a member of the Norwegian Authors' Union. http://beritellingsen.com.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 30, 2013
A video recommendation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UdkLC...
Really enjoyed this book, it has incredibly beautiful prose along with very inventive situations. There's one story with only two sentences, the "Hostage Situation," which encapsulated the plight of so many families and captured so much in such a tight space. One of my favorite stories was "The Love Decay Has For the Living," in which fungi and fruits grow out of the body of the Chef's Lover. There were many memorable lines. One of my favorites comes from the last story, "Anthropocene," which I'll quote here:
"The world was an epic poem, but became a dirge. The firstborn illness took everything, as hungry as its name. We wrung the air and the water and the soil like a rag..."
Every story has something unique, not just in the plot elements, but in the way it's told. There's layers of skin, layers underneath the 'liquid skin,' brimming with creativity and a real love for language as in, "The Tale that wrote itself." If that title doesn't intrigue you, the story definitely will. All in all, a great read!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UdkLC...
Really enjoyed this book, it has incredibly beautiful prose along with very inventive situations. There's one story with only two sentences, the "Hostage Situation," which encapsulated the plight of so many families and captured so much in such a tight space. One of my favorite stories was "The Love Decay Has For the Living," in which fungi and fruits grow out of the body of the Chef's Lover. There were many memorable lines. One of my favorites comes from the last story, "Anthropocene," which I'll quote here:
"The world was an epic poem, but became a dirge. The firstborn illness took everything, as hungry as its name. We wrung the air and the water and the soil like a rag..."
Every story has something unique, not just in the plot elements, but in the way it's told. There's layers of skin, layers underneath the 'liquid skin,' brimming with creativity and a real love for language as in, "The Tale that wrote itself." If that title doesn't intrigue you, the story definitely will. All in all, a great read!
November 17, 2012
Berit Ellingsen’s Beneath the Liquid Skin is a celebration of fantasy, of the tale and of the telling of tales. At times whimsical—as if written with the claw of a crab?—at other times elegantly blurring the lines between prose and poetry, Ellingsen’s collection of short fiction is full of exciting surprises. Each story is a new planet, finely wrought in unexpected ways.
There are richly textured still moments (“Still Life of Hypnos”), moments charged with energy that race past (“Down the River”) and those that take the reader to fresh narrative landscapes. Variety abounds. Yet for all this welcome unexpectedness, there are also cadences that bind these stories into a well-balanced collection. One of these is a variation on the tale of two men: a chef and his lover, an astronomer and a king, then a farmer and a king. And then there is man whose lover/friend becomes a shark. These stories are on one level dialogues between men; on another level they are dialogues between country life and the big city (another motif woven into this collection). Yet another story is a conversation between a man and his boss about food becoming poison.
Food: so meticulously detailed and well-researched in these stories. It would not surprise me to discover that Ellingsen is a trained chef herself; and, equally, it would not surprise me to discover that Ellingsen couldn’t boil an egg. It doesn’t really matter in the end. As an author, Ellingsen is a skilled actor slipping into the most various of roles like a chef creating any dish the imagination can conjure. When an author can use food so deftly to create tone and setting, the reader is a fortunate diner. I’d love to have dinner with Ellingsen—perhaps just not “mushrooms . . . mixed with grilled squid and spring onions, toasted red chili, thick dark soy sauce, and a dash of bitter tamarind”—at least not the white, finger-like mushrooms in “The Love Decay Has for the Living”.
Another cadence in the collection is Ellingsen’s plastic use of color, as if Beneath the Liquid Skin itself is a complex painting with its own palette. Although I would say the dominant color is yellow with its contrast being the darkness of the mountains and the fjords, Ellingsen’s palette is a “many-hued splendor” connecting her worlds. Perhaps this is not so obvious or intentional as I observe it, but color certainly imbues consistency of tone to this collection. (I hadn’t seen the cover of the book before I wrote this review. It was a bit chilling to see the colors I’d mentioned–and reassuring. I wasn’t crazy after all.)
Beneath the Liquid Skin spans centuries, from the tales of kings and the sycophants of kings to modern relationships between men and women, but also between men and men. Ellingsen moves gracefully from one era to another as well as from one narrative approach to another. Full of surprise yet as satisfying and balanced as a well-planned meal: Beneath the Liquid Skin.
Originally published at www.metazen.ca.
There are richly textured still moments (“Still Life of Hypnos”), moments charged with energy that race past (“Down the River”) and those that take the reader to fresh narrative landscapes. Variety abounds. Yet for all this welcome unexpectedness, there are also cadences that bind these stories into a well-balanced collection. One of these is a variation on the tale of two men: a chef and his lover, an astronomer and a king, then a farmer and a king. And then there is man whose lover/friend becomes a shark. These stories are on one level dialogues between men; on another level they are dialogues between country life and the big city (another motif woven into this collection). Yet another story is a conversation between a man and his boss about food becoming poison.
Food: so meticulously detailed and well-researched in these stories. It would not surprise me to discover that Ellingsen is a trained chef herself; and, equally, it would not surprise me to discover that Ellingsen couldn’t boil an egg. It doesn’t really matter in the end. As an author, Ellingsen is a skilled actor slipping into the most various of roles like a chef creating any dish the imagination can conjure. When an author can use food so deftly to create tone and setting, the reader is a fortunate diner. I’d love to have dinner with Ellingsen—perhaps just not “mushrooms . . . mixed with grilled squid and spring onions, toasted red chili, thick dark soy sauce, and a dash of bitter tamarind”—at least not the white, finger-like mushrooms in “The Love Decay Has for the Living”.
Another cadence in the collection is Ellingsen’s plastic use of color, as if Beneath the Liquid Skin itself is a complex painting with its own palette. Although I would say the dominant color is yellow with its contrast being the darkness of the mountains and the fjords, Ellingsen’s palette is a “many-hued splendor” connecting her worlds. Perhaps this is not so obvious or intentional as I observe it, but color certainly imbues consistency of tone to this collection. (I hadn’t seen the cover of the book before I wrote this review. It was a bit chilling to see the colors I’d mentioned–and reassuring. I wasn’t crazy after all.)
Beneath the Liquid Skin spans centuries, from the tales of kings and the sycophants of kings to modern relationships between men and women, but also between men and men. Ellingsen moves gracefully from one era to another as well as from one narrative approach to another. Full of surprise yet as satisfying and balanced as a well-planned meal: Beneath the Liquid Skin.
Originally published at www.metazen.ca.
April 17, 2015
A really strong collection, with stories that fall somewhere between surrealism, fantasy, and fairy tales. A lot of the shorter ones were closer to prose poetry, punctuated with longer, more narrative pieces, which I especially enjoyed. My favorites were "The Love Decay has for the Living" and "The Glory of Glormorsel," but there were a lot of standouts in different ways. One thing I appreciated was the range of the collection, which I think was unusually broad; and also the number of stories dealing with gay men, in very interesting ways. This was a quick read but a good one, and I'm very curious to see what Ellingsen's new novel will look like whenever it comes out.
July 30, 2013
At 101 pages, Berit Ellingsen's collection Beneath the Liquid Skin appears beguilingly brief, yet the richness of each piece is such that this book feels as weighty as a tome five times its length. Ephemerally beautiful, often achingly vivid, and always told with a unique voice that drifts back and forth from the lyrical and poetic to the grounded and pragmatic. There's heartbreak and humor, often in the same breath, and always a sharp eye being cast at both the subject and the reader. Chefs and scientists fill the pages, as do families and farmers, decay and decadence, and while each story stands out for its own merits, the sum is even more than its components. A damn fine read for those inclined to both the weird and the wonderful, which is to say, humans.
November 17, 2012
Borne of the seemingly limitless imagination of Berit Ellingsen, BENEATH THE LIQUID SKIN delights as much for its deft and elegant language as for its storytelling. This writer has at her disposal that rare combination of searing intelligence and a poetic sensibility. Ellingsen takes the reader to far-flung worlds, to the people and the places we find achingly distant yet remarkably close. This collection is a beauty not to be missed.
November 15, 2012
Beneath the Liquid Skin evokes, terrifies, and placates. Berit Ellingsen's stunning collection of stories touches on the mystical, the macabre, and the absurd. I'm quite taken by the dramatic structure and the beautiful writing. Ellingsen's voice is a breathtakingly marvelous one.
November 26, 2012
There are some odd, alien, repulsive, nightmarish, sly, funny, fabulous, fairytale-ilike images in Berit Ellingsen's new collection of stories, "Beneath the Liquid Skin". This book sets up and detonates little depth-charges of meaning. You can't resist being pulled into Ellingsen's unique and vital imagination.
Ellingsen doesn't practice the art of the short story, she explodes the accepted state of the short story and mines its shards. Each of these stories, some no more than brief vignettes or prose poems, is so different from the others that you feel that Ellingsen is re-inventing the story genre with each with each and every outing. Like her artistic forbears Kafka and Borges, she is exploring new possibilities in fiction writing and showing more conventional authors the way it can be. She doesn't keep coming back and re-ploughing the same earth the way some writers do, nor is she forcing each piece into the kind of shape that a New Yorker editor would love. Rather, she is letting each story stand on its own as a work of art and as an expression that was the result of a successful quest to find a new form.
And yet, as different as each story is, the constant behind them all is her narrative voice. It is controlled, vivid, accurately descriptive, and packed with surprising images. Her imagery comes from the biological world, cityscapes, Cold War defections and online games, nightmares and dreams. Her voice gets in your head and you want more of it. This is especially true in "A June Defection", which could have become a full-length novel. "A June Defection" is as close as she comes to New Yorker short stories with their little epiphanies. But it carries her own special twist, as the ending is prepared like a trap that is sprung in the last sentences.
In other stories, like "The Glory of Glormosel" or "The Love Decay has for the Living", the authorial voice is very tongue in cheek. There is a sly humor that easily conveys the bizarre logic of dreams. On the other hand, the stories "The Astronomer and the King" and "The Tale that Wrote Itself" read like fables, and the narrator is the tale-spinner, who delights in entertaining and confounding the reader. And "Autumn Story" is a sad evocation of loss, told by a somewhat removed narrator who follows the character in the story who, much like the one in Ellingsen's novel "The Empty City", gradually empties out and seems to be fading away into nothingness.
If there is a theme that unites many of these stories, it is that of Identity. It is as if, after the collapse of the post-modern ironic consciousness in the wake of 9/11, a new kind of identity arose, which she explores in this book. This new kind of identity is more fluid, less rigid, quite apt to metamorphosize. Everything is mutable, including the self of an Antarctic researcher, the body of a Chef's lover, and the man whose lover turns into a shark. In "Sexual Dimorphism - A Nightmare Transcribed From the Sanskrit", a "female self" decides to change into a "male self", with strange results, but with a haunting refrain that reminds us of the mutability of the gods themselves. Again, as in "The Empty City", she treats notions of the Self and Identity not as fixed structures to be explored, but as notions that are liquid, flowing, ephemeral, and made to be deconstructed, melted down, re-formed into something bigger, wilder, more open to crazy possibilities.
It is impossible to pigeonhole Ellingsen's work into a genre or an influence.
You find modernism, sci-fi, fantasy, surrealism, magic realism, and straight short story art. At times it seems that she is verging on post-modernist meta-fiction, but her sensibility is too close to the bone to undercut her own narratives in that way. Yet it is as though she is inventing a new narrative space all her own, where her deadpan, controlled language meets her concern with identity, metamorphosis, and non-duality. At its best her work is attains the spiritual, but in a way that is unexpected and rare.
This is nowhere more evident than in her final story, "Anthropocene", and another story, "A Catalog of Planets". The latter story starts with the statement, "this planet reminds your atoms and molecules that they are mostly empty space". In very brief paragraphs, she presents the various ways that people are in prisons of their own making, and ends with a vision of true freedom.
The story "Anthropocene" takes a similar planetary perspective, but starts from the viewpoint of geology. I didn't really understand this story until I looked up the meaning of the title word. The Anthropocene is a scientific neologism for the human epoch on earth and its effect on the planet's ecology. This story is ostensibly about geology and a possible future if humankind continues down its current path. The constant refrain, as the narrator moves through time past to time future, is about a poison ore at the heart of the earth. The final lines jump to a statement that both sums up the entire book, and explains what the poison ore is:
"'You' and 'I' denote no one and no thing. They are simply chalk marks on the blackboard or letters on the page."
Ellingsen takes us on quite a journey through the stories in this book. Open it at any page and start reading and you will be enthralled. And wanting more.
Ellingsen doesn't practice the art of the short story, she explodes the accepted state of the short story and mines its shards. Each of these stories, some no more than brief vignettes or prose poems, is so different from the others that you feel that Ellingsen is re-inventing the story genre with each with each and every outing. Like her artistic forbears Kafka and Borges, she is exploring new possibilities in fiction writing and showing more conventional authors the way it can be. She doesn't keep coming back and re-ploughing the same earth the way some writers do, nor is she forcing each piece into the kind of shape that a New Yorker editor would love. Rather, she is letting each story stand on its own as a work of art and as an expression that was the result of a successful quest to find a new form.
And yet, as different as each story is, the constant behind them all is her narrative voice. It is controlled, vivid, accurately descriptive, and packed with surprising images. Her imagery comes from the biological world, cityscapes, Cold War defections and online games, nightmares and dreams. Her voice gets in your head and you want more of it. This is especially true in "A June Defection", which could have become a full-length novel. "A June Defection" is as close as she comes to New Yorker short stories with their little epiphanies. But it carries her own special twist, as the ending is prepared like a trap that is sprung in the last sentences.
In other stories, like "The Glory of Glormosel" or "The Love Decay has for the Living", the authorial voice is very tongue in cheek. There is a sly humor that easily conveys the bizarre logic of dreams. On the other hand, the stories "The Astronomer and the King" and "The Tale that Wrote Itself" read like fables, and the narrator is the tale-spinner, who delights in entertaining and confounding the reader. And "Autumn Story" is a sad evocation of loss, told by a somewhat removed narrator who follows the character in the story who, much like the one in Ellingsen's novel "The Empty City", gradually empties out and seems to be fading away into nothingness.
If there is a theme that unites many of these stories, it is that of Identity. It is as if, after the collapse of the post-modern ironic consciousness in the wake of 9/11, a new kind of identity arose, which she explores in this book. This new kind of identity is more fluid, less rigid, quite apt to metamorphosize. Everything is mutable, including the self of an Antarctic researcher, the body of a Chef's lover, and the man whose lover turns into a shark. In "Sexual Dimorphism - A Nightmare Transcribed From the Sanskrit", a "female self" decides to change into a "male self", with strange results, but with a haunting refrain that reminds us of the mutability of the gods themselves. Again, as in "The Empty City", she treats notions of the Self and Identity not as fixed structures to be explored, but as notions that are liquid, flowing, ephemeral, and made to be deconstructed, melted down, re-formed into something bigger, wilder, more open to crazy possibilities.
It is impossible to pigeonhole Ellingsen's work into a genre or an influence.
You find modernism, sci-fi, fantasy, surrealism, magic realism, and straight short story art. At times it seems that she is verging on post-modernist meta-fiction, but her sensibility is too close to the bone to undercut her own narratives in that way. Yet it is as though she is inventing a new narrative space all her own, where her deadpan, controlled language meets her concern with identity, metamorphosis, and non-duality. At its best her work is attains the spiritual, but in a way that is unexpected and rare.
This is nowhere more evident than in her final story, "Anthropocene", and another story, "A Catalog of Planets". The latter story starts with the statement, "this planet reminds your atoms and molecules that they are mostly empty space". In very brief paragraphs, she presents the various ways that people are in prisons of their own making, and ends with a vision of true freedom.
The story "Anthropocene" takes a similar planetary perspective, but starts from the viewpoint of geology. I didn't really understand this story until I looked up the meaning of the title word. The Anthropocene is a scientific neologism for the human epoch on earth and its effect on the planet's ecology. This story is ostensibly about geology and a possible future if humankind continues down its current path. The constant refrain, as the narrator moves through time past to time future, is about a poison ore at the heart of the earth. The final lines jump to a statement that both sums up the entire book, and explains what the poison ore is:
"'You' and 'I' denote no one and no thing. They are simply chalk marks on the blackboard or letters on the page."
Ellingsen takes us on quite a journey through the stories in this book. Open it at any page and start reading and you will be enthralled. And wanting more.
April 24, 2018
I almost missed out on this beautiful collection -- but it recently had its second printing! The writing here is gorgeous, poetic, and experimental, and the stories fantastical and brand-new. Ellingsen's is a voice unlike any other.
January 5, 2013
--Many short story collections suffer from monotony, where the stories all too similar, whether it be in content or tone or emotion, but this little book is one of the most fun reads I have recently encountered. It is a display for Ellingsen’s talent and imagination and yet it is so distinctly itself. These stories belong together for reasons I cannot really name, but if one were to be missing, it would be noticed. Where many writers explore the fantastic by revisiting myths or spinning tropes, it is almost as if Ellingsen herself came from somewhere else, some world beyond ours and carried back the stories of that distant place.--
Full review at InDigest Magazine.
Full review at InDigest Magazine.
July 29, 2015
This collection surprised me. It pulls the reader straight into a number of alternate worlds full of the surreal, and describes the human/inhuman, and the natural in extremely lush and vivid language. Some stories are brief, lucid formations that lead into broader stories throwing up the fantastical. Will definitely be re-reading certain stories that are pure gems. Beautiful book design also. A unique, warm, fuzzy and weird collection of out-there tales.
July 11, 2016
A very strange collection. I floated in and out of this book, untethered but not necessarily distant. It's sort of a molesting read; invasive and disquieting but delighting in a queasy way. A lot of groping and mind games. It reminds me of Donald Barthelme but more grounded and less cutesy. By grounded I don't necessarily mean in reality, I just mean that it's less fanciful; more visceral than ephemeral, more like looking a deformity than witnessing a strange attire.
February 25, 2015
This collection beautifully seesaws between poetry and fiction. Ellingsen's connection to nature, the stars, and the Earth is riddled within, and I've never been more enamored with the world after having read this even when she presents the numerous dark facets nature has. Ultimately you can't fight against the world. It just is. Beautiful. Brutal. Captivating. Alienating.
October 14, 2014
There were quite a few individual sentences that struck something. I liked the stories more on that level than taken as a whole.
"The Tale That Wrote Itself" was my favorite. Followed by "Still Life of Hypnos"
"The Tale That Wrote Itself" was my favorite. Followed by "Still Life of Hypnos"
January 9, 2013
Absolutely lovely writing. I agree with Kathy Fish's review, below.
January 13, 2014
Exquisitely crafted and deliciously weird.
May 14, 2016
Five is simply not stars enough.
A rare collection from which several stories are almost certain to remain subtly & relentlessly spiraling through the reader's life.
A rare collection from which several stories are almost certain to remain subtly & relentlessly spiraling through the reader's life.
September 2, 2013
Sinking is a feeling you'll often get as you plunge into this mesmerizing collection.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews