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Dinosaurs On Other Planets
A woman battles bluebottles as she plots an ill-judged encounter with a stranger; a young husband commutes a treacherous route to his job in the city, fearful for the wife and small daughter he has left behind; a mother struggles to understand her nine-year-old son’s obsession with dead birds and the apocalypse. In Danielle McLaughlin’s stories, the world is both beautiful and alien. Men and women negotiate their surroundings as a tourist might navigate a distant country: watchfully, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension. Here are characters living lives in translation, ever at the mercy of distortions and misunderstandings, striving to make sense both of the spaces they inhabit and of the people they share them with.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 128 reviews
May 12, 2016
I had the privilege of traveling to Ireland just over a month ago. Alas, when I returned, as these things go, my Netgalley request for Dinosaurs on Other Planets, a beautiful debut short-story collection by a budding Irish author, was approved. Having just spent a few days imbibing the soulful atmosphere of Dublin and the melancholy of the fertile but sparsely inhabited countryside of County Cork, I was especially appreciative of McLaughlin’s portrait of Ireland in transition.
The backdrop is a place still struggling from economic depression, and the overwhelming theme explored is human despair/alienation (driven by economic woes/inequality). A father desperately attempts to provide for his bipolar wife and child; a team of brothers engage in smuggling activities; a mink-farmer is ridden by debt.
The most unsettling thread coursing through McLaughlin’s stories is her choice of setting: locations far removed from urban centers (long imprinted in human mythos as harbors of despair/inequality/strife).
Cliffs of Moher, Ireland
An example (and indulgence): I’ve always day-dreamed about my ideal of a peaceful life: roaming Romanian’s Carpathians as a shepherd- just me, the mountains, and sheep. And of course, in my fantasy, I’m also carrying a backpack full of books.
Piatra Craiului, a sub-range of the Carpathians in Transylvania, my soul-home
But, this daydream is a purely romantic notion, born of a melancholy for simpler times, in which nature symbolizes peacefulness and beauty. Who knows if these times really existed? We tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses, yearning for an ‘Eden’ that lives purely in the imagination and is not supported by historical fact.
Piatra Craiului, Romania
Realistically, if I was a Romanian shepherd, I wouldn’t be carrying around a backpack full of books (I wouldn’t have the means, or the education most likely). I’d be living in poverty, away from human companionship for long stretches at a time. And meanwhile, the world would go on, and I would know very little about it. On second thought, not so ideal, after all. In fact, a privileged self-indulgence: for I’m sure I wouldn’t be having this fantasy if I were still a child in Communist Romania. Ah, the view from my American land-of-plenty perch…
McLaughlin brilliantly captures this dilemma of modern times: even in remote places, even in places bountifully given to nature, human despair persists, darkness still encroaches. There is no place where we can go to ‘escape’. Effectively, these stories demolish the notion of a fabled haven, of being able to somehow transcend the confines of our material situations (i.e. economics).
Still, McLaughlin does not leave the reader with a complete sense of loss or inescapable existential ennui. For even within the bounds of our lives, her stories relate the ways in which we still have the ability to make meaning for ourselves. There is, at least, no cessation of movement: we are compelled forward, by our desire to understand. And, this desire is fundamentally a productive and positive force that propels action/life.
Meanwhile, the choice is ours. Whether we decide to act, to seek out experiences, knowledge, wisdom - life sweeps us along in an ever-moving stream. Whatever happens, wherever we are, rivers don’t stop on our behalf. This sentiment is poignantly alluded to in the final story of the collection, in which a child wonders, could there be dinosaurs on other planets? Since they were wiped out on Earth by an asteroid, what about all those places that have not been hit? Even when a devastating realization, event, or act may wipe out all we hold dear, or may cause us to rethink all of our preconceptions, the world goes on, carrying us even as we may lie limp or try to fight against the current. Sobering, indeed.
McLaughlin writes beautifully, her insights are penetrating, and her stories are easily relatable. Still, I wasn’t fully captured by the work. While I fully identified with the melancholic tone (the story of my being), these stories were a bit too... lethargic for my taste. Reading this short book induced some kind of torpor- it took me weeks to read, and then weeks more to write this review.
I received my copy from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are solely my own
The backdrop is a place still struggling from economic depression, and the overwhelming theme explored is human despair/alienation (driven by economic woes/inequality). A father desperately attempts to provide for his bipolar wife and child; a team of brothers engage in smuggling activities; a mink-farmer is ridden by debt.
The most unsettling thread coursing through McLaughlin’s stories is her choice of setting: locations far removed from urban centers (long imprinted in human mythos as harbors of despair/inequality/strife).
Cliffs of Moher, IrelandAn example (and indulgence): I’ve always day-dreamed about my ideal of a peaceful life: roaming Romanian’s Carpathians as a shepherd- just me, the mountains, and sheep. And of course, in my fantasy, I’m also carrying a backpack full of books.
Piatra Craiului, a sub-range of the Carpathians in Transylvania, my soul-homeBut, this daydream is a purely romantic notion, born of a melancholy for simpler times, in which nature symbolizes peacefulness and beauty. Who knows if these times really existed? We tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses, yearning for an ‘Eden’ that lives purely in the imagination and is not supported by historical fact.
Piatra Craiului, RomaniaRealistically, if I was a Romanian shepherd, I wouldn’t be carrying around a backpack full of books (I wouldn’t have the means, or the education most likely). I’d be living in poverty, away from human companionship for long stretches at a time. And meanwhile, the world would go on, and I would know very little about it. On second thought, not so ideal, after all. In fact, a privileged self-indulgence: for I’m sure I wouldn’t be having this fantasy if I were still a child in Communist Romania. Ah, the view from my American land-of-plenty perch…
McLaughlin brilliantly captures this dilemma of modern times: even in remote places, even in places bountifully given to nature, human despair persists, darkness still encroaches. There is no place where we can go to ‘escape’. Effectively, these stories demolish the notion of a fabled haven, of being able to somehow transcend the confines of our material situations (i.e. economics).
Still, McLaughlin does not leave the reader with a complete sense of loss or inescapable existential ennui. For even within the bounds of our lives, her stories relate the ways in which we still have the ability to make meaning for ourselves. There is, at least, no cessation of movement: we are compelled forward, by our desire to understand. And, this desire is fundamentally a productive and positive force that propels action/life.
Meanwhile, the choice is ours. Whether we decide to act, to seek out experiences, knowledge, wisdom - life sweeps us along in an ever-moving stream. Whatever happens, wherever we are, rivers don’t stop on our behalf. This sentiment is poignantly alluded to in the final story of the collection, in which a child wonders, could there be dinosaurs on other planets? Since they were wiped out on Earth by an asteroid, what about all those places that have not been hit? Even when a devastating realization, event, or act may wipe out all we hold dear, or may cause us to rethink all of our preconceptions, the world goes on, carrying us even as we may lie limp or try to fight against the current. Sobering, indeed.
McLaughlin writes beautifully, her insights are penetrating, and her stories are easily relatable. Still, I wasn’t fully captured by the work. While I fully identified with the melancholic tone (the story of my being), these stories were a bit too... lethargic for my taste. Reading this short book induced some kind of torpor- it took me weeks to read, and then weeks more to write this review.
I received my copy from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are solely my own
July 3, 2016
4.5/5 :)
May 10, 2017
This volume consists of 11 short stories, two of which appeared in the New Yorker. One person at my book club noted all the stories featured "bad mothers". Some beautiful prose, but the stories at times were grim. But I appreciated this collection and will definitely read more of her. A book for those interested in new Irish writing, short stories, and writing by women.
May 23, 2016
When a publicist compares a debut writer to the inimitable Alice Munro and William Trevor, expectations are bound to be high. I don’t think Danielle McLaughlin quite meets that standard, but I do think that this is a very promising collection of stories that builds momentum as it goes along.
Taken as a whole, this quietly powerful story collection each person’s evolving place in an often uncertain, always mysterious universe. The title story is the final story and it includes this description, partially in response to a young boy who believes he has discovered a dinosaur skull : “There were stars, millions of them, the familiar constellations she’d known since childhood. They were white-hot clouds of dust and gas, and the light, if you got close, would blind you.”
Animals don’t fare well in Dinosaurs On Other Planets; neither, in many cases, do parent-child relationships or relationships between lovers. A particularly disturbing story, A Different County, focuses on an innocent woman named Sarah who travels with her new boyfriend, Jonathan, to the home of his brother Aidan and his very pregnant girlfriend, Pauline. As labor commences for Pauline, Sarah’s innocence is shattered when she comes across the brothers’ unsettling and secretive activities.
Another, In The Act of Falling, centers on a stressed-out wife whose unemployed husband stays home with their antisocial young son. Tension builds as we view the son’s obsession with dead ducks, a traveling preacher who looks like Angelina Jolie, and a depraved man who might be the cause of harm.
With psychological acuity, Danielle McLaughlin crafts her stories, which – for the most part – evoke desolution, alienation, and in some cases, redemption. I foresee good things for this talented writer. 4.5 stars.
Taken as a whole, this quietly powerful story collection each person’s evolving place in an often uncertain, always mysterious universe. The title story is the final story and it includes this description, partially in response to a young boy who believes he has discovered a dinosaur skull : “There were stars, millions of them, the familiar constellations she’d known since childhood. They were white-hot clouds of dust and gas, and the light, if you got close, would blind you.”
Animals don’t fare well in Dinosaurs On Other Planets; neither, in many cases, do parent-child relationships or relationships between lovers. A particularly disturbing story, A Different County, focuses on an innocent woman named Sarah who travels with her new boyfriend, Jonathan, to the home of his brother Aidan and his very pregnant girlfriend, Pauline. As labor commences for Pauline, Sarah’s innocence is shattered when she comes across the brothers’ unsettling and secretive activities.
Another, In The Act of Falling, centers on a stressed-out wife whose unemployed husband stays home with their antisocial young son. Tension builds as we view the son’s obsession with dead ducks, a traveling preacher who looks like Angelina Jolie, and a depraved man who might be the cause of harm.
With psychological acuity, Danielle McLaughlin crafts her stories, which – for the most part – evoke desolution, alienation, and in some cases, redemption. I foresee good things for this talented writer. 4.5 stars.
June 20, 2021
Danielle McLaughlin's debut collection was first published in 2015 and I've heard much praise for it in the intervening years. On my first trip to a bookshop since our latest Covid lockdown, I spied it on a Notable Irish Fiction table, so I finally decided to give it a whirl.
Throughout these stories, everyday scenarios take sinister turns. In A Different Country, a young woman takes a trip with her new boyfriend to see his home in Donegal, and learns some unwelcome truths about him. Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate describes a neighbourhood First Communion party, which is full of joy and excitement for the children, but an undercurrent of malice and mistrust lingers around the adults. My favourite of all was Night of the Silver Fox, in which an innocent young worker travels to a cash-strapped mink farm with his employer, and has his eyes opened to the harsh realities of life.
If I am to be critical, I have to admit that not all of these stories lived up to the hype. I found the symbolism a bit too obvious and heavy-handed in some. My experience was not helped by the fact that there were several unintentional blank pages in the book, leaving a couple of tales unreadable. But the stories I did like stayed with me, the darker scenarios the McLaughlin imagined swirled in my brain for days afterwards. She has a knack for portraying flawed characters, and her astute powers of observation indicate a writer of many talents.
Throughout these stories, everyday scenarios take sinister turns. In A Different Country, a young woman takes a trip with her new boyfriend to see his home in Donegal, and learns some unwelcome truths about him. Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate describes a neighbourhood First Communion party, which is full of joy and excitement for the children, but an undercurrent of malice and mistrust lingers around the adults. My favourite of all was Night of the Silver Fox, in which an innocent young worker travels to a cash-strapped mink farm with his employer, and has his eyes opened to the harsh realities of life.
If I am to be critical, I have to admit that not all of these stories lived up to the hype. I found the symbolism a bit too obvious and heavy-handed in some. My experience was not helped by the fact that there were several unintentional blank pages in the book, leaving a couple of tales unreadable. But the stories I did like stayed with me, the darker scenarios the McLaughlin imagined swirled in my brain for days afterwards. She has a knack for portraying flawed characters, and her astute powers of observation indicate a writer of many talents.
April 4, 2016
It's not till the last part of this debut short story collection by author Danielle McLaughlin that you reach the title story. If you've read all the stories in order (as I did) then you'll already have a sense of the title's more complex meaning. It’s a phrase taken from a conversation in one story where a child speculates that if dinosaurs were made extinct after a meteor hit Earth there could still be dinosaurs on other planets. However, a more layered understanding of how this image’s meaning connects with human relationships comes from the interactions of the characters throughout all of the stories. They convey a sensation that, even if we are emotionally destroyed in our own circumscribed existence, other lives still carry on independently. There is a feeling running through many of these varied and skilfully-written tales that the existence of others happens at a far remove from you and your own internal reality. Even if we live in close proximity to each other and especially if we're in a relationship with someone, the bulk of these other lives remains distinct and private. McLaughlin subtly handles this by creating deeply immersive and compelling stories which show a keen sense of how people relate to each other.
Read my full thoughts on LonesomeReader review of Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin
Read my full thoughts on LonesomeReader review of Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin
June 10, 2016
I've observed this paradox before -- if a book of short stories is uniformly great, reading it is hard work. To give each story its due, it requires digestion and are thus better read individually, between weightier novels, as a sort of sorbet. But when gathered in a collection, the process of immersion, intrigue, absorption, all requires an ebb and flow of concentration, culminating sometimes in an abrupt closure.
So, how to review a collection such as this where every story is compelling. Set in an Ireland that could be anywhere, even anywhere USA, with only sporadic reference to place names or metric measurements to identify this as Ireland. There is so much good writing coming out of there -- I recently attended a panel of Irish writers who agreed that the flavor of contemporary Irish fiction is reflective of that island's long tradition of story telling. If there is a common thread running through these particular stories, it is one that is familiar to anyone who has lived the past decade anywhere in the world in which a financial surge and decline has affected all. I recently read a book of short stories from Greece with similar themes. These are hyper realistic, hypnotic and recognizable situations that present us with a worldview, proving our lives are not that much different from those not next door.
So, how to review a collection such as this where every story is compelling. Set in an Ireland that could be anywhere, even anywhere USA, with only sporadic reference to place names or metric measurements to identify this as Ireland. There is so much good writing coming out of there -- I recently attended a panel of Irish writers who agreed that the flavor of contemporary Irish fiction is reflective of that island's long tradition of story telling. If there is a common thread running through these particular stories, it is one that is familiar to anyone who has lived the past decade anywhere in the world in which a financial surge and decline has affected all. I recently read a book of short stories from Greece with similar themes. These are hyper realistic, hypnotic and recognizable situations that present us with a worldview, proving our lives are not that much different from those not next door.
July 17, 2021
*3,5 ⭐️ Danielle McLaughlin veröffentlicht ihre Geschichten seit vielen Jahren in namenhaften Zeitungen und gewann zahlreiche Preise für ihre Kurzgeschichten. „Dinosaurier auf anderen Planeten“ ist ihr Debüt und dieses hat es in sich! Die Erzählungen spielen alle in Irland und so wie die Landschaft aussieht, kann man sich die Geschichten vorstellen: Sie sind rau, kühl, beeindruckend, poetisch und reichen von einsam bis hoffnungslos. Sie erzählen von normalen Menschen, deren Umstände oder Entscheidungen sie an den Rand der Gesellschaft getrieben haben. Sie kämpfen jeden Tag gegen sich selbst und fühlen sich wie Ausgestoßene und sind es mitunter auch. Ich empfand die Geschichten allesamt als sehr bewegend, erschreckend und habe häufig länger über das Gelesene nachdenken müssen. Erwähnenswert ist auf jeden Fall der großartige Schreibstil der Autorin! Sie erschafft so viele unvergleichliche sprachliche Bilder und beschreibt Nebenhandlungen oder Naturereignisse, die sich auf den geistigen oder körperlichen Gesundheitszustand der Charaktere beziehen lassen. Schon allein deswegen lohnt sich ein Blick ins Buch!
Was ich mir jedoch gewünscht hätte, wäre eine größere Varianz in den Erzählungen. Der „Ton“ der Geschichten ist fast immer der gleiche und das Leseerlebnis dadurch recht einseitig. Mir persönlich waren die Kurzgeschichten auch zum Teil zu brutal und ich weiß auch nicht, warum in fast jeder Geschichte Tiere leiden mussten 🙈
Was ich mir jedoch gewünscht hätte, wäre eine größere Varianz in den Erzählungen. Der „Ton“ der Geschichten ist fast immer der gleiche und das Leseerlebnis dadurch recht einseitig. Mir persönlich waren die Kurzgeschichten auch zum Teil zu brutal und ich weiß auch nicht, warum in fast jeder Geschichte Tiere leiden mussten 🙈
March 12, 2021
„Dinosaurier auf anderen Planeten“ von Danielle McLaughlin ist eine Kurzgeschichtensammlung, die für den Leser definitiv einiges bereit hält. Die verschiedensten Geschichten überraschen jede für sich in ihrer Einfachheit und doch auch immer mit der nötigen Wortkraft, um etwas bleibendes zu hinterlassen. Das ist ein ganz wichtiger Aspekt, der mir wirklich gut gefallen hat! Was ich aber auch sagen muss, mich konnte das Buch nicht gänzlich überzeugen. Manche Dialoge wirkten für mich persönlich irgendwie belanglos und ich hatte das Gefühl, immer wenn ich gerade dem Lesesog nahe war, wurde ich auch schon wieder rausgeschmissen und das machte es mitunter auch ein bisschen mühsam... Nichtsdestotrotz werden viele, die gerne Kurzgeschichten lesen sicher großen Gefallen an diesem Buch finden und ist literarisch gesehen für ein Debüt schon mal ein guter Start!
November 30, 2020
A dark edgy story collection, set in Ireland. Many are about failed relationships and people trying to find happiness in troubled times. The writing is excellent.
April 9, 2021
No dinosaurs or other planets, these stories are rooted in the everyday strains and stresses of family life, often disrupted by the arrival of a stranger or distant cousin. They are beautifully judged and leave space for the reader to fill in gaps and bring their own experiences and ideas. A debut but very accomplished- mature - bringing to mind William Trevor. Irish, of course.
May 13, 2019
Hemingway said once about the writing of a short story: “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more that they understood.” The stories in this collection are constructed like that. They often stop at the moment of uncertainty. I could feel the time paused, the image created. But there was no resolution as in life. And that gives a unique space for the reader to be in - not so much to make your own ending, but to participate in the moment, burdened with possibilities.
I enjoyed all stories which is rare for a collection. But if i would need to single one, it has to be “The smell of dead flowers.” This is the only one in the book which has got some kind of resolution. Butshe constructed a brilliant set of characters. It seems, they are coming from a 19th century novel. A woman in her late 40s reminded me Mrs Faversham. She has got a mentally disabled daughter in her late teens. The narrator, a girl fresh in Dublin from a farm, arrives to lodge with the woman. And there is another lodger, a permanent (it seems) student of philosophy at Trinity college. And the story takes us from there.
All the stories are realistic. The majority of them are set in modern Ireland. They left me with the thirst for more. I can see why the author was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize this year. I think she is in the process of writing a novel now. But i would wish for more short stories by her.
I enjoyed all stories which is rare for a collection. But if i would need to single one, it has to be “The smell of dead flowers.” This is the only one in the book which has got some kind of resolution. Butshe constructed a brilliant set of characters. It seems, they are coming from a 19th century novel. A woman in her late 40s reminded me Mrs Faversham. She has got a mentally disabled daughter in her late teens. The narrator, a girl fresh in Dublin from a farm, arrives to lodge with the woman. And there is another lodger, a permanent (it seems) student of philosophy at Trinity college. And the story takes us from there.
All the stories are realistic. The majority of them are set in modern Ireland. They left me with the thirst for more. I can see why the author was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize this year. I think she is in the process of writing a novel now. But i would wish for more short stories by her.
March 24, 2021
These stories are pure perfection. They have everything I think a good short story should have: lots of tension, often something ominous, a little bit off, and you know something is going to happen you just don’t know what. There is not a word too much, everything is relevant and will come back, often only in the last paragraph when everything becomes clear. The atmosphere and nature descriptions are also beautiful and make me want to go on holidays on the Irish coast. I read the e-book, but really want to have a hard copy to re-read them whenever I want. A very clear 5 stars.
March 17, 2021
TW: Tierquälerei/Gewalt gegen Tiere, Suizidversuch, tödlicher Autounfall
"Wer sonst nur Romane liest, wird diesen Kurzgeschichten verfallen:" - BOOKLIST
Dieser Satz auf dem Cover hat mich überzeugt, es mit diesem Buch mal zu probieren, nachdem ich bisher leider sehr selten etwas mit Kurzgeschichten anfangen konnte. Und nach dem Lesen kann ich ihm - zumindest was mich selbst angeht - nur zustimmen!
Trotz der wenigen Seiten, die jede Geschichte umfasst (meist zwischen 20 und 30 Seiten), fühlte es sich bei jeder einzelnen an wie ein ganzer Roman. Danielle McLaughlin schafft es, die Leser*innen sofort in den Bann zu ziehen und die Schicksale verschiedenster Protagonist*innen vor ihnen aufzurollen. Dabei fesselt sie sie mit einem ganz besonderen Schreibstil, der mich sehr beeindruckt hat (z.B. "aus seiner Armbeuge ausquartiert", S. 145). In diesem Zusammenhang natürlich auch ein Lob an die Übersetzerin Silvia Morawetz!
In diesem Buch ist bestimmt für jeden etwas dabei; es geht um Menschen verschiedenster Altersgruppen und Konstellationen: vom Kind über den Teenager bis zu Erwachsenen und Senioren, homosexuelle Menschen, kranke Menschen und Menschen mit Behinderung sind alle vertreten.
Dabei spielt in fast jeder Geschichte das Meer eine Rolle und die Landschaft wird sehr atmosphärisch und die Menschen sehr lebensecht und in allen Facetten beschrieben.
Das einzige Problem, das ich inhaltlich hatte und auch für andere sehe, sind die häufigen ebenfalls in sehr vielen Geschichten aufgegriffenen Momente von Gewalt gegen Tiere, die ich sowohl einzeln als auch in ihrer Gesamtheit als recht makaber empfand. Ich habe mich gefragt, wie die Autorin wohl auf solch tierquälende Gedanken kommt ... in einem Thriller hätte ich es erwartet, hier hingegen habe ich nicht immer eine sich dahinter verborgene Aussage finden können.
Ansonsten allerdings hatte ich bei jeder Geschichte mindestens einen, wenn nicht gar mehr Interpretationsansätze, die mir viel Spaß gemacht haben. Vermutlich eignet sich das Buch auch gut für eine Leserunde.
Danke an das Bloggerportal und den Luchterhand Verlag für dieses Rezensionsexemplar!
"Wer sonst nur Romane liest, wird diesen Kurzgeschichten verfallen:" - BOOKLIST
Dieser Satz auf dem Cover hat mich überzeugt, es mit diesem Buch mal zu probieren, nachdem ich bisher leider sehr selten etwas mit Kurzgeschichten anfangen konnte. Und nach dem Lesen kann ich ihm - zumindest was mich selbst angeht - nur zustimmen!
Trotz der wenigen Seiten, die jede Geschichte umfasst (meist zwischen 20 und 30 Seiten), fühlte es sich bei jeder einzelnen an wie ein ganzer Roman. Danielle McLaughlin schafft es, die Leser*innen sofort in den Bann zu ziehen und die Schicksale verschiedenster Protagonist*innen vor ihnen aufzurollen. Dabei fesselt sie sie mit einem ganz besonderen Schreibstil, der mich sehr beeindruckt hat (z.B. "aus seiner Armbeuge ausquartiert", S. 145). In diesem Zusammenhang natürlich auch ein Lob an die Übersetzerin Silvia Morawetz!
In diesem Buch ist bestimmt für jeden etwas dabei; es geht um Menschen verschiedenster Altersgruppen und Konstellationen: vom Kind über den Teenager bis zu Erwachsenen und Senioren, homosexuelle Menschen, kranke Menschen und Menschen mit Behinderung sind alle vertreten.
Dabei spielt in fast jeder Geschichte das Meer eine Rolle und die Landschaft wird sehr atmosphärisch und die Menschen sehr lebensecht und in allen Facetten beschrieben.
Das einzige Problem, das ich inhaltlich hatte und auch für andere sehe, sind die häufigen ebenfalls in sehr vielen Geschichten aufgegriffenen Momente von Gewalt gegen Tiere, die ich sowohl einzeln als auch in ihrer Gesamtheit als recht makaber empfand. Ich habe mich gefragt, wie die Autorin wohl auf solch tierquälende Gedanken kommt ... in einem Thriller hätte ich es erwartet, hier hingegen habe ich nicht immer eine sich dahinter verborgene Aussage finden können.
Ansonsten allerdings hatte ich bei jeder Geschichte mindestens einen, wenn nicht gar mehr Interpretationsansätze, die mir viel Spaß gemacht haben. Vermutlich eignet sich das Buch auch gut für eine Leserunde.
Danke an das Bloggerportal und den Luchterhand Verlag für dieses Rezensionsexemplar!
September 19, 2016
Have been on the lookout for some short story collections to get into, and I was tempted by this one as the cover and title intrigued me!
This is a collection of short stories and not of the happy variety! They are beautifully written and feature a host of different problems faced by families. My problem with this book was that it was more miss than hit for me with how the stories captured my imagination and interest.
The best was definitely saved til last, and a couple of the others were captivating too but I found a lot of the others didn't really move me.
This is a collection of short stories and not of the happy variety! They are beautifully written and feature a host of different problems faced by families. My problem with this book was that it was more miss than hit for me with how the stories captured my imagination and interest.
The best was definitely saved til last, and a couple of the others were captivating too but I found a lot of the others didn't really move me.
November 9, 2018
Velmi divne poviedky. Divne v pozitivnom zmysle. Urcite vyzaduju re-reading a trpezliveho citatela. Nie je to citanie pre kazdeho.
April 13, 2022
McLaughlin is a good writer, but it just wasn't the right time to read a series of depressing stories with all the bad things going on in the world. I read the last couple while lying in bed with Covid.
The stories are all, bar one, set in Ireland after the financial crash in 2008. Unexpected poverty and unemployment is only one of the factors in these stories of people struggling to be parents, dysfunctional relationships that are falling apart, casual cruelty and lack of communication. Most of them end without any resolution or hope of a better life.
The stories are all, bar one, set in Ireland after the financial crash in 2008. Unexpected poverty and unemployment is only one of the factors in these stories of people struggling to be parents, dysfunctional relationships that are falling apart, casual cruelty and lack of communication. Most of them end without any resolution or hope of a better life.
May 31, 2016
Build Your Own Story
This is one of the oddest collections of stories I have read in some time. Not odd in the playful or fantastic sense implied by the title, which is just part of the conversation of a man making friends with a young boy. All but one of the eleven stories are set in Ireland, in the countryside of the Dublin suburbs, the characters live more or less normal middle-class lives (though sometimes on the fringes), and their concerns are the usual ones of parenthood, marriage, relationships. No, what makes them odd is that, for all but a very few of them, you have to search for the story. Within a very few lines, McLaughlin will have you involved with some very believable characters in very real situations. She does not tell you everything, but you want to find out all you can. Then suddenly the story ends, without any real climax or denouement, leaving you to wonder, "Now what was that all about?"
As an example, consider "Not Oleanders," the only story not set in Ireland. An Irishwoman named Lily travels south on a train through Italy, and gets into conversation with a younger woman, an Austrian graduate student called Etta, who lends her a book. They reach their destination and part. Lily travels further to the mountain guest-house where she will be staying, explains to the proprietor that her companion, Sandra, is sick and will be unable to come. A day or so later, she goes back to the town to return the book to Etta, but after a brief conversation returns to her inn. The story ends with a beautiful but unconnected scene of horses being gathered in for the night, and then abruptly stops. What was it about? On reflection, I think its most important feature is something we hear about only in passing, the relationship between Lily and her missing companion. Who is this Sandra: a friend, a sister, or perhaps a lover? It is pretty clear that the sickness is an excuse, so what happened between them? How does this reflect Lily's relationship with Etta and vice-versa? But the author gives no answers. It is a fascinating exercise in Build Your Own Story.
Or again, in the first and probably the most unusual piece, "The Art of Foot Binding," a mother is having the usual trouble with a rebellious teen daughter, and having to face the girl's teacher while the father is pretty much out of the picture. It seems a normal situation, except for the fact that the story is intercut with excerpts from a Chinese manual on foot binding—grotesque instructions on how the parent should break, infect, and essentially destroy the child's feet, heedless of her screams—leaving the reader to work out whether there is not some analogy here, and if the "normal" mother-daughter relationship is normal after all.
None of the other stories need to use such a device to set the reader thinking. Most of them use other clues to raise questions. Couples living in isolated or dilapidated houses. Adults with no apparent means of support. People with a troubled past we can only conjecture. Affectless sex. Even though most of the marriages show the couples still together, the relationships are what I would describe as pre-dysfunctional., with one partner was carrying 90% of the load. Generally this is the woman, but there is one story, "Along the Heron-Studded River," which neatly reversed the pattern. Here it is the husband who maintains with difficulty a business job in the town, while his wife and daughter carry on a precarious existence in their isolated house in the country. It becomes clear that the wife is disturbed—though we never learn how extensively or why, any more than we do in the several other stories that feature disturbed or problematic children. The strange combination of functionality and disturbance is possibly the most recurrent feature of McLaughlin's writing.
These are not for readers allergic to loose ends—only one of the eleven stories ends with anything like an Event—but I found them enticing rather than off-putting. After three or four similarly enigmatic stories, I was addicted, reading more and more in the hope of finding the one key that would unlock the mystery of all the others. I never did find it, but I did get a very good sense of McLaughlin's method and atmosphere. That was more than enough for the ride, though I am not quite at five stars, because I found myself quickly forgetting the details. But there is no story writer quite like Danielle McLaughlin, and that's saying something.
This is one of the oddest collections of stories I have read in some time. Not odd in the playful or fantastic sense implied by the title, which is just part of the conversation of a man making friends with a young boy. All but one of the eleven stories are set in Ireland, in the countryside of the Dublin suburbs, the characters live more or less normal middle-class lives (though sometimes on the fringes), and their concerns are the usual ones of parenthood, marriage, relationships. No, what makes them odd is that, for all but a very few of them, you have to search for the story. Within a very few lines, McLaughlin will have you involved with some very believable characters in very real situations. She does not tell you everything, but you want to find out all you can. Then suddenly the story ends, without any real climax or denouement, leaving you to wonder, "Now what was that all about?"
As an example, consider "Not Oleanders," the only story not set in Ireland. An Irishwoman named Lily travels south on a train through Italy, and gets into conversation with a younger woman, an Austrian graduate student called Etta, who lends her a book. They reach their destination and part. Lily travels further to the mountain guest-house where she will be staying, explains to the proprietor that her companion, Sandra, is sick and will be unable to come. A day or so later, she goes back to the town to return the book to Etta, but after a brief conversation returns to her inn. The story ends with a beautiful but unconnected scene of horses being gathered in for the night, and then abruptly stops. What was it about? On reflection, I think its most important feature is something we hear about only in passing, the relationship between Lily and her missing companion. Who is this Sandra: a friend, a sister, or perhaps a lover? It is pretty clear that the sickness is an excuse, so what happened between them? How does this reflect Lily's relationship with Etta and vice-versa? But the author gives no answers. It is a fascinating exercise in Build Your Own Story.
Or again, in the first and probably the most unusual piece, "The Art of Foot Binding," a mother is having the usual trouble with a rebellious teen daughter, and having to face the girl's teacher while the father is pretty much out of the picture. It seems a normal situation, except for the fact that the story is intercut with excerpts from a Chinese manual on foot binding—grotesque instructions on how the parent should break, infect, and essentially destroy the child's feet, heedless of her screams—leaving the reader to work out whether there is not some analogy here, and if the "normal" mother-daughter relationship is normal after all.
None of the other stories need to use such a device to set the reader thinking. Most of them use other clues to raise questions. Couples living in isolated or dilapidated houses. Adults with no apparent means of support. People with a troubled past we can only conjecture. Affectless sex. Even though most of the marriages show the couples still together, the relationships are what I would describe as pre-dysfunctional., with one partner was carrying 90% of the load. Generally this is the woman, but there is one story, "Along the Heron-Studded River," which neatly reversed the pattern. Here it is the husband who maintains with difficulty a business job in the town, while his wife and daughter carry on a precarious existence in their isolated house in the country. It becomes clear that the wife is disturbed—though we never learn how extensively or why, any more than we do in the several other stories that feature disturbed or problematic children. The strange combination of functionality and disturbance is possibly the most recurrent feature of McLaughlin's writing.
These are not for readers allergic to loose ends—only one of the eleven stories ends with anything like an Event—but I found them enticing rather than off-putting. After three or four similarly enigmatic stories, I was addicted, reading more and more in the hope of finding the one key that would unlock the mystery of all the others. I never did find it, but I did get a very good sense of McLaughlin's method and atmosphere. That was more than enough for the ride, though I am not quite at five stars, because I found myself quickly forgetting the details. But there is no story writer quite like Danielle McLaughlin, and that's saying something.
February 11, 2018
This short story collection isn’t quite what I was expecting. It contains no dinosaurs or other planets, but it does contain realistic stories about characters whose lives have gone slightly off-course.
These are iceberg stories. You only see brief snippets of the characters’ lives, but you know that a lot is happening under the surface. Most things are left unsaid. The characters bury their feelings and don’t find it easy to express their thoughts. This isn’t a collection that a reader can race through. You have to pause after each story and think about it to really understand its meaning.
There’s nothing explicitly sad about the stories, but they all have a heavy, melancholy tone. The characters are on the cusp of major changes in their lives. The reader gets the sense that the characters are holding their breaths, waiting to see which way life shoves them next. There’s an equal chance of things getting dramatically better or dramatically worse.
Danielle McLaughlin’s writing is beautiful. These stories are very well-observed. The author definitely understands human behavior and how subtle actions can sometimes say more than words.
I love the setting. Most of the stories take place in rural Ireland. I’ve never been to Ireland, but the author makes it easy to get a sense of the landscape and the people.
My only complaint about this collection is that some of the stories are too quiet for me. Compared to most short stories, these are quite long. Since they’re long and slow, it sometimes feels like nothing is happening.
Still, I like the tone of the collection and the complex characters. I have to be vague about my favorite stories because they’re too easy to spoil. They don’t have tons of action or unexpected plot twists. Here they are:
TL;DR: If you like quiet, highly realistic short stories, this is a must-read.
These are iceberg stories. You only see brief snippets of the characters’ lives, but you know that a lot is happening under the surface. Most things are left unsaid. The characters bury their feelings and don’t find it easy to express their thoughts. This isn’t a collection that a reader can race through. You have to pause after each story and think about it to really understand its meaning.
There’s nothing explicitly sad about the stories, but they all have a heavy, melancholy tone. The characters are on the cusp of major changes in their lives. The reader gets the sense that the characters are holding their breaths, waiting to see which way life shoves them next. There’s an equal chance of things getting dramatically better or dramatically worse.
Danielle McLaughlin’s writing is beautiful. These stories are very well-observed. The author definitely understands human behavior and how subtle actions can sometimes say more than words.
I love the setting. Most of the stories take place in rural Ireland. I’ve never been to Ireland, but the author makes it easy to get a sense of the landscape and the people.
My only complaint about this collection is that some of the stories are too quiet for me. Compared to most short stories, these are quite long. Since they’re long and slow, it sometimes feels like nothing is happening.
Still, I like the tone of the collection and the complex characters. I have to be vague about my favorite stories because they’re too easy to spoil. They don’t have tons of action or unexpected plot twists. Here they are:
In “The Art of Foot-binding,” a rebellious teenage girl comes home with an unusual school assignment. When the girl’s mother confronts the teacher, she learns that her daughter may know more about her parents’ failing marriage than the mother cares to admit.
“Along the Heron-Studded River” takes place in a rural area. A husband commutes to the city for work every day, but he lives in terror that his wife will harm their young daughter while he’s gone.
One of my favorite-favorite stories is “Night of the Silver Fox.” A young truck driver develops an interest in the strong-minded daughter of a fur farmer. He’s devastated to learn that she’s resorting to desperate measures to keep her father’s failing farm from going bankrupt.“‘It’s what they’re bred for,’ she said, turning away, ‘they don’t know any different.’” – Dinosaurs on Other Planets
“Not Oleanders” is the only story that doesn’t take place in Ireland. After a breakup with her lover, Lily travels to Italy alone. To stave off loneliness, she tracks down a fellow tourist who she met on a train, but the encounter doesn’t go as planned.“Life, after all, was mostly the art of salvage.” – Dinosaurs on Other Planets
My other favorite-favorite is the title story, “Dinosaurs on Other Planets.” This one is about dying relationships. A grandmother wants to be involved in the life of her grandson, but she worries that all he’ll remember from his visit to her house is the sheep skull that he found in a field. (And misidentified as a dinosaur skull.)
TL;DR: If you like quiet, highly realistic short stories, this is a must-read.
March 8, 2016
More like 2.5. This book unfortunately does not feature either dinosaurs or other planets, but it is a well-written collection of literary short stories. These stories are not happy ones. These stories are of families with problems. My favourite is the first story of the bunch The Art of Foot-Binding, following a teenage daughter's strange behaviour that arises from the problems between her parents. All About Alice is another one of my favourites, which follows middle-aged Alice who has the house to herself after her father goes on holiday. I could really feel Alice's regret at doing the thing she did that made her move back in with her father and it's wonderfully claustrophobic and tense, as is the nail-biting Along the Heron-Studded River, which has all the ingredients to be a thriller in its own right. Unfortunately as the book progresses everything becomes very sameish. At least throw in one happy family! In Not Oleanders, the only story not set in Ireland, I initially became excited because of the change of scenery, but it's probably the most dull story of the bunch.
February 26, 2016
On the back cover of my copy of Dinosaurs On Other Planets, there’s a blurb from Anne Enright, the first Irish fiction laureate. It is to the effect that this collection does not (as debut collections are often said to do) “mark the arrival” of a fresh and exciting new voice; that voice–McLaughlin’s voice–is already here. She’s landed; all this collection is doing is announcing her presence.
It certainly doesn’t have any of the wobbles or uncertainties that can mar debut story collections. I’m not a short story kind of girl; things I can’t sink my teeth into tend to bore me, and I cavalierly dismiss stories as being in this category. McLaughlin’s stories are different. They’re sort of like contemporary Flannery O’Connor if you stripped out the religion and replaced it with something very difficult to identify: maybe the clarity of despair, maybe just the lifelong act of putting one foot in front of the other.
Read the rest of the review here: https://ellethinks.wordpress.com/2016...
It certainly doesn’t have any of the wobbles or uncertainties that can mar debut story collections. I’m not a short story kind of girl; things I can’t sink my teeth into tend to bore me, and I cavalierly dismiss stories as being in this category. McLaughlin’s stories are different. They’re sort of like contemporary Flannery O’Connor if you stripped out the religion and replaced it with something very difficult to identify: maybe the clarity of despair, maybe just the lifelong act of putting one foot in front of the other.
Read the rest of the review here: https://ellethinks.wordpress.com/2016...
March 5, 2017
Danielle McLaughlin writes characters and atmosphere really well. Her writing in general is very nice, at times lovely. I just found every story, though clearly different, to still feel the same. I was left feeling cold and empty. A couple of stories I did not finish as they were just too miserable. I'm not keen on misery stories, especially over and over. This collection is covered in an air of impending doom. My favourite story of the collection was 'Along the Heron-studded River'. I want a whole novel on these characters! I would definitely read any other work by McLaughlin. It's just a shame that, for me, the best aspect of this book is its cover and its title. Two quotes that stood out to me that I loved were:
"She was good looking in a raw, violent way" (A Different Country)
&
"Life, after all, was mostly the art of salvage" (Not Oleander)
"She was good looking in a raw, violent way" (A Different Country)
&
"Life, after all, was mostly the art of salvage" (Not Oleander)
April 2, 2016
Lots of dead animals and killer endings. The dead animals include seals (shot), bluebottle flies (smashed) and ducks (unknown), among others. Some endings are quiet, some are brutal, only one is clearly happy. There's also plenty of extra marital affairs (both attempted and carried out) and strange creepy children. My favorite stories were "The Smell of Dead Flowers" (that ending!) and "Dinosaurs on Other Planets" (that skull in the bucket full of bleach!). "The Art of Foot Binding" was good too (it made me not want to have kids). All in all, yet another solid collection of contemporary short fiction from Ireland (what the heck are they putting in the water over there?! It's like there's one brilliant writer after another comin' out with a jealousy-inducing book of short fiction!).
March 18, 2020
I certainly do not mind the stories that I read to be drenched in misery, but there is a point where if things feel too haphazard that I will be disillusioned with a book. This is a good example of that- while I liked the ideas in some of the stories, I wish they had been more detailed and that I could have had the chance to genuinely connect with the characters. They all felt very separate from everything else and the way that this was written didn’t help with that. It just felt like something was missing here, and I didn’t find any of them to hold much meaning for me either. Back to my sci-fi anthologies, I suppose.
November 1, 2021
This Irish author has a captivating style, rightly compared to William Trevor and Alice Munro, and in my opinion, also like Elizabeth McCracken (minus the humor). These short stories expose the bristly messiness of life, the dangerous unforced errors, the lurking treachery, and the sinking feeling that we're missing something vitally important about our fate while we're busy looking in the wrong direction.
December 11, 2015
I enjoyed this but it's so sad. These are beautifully told stories but each one is a study of frustration and disappointment. She's a talented author and a master of the short study. There's something very Irish about her focus on life's defeats. Still a compelling collection.
February 24, 2018
Danielle McLaughlin's debut short story collection, "Dinosaurs On Other Planets" is emotionally powerful, deeply insightful and written with a deft touch that is compelling without being intrusive.
It's taken me a little over two months to read the eleven stories in this collection because each one demands a period of reflection before moving on to the next. Each has its own flavour that I found I wanted to savour by itself for a while.
This is one of those rare collections where all the stories a strong, so I've reviewed them all in the order that they appear on the table of contents, rather than trying to pick favourites.
The Art Of Footbinding
This is a quietly disturbing story that leaves the reader to arrive at an understanding of the meaning of the story or. perhaps, just to see clearly the people in the story.
We are presented with a woman trying to hold on to a husband she is fearful of losing and struggling to assert authority over an increasingly contemptuous and unhappy teenage daughter. Descriptions of the art of footbinding, that read as if they are from a very old Chinese handbook for footbinders, are placed between the unfolding events. That the daughter then starts to bind her own feet, allegedly as part of a homework assignment, links the two streams of text.
I like the words that are left unsaid and the relationships and meanings that are left implicit in this story. The effect is to make the story more truthful and more compelling.
I was left to consider what I thought about the things women are willing to do or are made to or push their daughters into doing in order not to be abandoned.
I wasn't told what to think. I was invited to consider. I liked that. It's something a short story is uniquely positioned to do.
Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate
I've been told that, if you break a hologram into pieces, each shard will contain the entire image. "Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate" seems to me to be a hologram shard. It's not really a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's an immersion into the experience of a man at a public event in a small town where everyone knows what he's done and who he is and holds him in contempt for it. We don't need to be told what the thing is or was because everyone knows it and accepts it.
In a few short pages, watching the world from inside the head of this untrusted, hard-drinking, adulterous man, I felt I knew not just him, but the people around him and social gravity that keeps them orbiting around one another. The main character IS the narrative. The story is about being not doing.
All About Alice
Alice has a past but what she wants is a future, she just isn't sure how to get there from here.
The story opens with a wonderful image that captures Alice's mood and her situation, living in her father's house, dragged down by the weight of her past and unable to reach the future she can see but can't touch:
"August was heavy with dying blubottles. They gathered in velvety-blue droves on the window panes and beat their gauzy wings against the glass. They squatted black and languid along the sills."
As we follow Alice through a week free from her father's presence we find that Alice
"wanted to leave her life like a balloon leaves a fairground. To slip from life’s sweaty hand and float away."
yet her past life sticks to her not because she holds on to it but because everyone in the village keeps it fixed in place. At one point, Alice meets her friend, Marian and we find that
"Marian, like everybody else in this town, really did know all about Alice."
Eventually, Alice comes to the realization that
"there was no bolt to slide across her past. The past was an open door and the best that could be done was to hurry by on the corridor."
and that, at forty-five, it may already be too late for her to do more than beat her wings against the glass.
Along the Heron-studded River
This is a delicate tale, indirectly told but clearly drawn, about living with someone loved but broken. When I first listened to the husband, from whose point of view the tale is told, and I attributed to him many motives and actions and secrets that explained his behaviour and his wife's. I was wrong about all of them. Only when the simple truth of his situation became clear did I finally see the man himself, the hurt he had suffered and the love he continues to offer.
I understood then that he sees life as herron-studded river that we must swim in to be free, even though that makes us vulnerable to the sharp bills of the herrons looming over us.
Night of the Silver Fox
This story reminded me strongly of the quiet desperation of H.E. Bates' stories. Like the caged silver foxes of the story, all the characters are trapped so that I felt invited to believer
"It’s what they’re bred for,’ she said, turning away, ‘they don’t know any different."
The story is soaked in a solution of defeat, duplicity and sexual tension that sucks at the characters, dragging them towards another round of bad choices.
The story is told from the point of view of a young man in his first job after school, still trying to get a grip on his place in the world. My attention (and his of course) was captured by the smart, determined young woman trapped on her father's dying farm, doing what she thinks needs to be done to survive.
Not Oleanders
This is the story of Lily, a woman in her forties who has displaced herself so that she is not at the centre of her own life. She is living with a loss of meaning, carried along a path she didn’t choose, by a relationship she no longer inhabits. It captures perfectly the gentle confusion and embarrassment that comes from knowing oneself well without gaining power or purpose from the knowledge.
Our heroine, alone on a holiday in Italy that was meant to be with her long-term but now lost, lover, Sandra, impulsively tracks Etta, a chance-met young woman to a nearby town, thinking there is a connection between them.. It is instantly clear to her that she has misjudged. How might she explain this misjudgement, even to herself?
"Hope, she might have said, if she’d tried; the eternal triumph of hope over experience. That and the fact that, if she were honest, there was something about this young woman that reminded her of Sandra; she’d noticed it the minute Etta had settled into the seat opposite her on the train; not a recent Sandra, an earlier version."
For a moment she tries to save something from the encounter because
"Life, after all, was mostly the art of salvage. But Etta, her expression shifting in sudden recognition, was too young yet, too undamaged, to have learned this."
Lily, humiliated, retreats and tries
"to make the best of this place that Sandra had landed her in,"
Lily understands that humiliation is not so easily dismissed. She says:
"It would return, of course, as humiliations always did, it would wait for her in the long grass of memory.
In the final scene, when a small herd of horses that Lily had thought were focused on her, start to run towards a man behind her, who has come to feed them and who was the real object of their attention, Lily's response encapsulates her character and her relationship to life:
"And as they went by, she stepped back into the trees, to shelter from the clouds of yellow dust flung up by the chaos of their hooves."
Silhouette
This is a story of mothers and daughters: how they see each other, how they hurt each other and the love they can offer each other.
Aileen, in her forties, unmarried, living in England, recently made pregnant by a married colleague, returns to Cork to give her dying mother her news. Things turn out to be more complicated than that.
This story shows how hard it is to say what needs to be said to those we love. How even new life and near death can't free our tongues.
My favourite line describes Aileen, sitting with her frail mother, trying and failing to find a way to speak of her pregnant state and recognising both the connection between her and her mother and the deep crevasse it spans.
"They sat in silence for a while. At the end of the day, Aileen thought, this was all she and her mother could offer one another, the comfort of being frightened together."
A Different Country
This tale has the feeling of a nightmare to it, that sense of slowly sliding towards something that appals you but being unable to stop yourself.
We all know that the past is a foreign country but the past that those whom we can move beyond feeling foreign and distance and become something fundamental and immediate. Sarah, travelling from Dublin to the small fishing village her partner grew up in, discovers not just that Ireland has more divisions than between north and south but that she may not really know her partner at all.
There is no melodrama here, simply the shock that comes from discovering that values, so deeply held that they seemed not to need discussion, are not shared.
Here is the moment when Sarah realises this.
"All of the years he had lived in this place before he met her, all of the time they had been strangers to each other, unaware of the other’s existence, settled upon Sarah, heavy and impenetrable. She felt a small, quiet panic rise up. It was the panic of a swimmer who has drifted out, little by little, on a rogue current and who suddenly discovers herself to be far from shore. She had a sense of something slipping away from her; it was something she could not quite identify, but she could feel its ebbing none the less."
The Smell of Dead Flowers
This story of a young woman taking up lodging with her mother's oldest friend is both gritty and grimy. It feels like one of those 1960's "it's grim up North" English films that were shot in black and white and filled with noisy silences.
All of the characters seem flawed or trapped or both. The tragedy at the heart of the story feels corrupted or at least subverted by the sullied motives and emotions of the people watching it happen.
It is beautifully told, with sparse prose and muted emotions that nevertheless bring you back to a sharp clear image of a moment of playfulness that has many layers of meaning.
In the Act of Falling
This story is exactly what the title suggests. It catches a woman in that weightless moment when her present is slowly crumbling and she can do nothing to control the speed or direction of her fall.
The woman's dwindling sense of agency is beautifully described: a gradual crippling of the will brought on by a slow but irreversible extinction of hope. We never learn her name. She never uses it and no one calls her by it. It's as if she is already becoming the ghost of her former self.
The tug of gravity is present in many elements of the story: the house that that gone from dream opportunity to economic burden, the husband who no longer earns and seems to have lost traction on the world,, the strange son with obsessed with death and the End of Times. No one thing pushes the woman yet her fall has started and she has nothing to hang on to.
Dinosaurs On Other Planets
This is a tale filled with the sadness of decaying relationships and frustrated hopes. Kate, a woman in her fifties, finds herself at a point in her life where those she loves are moving away from here, pulled along paths that diverge from hers and which will leave here isolated and alone. Her husband, older than her by more than a than a decade, is withdrawing into himself. Her son lives in Japan, her daughter lives in London. Her grandson is almost a stranger to her.
The story is set in a weekend that brings daughter and grandson and an unexpected guest into Kate's house for a weekend. The proximity is made almost painful, despite the moments of connection, because it is clear that it is fleeting.
In only a few pages we get to know Kate, her now, her remembered past, and her imagined and already feared future and yet there remains always the possibility of change, of something not being what she expects it to be. Even so, there is only so much solace to be taken from the notion that there may still be dinosaurs on other planets.
It's taken me a little over two months to read the eleven stories in this collection because each one demands a period of reflection before moving on to the next. Each has its own flavour that I found I wanted to savour by itself for a while.
This is one of those rare collections where all the stories a strong, so I've reviewed them all in the order that they appear on the table of contents, rather than trying to pick favourites.
The Art Of Footbinding
This is a quietly disturbing story that leaves the reader to arrive at an understanding of the meaning of the story or. perhaps, just to see clearly the people in the story.
We are presented with a woman trying to hold on to a husband she is fearful of losing and struggling to assert authority over an increasingly contemptuous and unhappy teenage daughter. Descriptions of the art of footbinding, that read as if they are from a very old Chinese handbook for footbinders, are placed between the unfolding events. That the daughter then starts to bind her own feet, allegedly as part of a homework assignment, links the two streams of text.
I like the words that are left unsaid and the relationships and meanings that are left implicit in this story. The effect is to make the story more truthful and more compelling.
I was left to consider what I thought about the things women are willing to do or are made to or push their daughters into doing in order not to be abandoned.
I wasn't told what to think. I was invited to consider. I liked that. It's something a short story is uniquely positioned to do.
Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate
I've been told that, if you break a hologram into pieces, each shard will contain the entire image. "Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate" seems to me to be a hologram shard. It's not really a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's an immersion into the experience of a man at a public event in a small town where everyone knows what he's done and who he is and holds him in contempt for it. We don't need to be told what the thing is or was because everyone knows it and accepts it.
In a few short pages, watching the world from inside the head of this untrusted, hard-drinking, adulterous man, I felt I knew not just him, but the people around him and social gravity that keeps them orbiting around one another. The main character IS the narrative. The story is about being not doing.
All About Alice
Alice has a past but what she wants is a future, she just isn't sure how to get there from here.
The story opens with a wonderful image that captures Alice's mood and her situation, living in her father's house, dragged down by the weight of her past and unable to reach the future she can see but can't touch:
"August was heavy with dying blubottles. They gathered in velvety-blue droves on the window panes and beat their gauzy wings against the glass. They squatted black and languid along the sills."
As we follow Alice through a week free from her father's presence we find that Alice
"wanted to leave her life like a balloon leaves a fairground. To slip from life’s sweaty hand and float away."
yet her past life sticks to her not because she holds on to it but because everyone in the village keeps it fixed in place. At one point, Alice meets her friend, Marian and we find that
"Marian, like everybody else in this town, really did know all about Alice."
Eventually, Alice comes to the realization that
"there was no bolt to slide across her past. The past was an open door and the best that could be done was to hurry by on the corridor."
and that, at forty-five, it may already be too late for her to do more than beat her wings against the glass.
Along the Heron-studded River
This is a delicate tale, indirectly told but clearly drawn, about living with someone loved but broken. When I first listened to the husband, from whose point of view the tale is told, and I attributed to him many motives and actions and secrets that explained his behaviour and his wife's. I was wrong about all of them. Only when the simple truth of his situation became clear did I finally see the man himself, the hurt he had suffered and the love he continues to offer.
I understood then that he sees life as herron-studded river that we must swim in to be free, even though that makes us vulnerable to the sharp bills of the herrons looming over us.
Night of the Silver Fox
This story reminded me strongly of the quiet desperation of H.E. Bates' stories. Like the caged silver foxes of the story, all the characters are trapped so that I felt invited to believer
"It’s what they’re bred for,’ she said, turning away, ‘they don’t know any different."
The story is soaked in a solution of defeat, duplicity and sexual tension that sucks at the characters, dragging them towards another round of bad choices.
The story is told from the point of view of a young man in his first job after school, still trying to get a grip on his place in the world. My attention (and his of course) was captured by the smart, determined young woman trapped on her father's dying farm, doing what she thinks needs to be done to survive.
Not Oleanders
This is the story of Lily, a woman in her forties who has displaced herself so that she is not at the centre of her own life. She is living with a loss of meaning, carried along a path she didn’t choose, by a relationship she no longer inhabits. It captures perfectly the gentle confusion and embarrassment that comes from knowing oneself well without gaining power or purpose from the knowledge.
Our heroine, alone on a holiday in Italy that was meant to be with her long-term but now lost, lover, Sandra, impulsively tracks Etta, a chance-met young woman to a nearby town, thinking there is a connection between them.. It is instantly clear to her that she has misjudged. How might she explain this misjudgement, even to herself?
"Hope, she might have said, if she’d tried; the eternal triumph of hope over experience. That and the fact that, if she were honest, there was something about this young woman that reminded her of Sandra; she’d noticed it the minute Etta had settled into the seat opposite her on the train; not a recent Sandra, an earlier version."
For a moment she tries to save something from the encounter because
"Life, after all, was mostly the art of salvage. But Etta, her expression shifting in sudden recognition, was too young yet, too undamaged, to have learned this."
Lily, humiliated, retreats and tries
"to make the best of this place that Sandra had landed her in,"
Lily understands that humiliation is not so easily dismissed. She says:
"It would return, of course, as humiliations always did, it would wait for her in the long grass of memory.
In the final scene, when a small herd of horses that Lily had thought were focused on her, start to run towards a man behind her, who has come to feed them and who was the real object of their attention, Lily's response encapsulates her character and her relationship to life:
"And as they went by, she stepped back into the trees, to shelter from the clouds of yellow dust flung up by the chaos of their hooves."
Silhouette
This is a story of mothers and daughters: how they see each other, how they hurt each other and the love they can offer each other.
Aileen, in her forties, unmarried, living in England, recently made pregnant by a married colleague, returns to Cork to give her dying mother her news. Things turn out to be more complicated than that.
This story shows how hard it is to say what needs to be said to those we love. How even new life and near death can't free our tongues.
My favourite line describes Aileen, sitting with her frail mother, trying and failing to find a way to speak of her pregnant state and recognising both the connection between her and her mother and the deep crevasse it spans.
"They sat in silence for a while. At the end of the day, Aileen thought, this was all she and her mother could offer one another, the comfort of being frightened together."
A Different Country
This tale has the feeling of a nightmare to it, that sense of slowly sliding towards something that appals you but being unable to stop yourself.
We all know that the past is a foreign country but the past that those whom we can move beyond feeling foreign and distance and become something fundamental and immediate. Sarah, travelling from Dublin to the small fishing village her partner grew up in, discovers not just that Ireland has more divisions than between north and south but that she may not really know her partner at all.
There is no melodrama here, simply the shock that comes from discovering that values, so deeply held that they seemed not to need discussion, are not shared.
Here is the moment when Sarah realises this.
"All of the years he had lived in this place before he met her, all of the time they had been strangers to each other, unaware of the other’s existence, settled upon Sarah, heavy and impenetrable. She felt a small, quiet panic rise up. It was the panic of a swimmer who has drifted out, little by little, on a rogue current and who suddenly discovers herself to be far from shore. She had a sense of something slipping away from her; it was something she could not quite identify, but she could feel its ebbing none the less."
The Smell of Dead Flowers
This story of a young woman taking up lodging with her mother's oldest friend is both gritty and grimy. It feels like one of those 1960's "it's grim up North" English films that were shot in black and white and filled with noisy silences.
All of the characters seem flawed or trapped or both. The tragedy at the heart of the story feels corrupted or at least subverted by the sullied motives and emotions of the people watching it happen.
It is beautifully told, with sparse prose and muted emotions that nevertheless bring you back to a sharp clear image of a moment of playfulness that has many layers of meaning.
In the Act of Falling
This story is exactly what the title suggests. It catches a woman in that weightless moment when her present is slowly crumbling and she can do nothing to control the speed or direction of her fall.
The woman's dwindling sense of agency is beautifully described: a gradual crippling of the will brought on by a slow but irreversible extinction of hope. We never learn her name. She never uses it and no one calls her by it. It's as if she is already becoming the ghost of her former self.
The tug of gravity is present in many elements of the story: the house that that gone from dream opportunity to economic burden, the husband who no longer earns and seems to have lost traction on the world,, the strange son with obsessed with death and the End of Times. No one thing pushes the woman yet her fall has started and she has nothing to hang on to.
Dinosaurs On Other Planets
This is a tale filled with the sadness of decaying relationships and frustrated hopes. Kate, a woman in her fifties, finds herself at a point in her life where those she loves are moving away from here, pulled along paths that diverge from hers and which will leave here isolated and alone. Her husband, older than her by more than a than a decade, is withdrawing into himself. Her son lives in Japan, her daughter lives in London. Her grandson is almost a stranger to her.
The story is set in a weekend that brings daughter and grandson and an unexpected guest into Kate's house for a weekend. The proximity is made almost painful, despite the moments of connection, because it is clear that it is fleeting.
In only a few pages we get to know Kate, her now, her remembered past, and her imagined and already feared future and yet there remains always the possibility of change, of something not being what she expects it to be. Even so, there is only so much solace to be taken from the notion that there may still be dinosaurs on other planets.
March 11, 2018
This collection is very well-written. Every story is interesting and gripping, and sometimes even gets the slight feel of a thriller, a foreboding feeling of something about to happen. Most of these stories are about the small and intense world that is a family; the feelings, the (mis-)communications, the navigations in between and around each other, the tiny disasters that can seem big in that small world. I was interested in every story – not one of them seemed boring, and I loved the premise for most.
Yet there is something about this collection that nags me. There are actually two things. One I have mentioned before in a review of Light Box, another short story collection; I am not good with the lack of a resolution or a hint at the meaning. This is a personal opinion, so it shouldn’t talk you out of reading this collection (unless you feel the same as I do about meaning and resolution). I felt many of these stories had rather poetic endings, but almost none gave me an idea that this was the point of the story. Another thing was the amount of sexual relationships and tensions. In several stories, one character is, without any build-up, suddenly attracted to another character. And this is between two almost strangers lodging at a woman’s house, an alcoholic husband and the daughter of his friends at a birthday party, and a mother and her brand-new son-in-law that she just met. Not only is the one character attracted to the other (which, granted, is a common theme and not that strange), but the other, VERY unlikely partner, is also miraculously as attracted to that character, and this without them having had any substantial conversations or time together. To me, most of these relationships seemed to have no point at all, and the stories could have been told very well without them. That the relationships were then poorly executed, in that they seemed very unbelievable to me, was my biggest issue.
But! As first mentioned, a very well-written collection that does merit reading. I enjoyed that most of the stories were set in Ireland, as I have not read much that is!
/NK
Yet there is something about this collection that nags me. There are actually two things. One I have mentioned before in a review of Light Box, another short story collection; I am not good with the lack of a resolution or a hint at the meaning. This is a personal opinion, so it shouldn’t talk you out of reading this collection (unless you feel the same as I do about meaning and resolution). I felt many of these stories had rather poetic endings, but almost none gave me an idea that this was the point of the story. Another thing was the amount of sexual relationships and tensions. In several stories, one character is, without any build-up, suddenly attracted to another character. And this is between two almost strangers lodging at a woman’s house, an alcoholic husband and the daughter of his friends at a birthday party, and a mother and her brand-new son-in-law that she just met. Not only is the one character attracted to the other (which, granted, is a common theme and not that strange), but the other, VERY unlikely partner, is also miraculously as attracted to that character, and this without them having had any substantial conversations or time together. To me, most of these relationships seemed to have no point at all, and the stories could have been told very well without them. That the relationships were then poorly executed, in that they seemed very unbelievable to me, was my biggest issue.
But! As first mentioned, a very well-written collection that does merit reading. I enjoyed that most of the stories were set in Ireland, as I have not read much that is!
/NK
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February 26, 2021
Ich muss gestehen, dass ich abgesehen von T. C. Boyle und Ken Liu noch nicht allzu viel Kontakt mit Anthologien bzw. Kurzgeschichten hatte. Gerade im Fantasybereich würde mich das ja auch mal sehr reizen! 🤔
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Die letzten Wochen hat mich das optisch so unfassbar ansprechende Buch der irischen Autorin Danielle McLaughlin "Dinosaurier und andere Planeten" begleitet - wie schön ist bitte dieses Cover?! 😍
In ihrer Gesamtheit betrachtet ist diese Anthologie ein sehr kraftvolles Buch, das den Fokus darauf legt, wie sich Menschen in einem unsicheren, wenig Halt gebenden Umfeld entwickeln. Tiere erleiden - sofern sie in den 11 Geschichten vorkommen - ein oft tragisches Schicksal. Ähnlich sieht's mit den Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen aus, die meistens durch ein Versagen oder Wegbrechen der Mutterrolle geprägt sind (nicht wertend übrigens, sonst hätte ich dieses Buch nicht zuende gelesen).
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Erst auf den allerletzten Seiten löst sich das Mysterium um den zugegebenermaßen recht skurrilen Titel. Er nimmt Bezug auf die Geschichte eines kleinen Jungen, der vermutet, dass die Auslöschung der Dinosaurier auf unserer Erde nicht zwangsläufig bedeuten muss, dass es nicht noch Saurier auf anderen Planeten geben könne. Bezieht man diese kindliche Theorie auf die oft bitteren Schicksale der zuvor gelesenen Geschichten, erkennt man McLaughlins übergeordnete Botschaft: Auch, wenn wir in unserer eigenen begrenzten Existenz emotional zerstört sind, heißt das nicht, dass das Leben überall innehält. Selbst wenn wir in unmittelbarer Nähe zueinander leben, ja sogar dann, wenn wir uns mit jemandem in einer Beziehung befinden, bleibt unser Umfeld von unseren eigenen Dinosaurier-Meteoriten-Momenten oft erstaunlich unberührt. Eine zugegebenermaßen nicht sehr optimistische, aber dennoch sehr scharfsinnige Sicht auf die Frage, wie Menschen miteinander in Beziehung treten.
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Die letzten Wochen hat mich das optisch so unfassbar ansprechende Buch der irischen Autorin Danielle McLaughlin "Dinosaurier und andere Planeten" begleitet - wie schön ist bitte dieses Cover?! 😍
In ihrer Gesamtheit betrachtet ist diese Anthologie ein sehr kraftvolles Buch, das den Fokus darauf legt, wie sich Menschen in einem unsicheren, wenig Halt gebenden Umfeld entwickeln. Tiere erleiden - sofern sie in den 11 Geschichten vorkommen - ein oft tragisches Schicksal. Ähnlich sieht's mit den Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen aus, die meistens durch ein Versagen oder Wegbrechen der Mutterrolle geprägt sind (nicht wertend übrigens, sonst hätte ich dieses Buch nicht zuende gelesen).
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Erst auf den allerletzten Seiten löst sich das Mysterium um den zugegebenermaßen recht skurrilen Titel. Er nimmt Bezug auf die Geschichte eines kleinen Jungen, der vermutet, dass die Auslöschung der Dinosaurier auf unserer Erde nicht zwangsläufig bedeuten muss, dass es nicht noch Saurier auf anderen Planeten geben könne. Bezieht man diese kindliche Theorie auf die oft bitteren Schicksale der zuvor gelesenen Geschichten, erkennt man McLaughlins übergeordnete Botschaft: Auch, wenn wir in unserer eigenen begrenzten Existenz emotional zerstört sind, heißt das nicht, dass das Leben überall innehält. Selbst wenn wir in unmittelbarer Nähe zueinander leben, ja sogar dann, wenn wir uns mit jemandem in einer Beziehung befinden, bleibt unser Umfeld von unseren eigenen Dinosaurier-Meteoriten-Momenten oft erstaunlich unberührt. Eine zugegebenermaßen nicht sehr optimistische, aber dennoch sehr scharfsinnige Sicht auf die Frage, wie Menschen miteinander in Beziehung treten.
October 11, 2019
another short story win! these stories were pretty grim and some made me uncomfortable (which is kind of hard to do!) and i just loved them.
from a goodreads reviewer (Eric Anderson):
"It's not till the last part of this debut short story collection by author Danielle McLaughlin that you reach the title story. If you've read all the stories in order (as I did) then you'll already have a sense of the title's more complex meaning. It’s a phrase taken from a conversation in one story where a child speculates that if dinosaurs were made extinct after a meteor hit Earth there could still be dinosaurs on other planets. However, a more layered understanding of how this image’s meaning connects with human relationships comes from the interactions of the characters throughout all of the stories. They convey a sensation that, even if we are emotionally destroyed in our own circumscribed existence, other lives still carry on independently. There is a feeling running through many of these varied and skilfully-written tales that the existence of others happens at a far remove from you and your own internal reality. Even if we live in close proximity to each other and especially if we're in a relationship with someone, the bulk of these other lives remains distinct and private. McLaughlin subtly handles this by creating deeply immersive and compelling stories which show a keen sense of how people relate to each other."
i couldn't have said it better!
from a goodreads reviewer (Eric Anderson):
"It's not till the last part of this debut short story collection by author Danielle McLaughlin that you reach the title story. If you've read all the stories in order (as I did) then you'll already have a sense of the title's more complex meaning. It’s a phrase taken from a conversation in one story where a child speculates that if dinosaurs were made extinct after a meteor hit Earth there could still be dinosaurs on other planets. However, a more layered understanding of how this image’s meaning connects with human relationships comes from the interactions of the characters throughout all of the stories. They convey a sensation that, even if we are emotionally destroyed in our own circumscribed existence, other lives still carry on independently. There is a feeling running through many of these varied and skilfully-written tales that the existence of others happens at a far remove from you and your own internal reality. Even if we live in close proximity to each other and especially if we're in a relationship with someone, the bulk of these other lives remains distinct and private. McLaughlin subtly handles this by creating deeply immersive and compelling stories which show a keen sense of how people relate to each other."
i couldn't have said it better!
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