Zolitude

by Paige Cooper

Paige Cooper’s short stories catalogue moments in love. These are stories about women who built time machines when they were nine, or who predict cataclysm, or who think their dreams are reality. They include police horses with talons and giant eagles and weredeer. At the center of it all is love. And if love is the problem, what is the solution? Being closer? Or being alone?

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Collections, Adult Fiction, Contemporary

248 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

My parents still live in a Soviet suburb halfway between here and the sea: Zolitude, where last year a roof collapsed and killed forty shoppers as they weighed their options for dinner.

Zolitude is a fairly slim volume of fourteen short stories, but still, it takes some time to get through this book. Author Paige Cooper doesn't give anything away for free, and readers are rewarded for their patience: while most of these tales focus on love and relationships (in often surprising ways), they all have complex and unclear structures, often confusing until the last few sentences. The stories are set in strange cities (or on a strange planet) far away, sometimes involve an alt-history or a post-crash future, and more than once, I was surprised to discover stories in which fantastical creatures just happen to roam our earth. This is high level, interesting writing, and at their cores, these stories have a kernel of keen observation about human relationships. I can see that Cooper's style might be an acquired taste (and, indeed, I had trouble understanding a few of these stories myself), but for the most part, this collection suited me just fine.

The first story, Zolitude, so impressed me that I hoped the entire book would be filled with such gems. I liked the confusion of not knowing where the story was set (eventually figuring out it is in Latvia), I liked the emotional pull of the lesbian main character, and I kept marking passages that intrigued me with their language:

• The devils in these nightmares are toothed whales, white and black and also just white, in water so cold it's blue with its own light. They seize our ankles with their sawteeth and whirlpool us down the nightling league to the river bottom. They hold us there.

• Everyone starves for the love of men, even men themselves.

• The vendors stay open all night, even through the grave-bottom of winter.

And then the second story, Spiderhole, was completely different; with a hyper-masculine male main character; an alcoholic war vet who leads us to a fascinating place that puts a new twist on true history:

Dusty sheathes himself in khaki against the sun and wind, kisses his wife and her girl, and drives inland on one red, day-long shot of road. On the second morning, he passes over the Annamites, his bike roaring in second up the grade, gravel hawking off the hairpins into the blue-black, the dipterocarp sea, the pit he's climbing out of. The road is empty except for potholes and a single, starved Honda driven by a kid in a dirty t-shirt, hunting rifle slashed across his shoulders. No animal life – it's been devoured. On his right, over the scarp, the mountains are imbricate rows of corroded teeth. The place is a national park now, all of it. Protected. From who? It blows his fucking mind.

(This is the opening passage and by now I knew to Google “the Annamites” to figure out where we were, and looked up “dipterocarp” and “imbricate” while I was at it.) Loved everything about that story, and also the third, Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan, and its look at the relationship between a female entertainment lawyer and the DJ she's promoting (and the female DJ's abusive ex). Again, I was intrigued by Cooper's style of description:

The sun on Irene is green-gold through the leaves. Her freckles look like worry scattered under deep-socketed, apologetic eyes. She could be a sickish art-gallery clerk, undiagnosable without health care; or some court sorceress tasked with sitting awake all night to keep the cats and night hags off a happier woman's baby. I love Irene. It's a side effect of looking at her.

There are some weird sciencey stories (Thanatos features both experimental surgeries and time travel; Record of Working is in a strange future, searching for new power sources; Pre-Occupants shows us the first couples sent to terraform Mars), and there are some stories that start off in normal places and take some weird twists (The Emperor, Moriah, and The Roar all feature mythical beasts), and another story, Retirement (about the post-sports life of an Olympic gold medal skiier) is set entirely in our world and is a credible insight into how that transition would be a struggle. I don't know that I entirely understood The Tin Luck, I was a little underwhelmed by both Slave Craton (about an obsessively in love park ranger who warns of a big earthquake) and Vazova on Love (about an affair between spies), but I was thoroughly entranced by La Folie and its tale of an alternative present in which parents can send one of their children into indentured servitude for the benefit of another of their children:

The water is lax. The sky opens up in mounds of mauve and saffron. The boat's engine churns against crowds of little wavelets. They pass lush clumps of greenery, possibly tethered, possibly roving. Audrey puts her hands under her shirt. Her belly is hot. Her hands are numb as a stranger's. The island is its own horizon of foliage clouds. The dawn behind shades it into shapes. This boat is a rescue boat. The sun exists. She can see it. She squints against it. She is the one being rescued, now, finally.

Even when confusing, I always found the writing in Zolitude to be intriguing and I am delighted that its inclusion on the Giller Prize's longlist for this year prompted me to pick it up; I ultimately found this collection to be much more interesting than some of the titles that made it to the shortlist, but who am I to judge?

[Penny (Literary Hoarders)]

I don't know how to rate these. When I originally saw this collection publicized I determined it wouldn't be anything I would enjoy. On Monday, Zolitude was longlisted for the Giller Prize. The library had the collection available, so I thought I would give them a try.

As I previously determined, this collection wasn't anything I enjoyed. I felt like I was muddling around in them, confused and found them difficult to get through. When stories started out with sentences like this: I thought the key prerequisite would be our psychological capacity to drink each other's filtered urine.
no, I'm sorry, they simply weren't something I could settle into and enjoy.

This would be the second book I've read from the 2018 Longlisted titles. I've already read Vi I'm now going to start reading the second short story collection longlisted - Something for Everyone. I have a feeling these stories may be more along the lines of something I will connect more with.

[Michelle]

DNF at page 89.

These stories are honestly just going right over my head. The first few hooked me with the writing style and the touches of surrealism, but otherwise, I don't get them.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Finished: 10.10.2018
Genre: short stories
Rating: F
#CanBookChallenge
Conclusion:
Longlisted Giller Prize 2018
but every story was a struggle.
Here is why.

Review

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paige Cooper demolishes the prejudicial line between “genre” and “literary” fiction. The stories in Zolitude are dense, rich, and wildly intelligent. This is not a bedtime book (trust me), not only because of the often chilling plotlines, but because you won’t want to miss a single detail of Cooper’s intricately crafted stories lest you discover, too late, that the women you’re reading about have become animals (or that they always were). I spent a long time lingering over the ARC I received from Biblioasis. It was well worth it.

Cooper’s stories cover a wide range of subjects, and she fully immerses herself in each. You’ll find a deeply detailed plan for the quotidian details of colonizing other planets in “Pre-Occupants.” “La Folie” upends stereotypes with the story of a white woman who’d been sold into slavery for the benefit of her sister and the lengths she’ll then go to in order to save that sister. And “Thanatos” takes us to the limits (I hope, though I’m not that dumb) of medical science with the stitching together of two bodies to form one (improved?) whole. There are also vampires, tortured (and torturing) geniuses, and a librarian.

All of these wild stories are wrapped in perfectly wrought and unusual images like “her hair is a trash tide over her head” and “he deletes truth like weather deletes history, imperfectly” paired with spot-on maxims like “it’s not heroism to crawl into someone’s grave with them.” The writing is sometimes sexy, always intelligent and intensely weird (in all the best ways) and it pushed me to be a better writer.

I’ll admit I got lost in the density of Cooper’s pages. I liked it.

[Beau · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a collection of fourteen short stories about life, loss, sex, loneliness, and other themes. The stories are usually set in some obscure, dystopian, timeless place and sometimes have fantastical elements like time machines or giant mythological birds (although such things are not prominent). The stories are very ambitious and wide-ranging. I found two or three of them to be excellent, but I had no patience with the rest. The writer likes to obscure the usual elements of plot, narrative, and structure, leaving the reader often in a cloud of confusion. You're bombarded with intense and beautiful imagery and emotion, but you're left wondering what the hell is going on in some of these stories. Sometimes you can piece everything together, but I didn't find doing so a pleasant experience. I simply find it hard to understand why an author won't just come out and tell the reader who is who and what is what. I don't enjoy being introduced to five characters on the first page without even knowing their gender or relationships to each other. I found the best stories to be La Folie, Pre-Occupants, and Retirement, all of which were perfectly understandable. The book is certainly original and I can understand if people like it a lot.

[Orla Hegarty · Rating 2 out of 5]

These stories left me feeling very unsophisticated. I hate when that happens. I just didn't get most (any?) of them and was frankly quite lost during a few. I enjoyed her descriptive style which kept me at it. I kept feeling that each story should have a novel flushed out beyond them.

The cover blurb says all of these stories are connected by the theme of love. Harrumph - I guess I was just too unsophisticated to see this. Perhaps an english literature degree might help me see their brilliance and not my little ole math and engineering degrees (which did help me digest the strange sci-fi elements no doubt).

In the last decade or so of reading I have pushed beyond my comfort zone many times. None of my goodreads friends have read this - I chose it because it was a Giller nominee this year and one of the female authors on the list. Maybe I would enjoy a fully fledged novel by this author? I think I might and I hope her Giller nomination has helped secure her a contract for a novel.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was exhausting. Each story felt like a purposefully convoluted creative writing exercise.

The fun part about dystopian novels is being confronted with a weird "reality" that you need to figure out -- the world-building. This novel just resets again somewhere new each time.

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavy slow book. Lots of meticulously detailed speculative-fiction elements to populate strange worlds the stories are set in, but the stories by and large staying well within the orbit of “two people in (or out of) love.” Cooper’s adroit play with verbs keeps the dense and long paragraphs readable, though slips sometimes into literariness that distracts (sometimes the world or the character wouldn’t need to be characterized that intelligently, or would be better served with a more familiar thematically cogent bit of play). Lots of sex, strange creatures and horrifying prospects, and no dip in quality over the many tightly packed stories. The biggest trouble I have with the book is those aforementioned literary-most turns, and often the endings fall prey to that MFA-voice too (“overwrite it to prove you can”), but those aren’t so conspicuous and numerous that they actually ruin anything. My only other nitpicky complaint is I wish sometimes the highly imaginative and dire looming worlds were in the foreground, which would maybe give Cooper’s heroes room to breathe, turn their brains off a few minutes and to tell a different scale of story, or to situate the heroes somewhere else in the scale (the notable exception in the story Moriah, which showcases my fav of the winged pulp monsters of yesteryear: The Roc). My favourite stories in the collection are the title piece, The Emperor, and Pre-Occupants. Can’t wait to read what Cooper does next.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review forthcoming!

[verbamatic · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one, for me, was kind of like reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for the first time: I did not understand everything, but I could not stop reading for the beauty of the language. There is also the raw, striking style that really woke me up. Often, the book seemed to slap me in the face as I finished a story. I had to take breaks. This brought me out of a long reader’s block slog. Actually, the novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor had the same effect on me when I read it last year (and loved it!). This is an example of art that is unsettling, scary, uncomfortable and extremely powerful. It is not feel-good, heartwarming, or simple. It is bizarre, odd and beautiful. I am actually glad some of these stories went over my head; this means that I will discover more and more meaning with each reread. You definitely have to be in a particular mood for this to hit just right: for me it was a perfect match.

[Michaela Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this collection are bizarre in the best way possible. Paige Cooper is phenomenal at inviting readers into unique, obscure worlds that are complex and fully fleshed just within a handful of pages. I loved how complicated all the characters were.

This is a collection I took my time with, as I often felt like I had to sit and reflect on the stories after I finished reading them. There were a couple stories, like "Spiderhole" in particular, that didn't hook me in as well as the others, so I found them quite slow. However, all the rest made up for that. Some of my favourites included the namesake "Zolitude", "Moriah", "La Folie", and "Vazova on Love". Through all the beautiful strangeness, I was happy to be along for the ride as a reader.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars

My brain is still sizzling from this unerasable reading experience. With each story (which, as advised by the Quill & Quire cover blurb, you might need to take a break after each one), Cooper creates worlds that are simultaneously jarring and seductive, minutely detailed and disturbingly vague. The more unusual or ominous the setting, somehow the more resonant the emotional effects are after the reader recovers from the overt or, even more powerful, the threatened violence.

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too much work, and not worth a tenth of the work, which is coming from a person who actually read all of Finnegans Wake. The part I liked best about the book, was watching it go up in flames in my campfire. The curling of the lit pages as they disappeared into oblivion. Very satisfying.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, let me say that I respect how Paige Cooper weaves many genres together in this collection, from literary fiction, to sci-fi, to thriller; I enjoy the versatility. There were some stories that I absolutely loved, including "Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan" and "Moriah", which brought up compelling commentaries about violence against women. I quite liked the unique "Retirement", which focused on former Olympian, Evan, who is desperately clinging on to his glory days, while pining for his pregnant step-sister. I found other stories like "La Folie", "Spiderhole" and "Zolitude" to be enjoyable as well, with a wide array of perspectives and settings.

There were a few things I enjoyed less. Cooper's writing style randomly introduces new characters and situations throughout the stories without giving context, making the reader have to figure out what is happening. I get that it may create suspense/ mystery, but I find all the guesswork really took away from the storytelling, of being invested in the plot. Although the short story format offers readers less time with the characters, I found some of the characters to be dully written and flat, making me not really care about what happens ultimately. I may be biased because I am not really a sci-fi fan, but some of the sci-fi stories went on too long about technical terms that I found hard to follow, and I understand that perhaps that is common in the genre, but I found it rather uninteresting.

Finally, while some important social issues were brought up, such as gendered violence and class inequalities, I find many of these stories were not timely, and even tone-deaf. The first eponymous story "Zolitude" has a queer main character, but that is the only instance of queer representation. The only non-white characters were those that lived in small Asian villages, and they were represented largely through the white American gaze. For example, "La Folie" takes place in Vietnam, but there is no mention of Vietnamese people. The main character, Audrey, frequently mentions people speaking French, and refers to some locals as "Not speaking English or French", rather than saying "Vietnamese". This story literally takes place in an Asian country, but erases Asian people. I just find this comes off as ignorant. While "Zolitude" had some interesting and entertaining moments, I did not care for this book.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in Paige Cooper’s surprising and unsettling debut collection are boldly inventive, cryptic, eerie, and challenging. Reading these stories is a bit like watching the approach of a distant object as it comes slowly into focus, or staring at an abstract-impressionist painting and experiencing the revelatory moment when a haphazard arrangement of blobs, splotches and squiggles offers up its meaning. After reading these stories, however, one could be excused for suspecting that the author is not particularly concerned with meaning, or focus either, and certainly not with anything so boring as message or theme. What seems to matter most in these pages is the act of writing/reading as risk-taking and discovery. These are stories that openly defy narrative convention and thumb their nose at reader expectation. Each story seems to venture farther out on the limb than the one that precedes it. These are courageous and elusive fictions that challenge us to put aside our misgivings and follow their lead, forget about what we already know and give ourselves over to something unapologetically strange and baffling. Though it’s certainly true that bizarre, disorienting fiction is not exactly revolutionary, rarely do we encounter a writer who renders their off-kilter personal vision with such clarity and poise. Cooper’s astounding verbal fluency and uncanny powers of description are given prominent display on every page. Nothing in the book seems tossed off or slack. Her prose is mature, sophisticated and visually precise, her stories tightly constructed with sentences that have heft and depth. It is no exaggeration to say that Zolitude is one of the more auspicious literary debuts in recent memory, disturbing and memorable in the manner of Kerry Lee Powell’s mind-blowing stories in Willem De Kooning’s Paintbrush and Andrew F. Sullivan’s outrageous novel Waste . Adventurous readers with a hankering for something off-beat will find their craving more than satisfied.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 1/2 stars, but unevenly distributed.

Ahh huh. Well. So. There were words, that's for sure.

Like many short story collections this is a mix. Spiderhole and La Folie got me - they got right into the heads of damaged ex-pats and established comprehensible speculative worlds that left me wanting more. Cooper is a very interesting prose writer - most English verbs are represented somewhere here - but with a lot of these stories, the prose is a jungle and you have a butter knife instead of a machete, and you have no idea what is actually going on.

For the record, despite how Goodreads categorizes them, this is not the Paige Cooper who writes dragon porn, and I'm 90% sure none of these stories contain dragon porn, but again, I was never quite sure what was going on, so I'll leave open the possibility.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. Usually with a book of short stories, even if you don't love it, there are one or two decent stories that you can take away. I gave up on this book about halfway through. I hated every story I read - some I just didn't like, some were just a mess with no plot or other redeeming qualities. According to my ebook count, I managed to make it 54% of the way through, or just after "Tin Luck." I thought I'd soldier on until the end, then I realized that I hadn't liked any of the stories that I'd read so far, and after a few attempts, I couldn't make any headway with the next story, "Record of Working," so I gave it up as a bad job. There are too many books out there and not enough time to force yourself to read something from which you're getting absolutely nothing.

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and jagged stories about people who are sort of out of sync - some are spies lost in the game, others work at remote hunting lodges or on foreign planets. They are trying to get by and they are - if only just.

Cooper’s prose has a distinctive rhythm and feel, and sort of reminds me of Renata Adler a little bit, but less fragmented. Her stories have a similar mood, one of longing and a detached sort of sexuality. People screw and lust, but it almost feels like they’re going through the motions and don’t quite believe what they’re doing anymore.

It’s a pretty remarkable collection by a debut author, and I’m curious to see if Cooper can sustain the feelings and ambience of these stories for a whole novel. I hope she can.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm really not sure what to say about these short stories. Paige Cooper certainly writes some amazingly beautiful and well-crafted sentences, and creates some unique and thought-provoking descriptions. But I must confess that by the end of all but one or two of the stories I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on or what they were about. Was she telling a story, describing a few frames from a longer movie, or merely creating a sensation? Most often, I came to the end of a story with the feeling of having been in certain space at a certain time but not knowing why I'd been taken there. Am I likely to read anything else by her? I'm afraid not.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense and demanding set of stories about social and environmental landscapes similar to but not the same as ours. At its best, this book captures the power of erotic human connection in a senseless world; Cooper is a skilled absurdist in this way. Don't expected to be guided by hand into any of these tales - I was often disoriented and sometimes just plain checked out. I respected this collection more than I enjoyed it.

[James Junke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author uses a vivid imagination and rigorous research of subject matter to create gripping but bleak, humourless settings. Narrative approach seems scatter gun, causing disorientation and discomfort, and lack of cohesion. Relationships are largely loveless, reduced to transactional sex, crudely described. Borders on juvenile. All this seems deliberate, but I had no idea. Clearly talented, needs to lighten up.

[Paige]

Cop on a griffin but its not about that.

Good stories but dont read them all at once! People on this site seem to misunderstand the new wave of "vibes fantasy literature," you're not missing anything enjoy the ride for what it is. An uneven entry into the canon but still enjoyed a lot of these especially the ones w/ Beasts.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book just isn't my style. Not only because of the short stories - I do prefer a longer narrative - but the style of writing feels thicker and harder to follow than the recent books I have enjoyed.

[Besha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Raymond Carver with lusher prose: everyone seems unpleasant and vaguely unhappy. I did like the Elizabeth Holmes parody, though.

This ebook also suffered from random paragraphs in bold that made it even harder to read.

[Mitchell MacLeod · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few of the short stories in this collection were a little undercooked and hard to follow. However, a few of the stories were truly excellent. Record of Working and Pre-Occupants were my faves. I'll certainly seek out more of Cooper's work in the future.

[Margarita · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a challenging collection of stories. Cooper writes with a vagueness I find difficult to immerse myself into – It feels like walking in a fog, barely able to see an inch in front of you no matter how you turn. The writing itself is vivid with use of deliberate and assertive language.

[Shan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It just wasn't for me.

[Michele · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish

[Jamie Strachan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seemed interesting but I ultimately found the first two stories impenetrable so didn't finish.