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Mere Chances
Mere Chances collects some of Veronika Simoniti's most singular and strange stories. A linguistic experimentalist in the tradition of Julio Cortazar, Simoniti populates her tales with homeless and nomadic characters struggling to fashion or to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders. Whether compelled to communicate in codes not their own or grappling with the loss of language itself, her characters’ struggles to forge stable identities point to the way human language, while fundamental to the formation of the self, is often an unreliable and imperfect tool.
136 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2018
24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 28, 2018
What a great discovery! For a short collection of stories, Simoniti sure packs a lot in. Covering a wide array of characters, places and themes, there is still some sort of connection between all of the different stories. None of the words are wasted or thrown in to show off, the reader cares about the characters because Simoniti cares about these characters and commits to them. Tone varies, too. There is humourous farce in the historically fictitious trading places of astronomer William Herschel and George III (Comet Hunting) but weightier subject matter can be found in the excavation of burial sites in Bosnia, naming forgotten victims of genocide (Olivija and later, in Sixty Percent). None of the stories were too out of place and none were particularly skippable either.
March 30, 2021
Translated by Nada Grošelj.
A collection of singular and strange stories about characters struggling to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders.
The themes of the stories in Mere Chances where very interesting as they cover belonging, identity, and the difficulties in making yourself heard in a new place. However, the actual plots of a lot of the stories aren’t as compelling as their themes. It’s like a lot of them are trying to be bigger and more important than they are, with surprises that don’t feel earned and characters that aren’t developed enough. Obviously, short stories don’t have the same space to give characters a full backstory but a good short story can give you a good characterisation to be interested in, even in just a few pages.
There are a few stories that are truly great and powerful. “Portugal” is about a young woman with a terminal illness who decides to make the trip she’s always wanted to before having to deal with the reality of her health. The escapism is great as she makes her way to her destination, talking to locals and letting her thoughts wander.
A couple of the stories are about the war in the Balkans and trying to find where the bodies in the mass graves belong to return them to their families. Those stories are like a shock to the system after the stories that are bland and unaffecting.
Mere Chances is a short story collection that has a lot of good ideas and themes but unfortunately the majority of the stories don’t have good enough characters and plot to make them more than interesting in theory.
A collection of singular and strange stories about characters struggling to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders.
The themes of the stories in Mere Chances where very interesting as they cover belonging, identity, and the difficulties in making yourself heard in a new place. However, the actual plots of a lot of the stories aren’t as compelling as their themes. It’s like a lot of them are trying to be bigger and more important than they are, with surprises that don’t feel earned and characters that aren’t developed enough. Obviously, short stories don’t have the same space to give characters a full backstory but a good short story can give you a good characterisation to be interested in, even in just a few pages.
There are a few stories that are truly great and powerful. “Portugal” is about a young woman with a terminal illness who decides to make the trip she’s always wanted to before having to deal with the reality of her health. The escapism is great as she makes her way to her destination, talking to locals and letting her thoughts wander.
A couple of the stories are about the war in the Balkans and trying to find where the bodies in the mass graves belong to return them to their families. Those stories are like a shock to the system after the stories that are bland and unaffecting.
Mere Chances is a short story collection that has a lot of good ideas and themes but unfortunately the majority of the stories don’t have good enough characters and plot to make them more than interesting in theory.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews