Evil Flowers

Starred review from November 14, 2022
In this charming and inventive collection, Øyehaug (Knots) plays with narrative conventions to dazzling effect, braiding jokes with earnest accounts of heartbreak. In “Birds,” an ornithologist loses all her memories of birds, jeopardizing her career but recapturing the joy she once found in bird-watching with her family. The four competing narratives of the “Thread” series place a lonely, elderly woman in a room with a hungry lion. In “Thread 2,” a Greek chorus intervenes, playfully urging the author to give the encounter a happy ending. In “Short Monster Analysis,” a woman wonders whether holding a 20-year grudge against a cruel lover makes her the monster in the story. And in the mysterious “By the Shack,” three women writers become trapped in a children’s book after a plane crash, where they live in a shack beneath stars that “click into place” in the sky. Charles Baudelaire, Inger Christensen, and Virginia Woolf are touchstones throughout, and in “Wish, Dream, Observation,” the narrator takes a crack at Henrik Ibsen’s constant presence in Norway, even when he is “not there.” Øyehaug often takes a postmodern swerve, highlighting how stories can be used to distance readers from their emotions but also to acknowledge and process them. This scintillating collection shouldn’t be missed.

December 15, 2022
A collection of 25 formally diverse, wide-ranging short and very short stories from the always surprising Norwegian author. In her fourth book to be translated into English, once more by Dickson--who handles its sly, fairy-tale-infused, theory-laced trickery with aplomb--�yehaug again displays her playfulness and attention to form, revealing the literary scaffolding and ropes that support the scenery of the often unstable narrative surface. Beginning the collection (with a truly memorable opening line) is "Birds," in which an ornithologist who has been preparing to defend her thesis loses the piece of her brain that contains all her knowledge of birds. She embarks on a quest to piece back together her ornithological expertise in time for her defense, though what she learns about who she is--or perhaps was--in the process is the more vital and wounding knowledge. In the title story, what begins as a tale about a made-up bus driver and made-up passenger progresses to the "real" story, in which the narrator has broken the sesamoid bones in their feet after, they realize, picking evil flowers ("Oh no, evil flowers, I whispered to myself as I lay there"), which they assure us are very real, though everything else is made up, and though Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, from which the title is taken, were a metaphor. This leads into a description of Etienne Carjat's famous photograph of Baudelaire and an extrapolation of how Baudelaire might feel about the title of his work being appropriated for such a story. "A Bit Like This" follows, a "story" that consists only of a copy of this photograph, showing Baudelaire looking as described and seemingly displeased with the proceedings, with no caption, credit, or text of any kind. Motifs, imagery, and forms pinball throughout the rest of the collection, making a messily cohesive whole tied together by anxieties, absurdities, and death--but in a fun way. A fresh slice of �yehaug's work, ideal for seekers of spry experimental short fiction.

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January 1, 2023
�yehaug (Present Tense Machine, 2022) stuns with this delightful, refreshing, read-in-one-sitting short story collection that's sure to be unlike anything else you'll pick up this year. �yehaug surprises the reader with every word, using various forms and narrative structures and impressing with each. The stories are especially self-referential, and while each work can stand on its own, it is also part of a whole, creating a cohesive and wonderfully odd collection. "The Thread" and its related stories are particularly stirring, as the author uses intentional language to create a "thread" connecting each piece. Other stories showcase �yehaug's poetic talents; at just one page, ""Seconds"" tells a tale that some novels don't accomplish. Simply put, �yehaug continues to excite, and fans of her previous works--particularly Knots (2017), her earlier collection of short fiction--will find this thread an exciting one to follow.

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