Book Review: Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, trans. Stephen Snyder

[juushika]

Title: Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Published: New York: Picador, 2013 (1998)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 162
Total Page Count: 132,080
Text Number: 387
Read Because: recommended by vaga42bond, borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Eleven interconnecting short stories of carrots shaped like human hands, a heart which grows outside the chest, and suddenly, violently jealous lovers weave a beautiful but ill-constructed web. Ogawa's voice inspires adjectives: delicate, cold, macabre. Something unsettling runs through this collection, a horrific magical realism that vacillates between brutal and subtle; at its best it's discomforting and emotionally resonant: an uncommon horror rooted in the most banal of human evils. But each story is told in first person without the slightest change in voice, rendering Ogawa's style repetitive and erasing the narrator's characters. The stories are interconnected, but the connections are blatant and purposeless, sundering the flow of a given story to nod towards another without adding much meaning to the collection as a whole. Revenge seems self-aware, acknowledging both its achievements and failures but making no move to correct the latter; there's not quite enough subtlety or substance, here. I admire certain parts and the overall intent, and it may encourage me to seek out more of Ogawa's work, but I don't recommend the book itself.

The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again.
—Revenge, 148

Review posted here on Amazon.com.