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ngfs92's reviews
313 reviews
At the River's Mouth: Stories of Aarhus by International Writers by Therese Helga Emborg, Nikolaj Volgushev, Wendy Garnier, Stephen Joyce, Nora Malhearst, Edurne Urrestarazu, Mathilde Hoeg, Michael Barrett, Matthew Travers
4.0
AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH is, above all else, a loving tribute to Denmark’s second largest city Aarhus (pronounced oar-huus), a charming university city densely packed with old buildings, modern architecture, small circular roads, and sea wind, where everything is no more than a 20 minutes walk.
I confess first my bias: I am third generation American, descended from a Danish farmer. To reconnect with my roots, I studied Danish at university and studied abroad for a year in Aarhus. This was several years ago, but I return again and again to visit friends and familiar streets. Because of who I am, AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH becomes a deeply personal reading experience, one I wish I could have contributed a story to despite my temporary residence.
For many foreigners, even ones like myself who can stake a claim to Danish-ness, community in Denmark often feels like a finite resource. Danes keep to themselves and their small social circles. Many of them are still friends with the people they met in Kindergarten, and anyone under 50 in Denmark likely speaks exceptionally good English (I once dated a Danish guy with a flawless American accent, which was uncanny) and so the Danish language, another means to connect, becomes a withheld commodity as the Danes often switch to English before you even open your mouth. Nevertheless, though you might feel like wind eroding stone in doing so, making Danish friends and finding a community in Denmark is worth the time.
AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH is both a short story collection and a community. Written collaboratively by international authors living in Aarhus, the collection’s greatest success is that the individual short stories are all interconnected. While not apparent until the last short story, “The Race” where Aarhus’ annual half-marathon retraces the sites of characters of the previous stories. Often I feel cheated by stories where meaning is only found in the second reading/viewing – after all, why should I have to put in twice the effort for the same reward? AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH however invites this re-reading, which provides an additional layer of meaning and understanding to stories which stand well on their own.
Structurally, the collection’s interconnectedness becomes a metaphor of its own for the ways community is created, out of perseverance, chance, and longing. The protagonist of “Between the Red Bricks” finds solace in her loneliness, yet she appears in nearly every other story and challenges the other protagonists’ perceptions of self and place. There is, in every story, a sense of catharsis for outsiders looking in.
Overall AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH is an excellent short story collection, a cup of warm tea for the heart that longs for Aarhus, and in broader strokes for the soul-searcher in terra incognita. I hope to see this collection expand, both for the stories and as ways to invite and build community.
I confess first my bias: I am third generation American, descended from a Danish farmer. To reconnect with my roots, I studied Danish at university and studied abroad for a year in Aarhus. This was several years ago, but I return again and again to visit friends and familiar streets. Because of who I am, AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH becomes a deeply personal reading experience, one I wish I could have contributed a story to despite my temporary residence.
For many foreigners, even ones like myself who can stake a claim to Danish-ness, community in Denmark often feels like a finite resource. Danes keep to themselves and their small social circles. Many of them are still friends with the people they met in Kindergarten, and anyone under 50 in Denmark likely speaks exceptionally good English (I once dated a Danish guy with a flawless American accent, which was uncanny) and so the Danish language, another means to connect, becomes a withheld commodity as the Danes often switch to English before you even open your mouth. Nevertheless, though you might feel like wind eroding stone in doing so, making Danish friends and finding a community in Denmark is worth the time.
AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH is both a short story collection and a community. Written collaboratively by international authors living in Aarhus, the collection’s greatest success is that the individual short stories are all interconnected. While not apparent until the last short story, “The Race” where Aarhus’ annual half-marathon retraces the sites of characters of the previous stories. Often I feel cheated by stories where meaning is only found in the second reading/viewing – after all, why should I have to put in twice the effort for the same reward? AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH however invites this re-reading, which provides an additional layer of meaning and understanding to stories which stand well on their own.
Structurally, the collection’s interconnectedness becomes a metaphor of its own for the ways community is created, out of perseverance, chance, and longing. The protagonist of “Between the Red Bricks” finds solace in her loneliness, yet she appears in nearly every other story and challenges the other protagonists’ perceptions of self and place. There is, in every story, a sense of catharsis for outsiders looking in.
Overall AT THE RIVER’S MOUTH is an excellent short story collection, a cup of warm tea for the heart that longs for Aarhus, and in broader strokes for the soul-searcher in terra incognita. I hope to see this collection expand, both for the stories and as ways to invite and build community.
Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
5.0
One of my favorite genres to read is modern retellings of folklore and fairy tales – not necessarily “The Little Mermaid” set in 2018, but ancient stories retold and reimagined through a contemporary lens. I’m also partial to fantasy, and protagonists who separate themselves from the flock with their cooking. As such, when I read the synopsis of REDEMPTION IN INDIGO, a retelling of a Senegalese folk tale where the heroine cooks with the Chaos Stick, a magical focus that controls chance, I was sold.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is not just a wonderful story on its own, the novel is rather a series of stories through which the heroine Paama moves through and returns to. Yet if Paama is the red thread that holds together these stories, Lord’s narrator, as the tailor, deserves a great deal of praise for weaving together a beautiful fiction.
The narrator tells Paama’s stories as if we the audience sit across from them, alongside many others, at a bonfire or at a speaking event. The novel begins with the narrator discussing a comment made by one of their rivals, read at first as if Lord wrote a preface to reveal her intentions writing REDEMPTION IN INDIGO. Yet the story takes shape at the bottom of the same page, with the same narrator setting the stage and outlining the cast. Lord/the Narrator paints the novel with beautiful sentences, with more focus on evoking emotional responses than imitating tactile sensations (though again Lord succeeds often). In one instance, the downtrodden poet Alton, unknowingly in the company of the Trickster, suddenly wakes up magically transformed into a wealthy, successful version of himself. The Trickster seizes the situation: "He lacked the puppeteer's power of his indigo counterpart, but he had something equally effective--the trickster's knack, which was now turned to the benign task of fooling Alton into believing in himself." There is something beautiful in the simplicity that Lord/the Narrator casually describes the moment in which a person finds strength and faith in themselves, at the same time inverting the trope that tricksters are malevolent or hindrances by their nature.
Throughout the novel, the narrator includes many of their own asides, in which they respond to the audience’s reaction to a character’s action or an event. REDEMPTION IN INDIGO’s narrator transforms the novel into a self-aware fiction that mediates the terms of its own reading. At the end the narrator highlights that many of the characters were not as “three-dimensional” or “believable” as some would want – and that is the point, that if a reader finds too much of themselves in one character, they lose sight of the parts of themselves they could recognize in another character such as the villain. Ultimately, the narrator argues, the fiction is neither a riddle to be solved nor a substitute from living life, the fiction is inspiration and allowed its own mystery.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is a beautiful self-aware novel that utilizes its medium to overcome and compensate for the potential shortfalls of written fiction. The narrator encourages the reader to ease up, both as reader and as a person, in order to open themselves to the full possibilities of the novel, and to the infinite magic of chance.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is not just a wonderful story on its own, the novel is rather a series of stories through which the heroine Paama moves through and returns to. Yet if Paama is the red thread that holds together these stories, Lord’s narrator, as the tailor, deserves a great deal of praise for weaving together a beautiful fiction.
The narrator tells Paama’s stories as if we the audience sit across from them, alongside many others, at a bonfire or at a speaking event. The novel begins with the narrator discussing a comment made by one of their rivals, read at first as if Lord wrote a preface to reveal her intentions writing REDEMPTION IN INDIGO. Yet the story takes shape at the bottom of the same page, with the same narrator setting the stage and outlining the cast. Lord/the Narrator paints the novel with beautiful sentences, with more focus on evoking emotional responses than imitating tactile sensations (though again Lord succeeds often). In one instance, the downtrodden poet Alton, unknowingly in the company of the Trickster, suddenly wakes up magically transformed into a wealthy, successful version of himself. The Trickster seizes the situation: "He lacked the puppeteer's power of his indigo counterpart, but he had something equally effective--the trickster's knack, which was now turned to the benign task of fooling Alton into believing in himself." There is something beautiful in the simplicity that Lord/the Narrator casually describes the moment in which a person finds strength and faith in themselves, at the same time inverting the trope that tricksters are malevolent or hindrances by their nature.
Throughout the novel, the narrator includes many of their own asides, in which they respond to the audience’s reaction to a character’s action or an event. REDEMPTION IN INDIGO’s narrator transforms the novel into a self-aware fiction that mediates the terms of its own reading. At the end the narrator highlights that many of the characters were not as “three-dimensional” or “believable” as some would want – and that is the point, that if a reader finds too much of themselves in one character, they lose sight of the parts of themselves they could recognize in another character such as the villain. Ultimately, the narrator argues, the fiction is neither a riddle to be solved nor a substitute from living life, the fiction is inspiration and allowed its own mystery.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is a beautiful self-aware novel that utilizes its medium to overcome and compensate for the potential shortfalls of written fiction. The narrator encourages the reader to ease up, both as reader and as a person, in order to open themselves to the full possibilities of the novel, and to the infinite magic of chance.