Short story collection review

Dark Paradise

By Rosa Liksom

Published by Dalkey Archive Press

Sophie Lewis is shocked, and then awed, by a collection of grim, unpredictable stories.

I think it’s fair to say that the darkness in this strange, compulsive collection of stories far outweighs the moments of paradise. In fact, I nearly stopped reading after the first story: I was simply frozen with shock. Who needs bereavement, isolation, nakedness, bloody violence and smashed mirrors, all in two swift pages, to lull them to sleep at night? But I soon changed my mind. Liksom gains interest and subtlety with every succeeding page.

The stories really are short – most no longer than four or five pages – and entirely unpredictable. They are untitled, and you don’t miss the familiar trickery or referencing tool that titles can become. The protagonists are tough: a woman who serves a life-sentence in jail despite being innocent of any crime, then leaves for a new life of respectable criminality; a man who asserts his right to exercise his obsessive-compulsive desire for absolute cleanliness and ends up with his father visiting in complete surgeon’s protective clothing and his wife happily married to him while living in another town, avoiding the contamination of co-habitation; a son who cares for his adored mother until her death, and then beyond…

Liksom handles rhythm like no one else I’ve read. The stories do carry twists but they creep up on you, more in the manner that you might discover an entirely new landscape round a familiar corner of your street than in the traditional, sting-in-the-tail way. A woman goes out drinking hoping to bag a husband. She sees a guy with only a small beergut, thinks he’s the one and next week they’re married. Her reasoning is that at least she’ll be warm in bed at night and since it’s winter there’s not much else to do with her spare time.

Our narrator’s wry, charming voice carries us through this lunacy at a steady pace, without a pause or break even when she gets to the murder. We end up thinking paradoxically: here’s a girl I’d like to be friends with, and simultaneously thanking our stars we don’t live in her world.

It seems that everything begins and ends with Liksom’s world, which is very different from our own. Her childhood in Lapland, herding reindeer with her parents – who inherited the trade from their distant ancestors – is one of her most important influences. I imagined little Rosa in her far-northern world thinking up stories in the long, solidly dark winter and perhaps writing them down through wild, sunlit nights in the summer.

In fact, ‘Rosa Liksom’ is a pseudonym for this multi-talented writer and performer who now lives in Helsinki, where she writes for children and adults as well as drawing her own cartoon strips and creating art shows. From the safety of her assumed identity, Liksom presents us with a naked world, a bare expose of everyday horror and love in a cold land. This is only the second of her books to appear in English; I would love to read more.

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Translator: David McDuff