Reading Recluse📘 "Small Comfort" by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish into English by Kira Josefsson
This title was released earlier this month. I received a digital ARC for it from the publisher (thanks!).
Some days I can shift my focus from the burden of seeing how my access to money has directed every single choice in my life to reading a good book about how fictional people's access to money is directing every single choice in their lives. I fear there's a metaphor in there somewhere.
This is a short story collection about wealth, class and the individual awareness of financial inequality (and of course the yearning to be free of it -or look away from it- once you notice it). I call them stories, but rather they're an interview, a letter, a speech, research notes turned diary, and prose sprinkled with a character's ideas jotted down in a note app. I really liked this unique structure with lots of variety.
To my delight these were interconnected short stories. Characters and items from one story will make an appearance in another, the happenings of one are news in the next, and if I stretch it a little more, I think there are also consequences, words and ideas that travel from story to story.
I flew through this book and laughed often. Yes, it's about money, its value, and our (societal) attitude towards it, but it's also very much about people and their relationships and the hoops they jump through in life, willingly or not. The third and fifth story were my favorites, but I liked all of them.
I think the stories are silly and self-aware enough to be funny, without ridiculing the seriousness of the topic of inequality. Maybe they're a little too on the nose, a little straightforward, but sometimes that was what made it amusing. A tragicomedy that never let itself wander too far away from being light-hearted.
Taylor Drew