Infinite Books

The oranges on the cover of “Bliss Montage” by Ling Ma are hidden behind plastic wrap, in full view but behind something that needs to be ripped off. I think this image summarizes the book perfectly.

 This is a collection of eight stories, and it’s probably best to read them one story a day: they are very condensed. In all the stories, the main character is a woman – and I feel it’s the same woman – who moves between reality and fantasy, sometimes quite literally, as in “Office Hours,” where moving the armoire reveals a passage to another place. The author reminds us that it’s nothing unusual: this is the world Dorothy entered in “The Wizard of Oz” or the world in Tarkovsky’s film “The Stalker.”

The stories often portray the inability to feel at home in the country one immigrated to and one’s birthplace, the strange alienation when misunderstanding is revealed: between mother and daughter (“Peking Duck”) or husband and wife (“Returning.”) Relationships that begin as ordinary transform into dependencies. For example, a friendship between young girls becomes a need for domination, so the drug that makes one invisible is a tool for enslaving another person.

Some stories were heartbreaking (“Oranges”), some unsettling, and there was even a story that I found humorous (“Yeti Lovemaking”), but all of them left me thinking about them long after I closed the book. “Bliss Montage” shows a Kafkaesque world. And a fascinating one.

BLISS MONTAGE by Ling Ma, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022