Critique de Wild milk par Josh

WTF did I just read?

I honestly have no idea. I'm giving it four stars, but it could just as well deserve eight, or negative three (if only Goodreads allowed such things).

It consists of a few dozen micro-stories - just a few pages long. They all display a kind dream logic:

In 'Pool' the narrator declares that she doesn't want to go into the pool because there's a tree in it. Her brother points out "that tree is not a tree but Grandmother, backstroking." After some discussion she declares "I do not like this pool." and points north asking Brother "Would it be possible to jump into that pool?" The object the narrator thought was a tree but turned out to be her grandmother floats by - "I am going to die soon, sings Grandmother" "I do not know that song." says the narrator.

In 'Spells' a professional "lice lady" laments that her "nine sons turned into nine daughters all at once." She first noticed signs that her sons might be about to turn into daughters a few days before when she noticed their ears "softening" and the smell of lilac. She had heard of such things happening before, "But not to nine sons at once unless they were all tucked away in cupboards by a stepmother with no name. Or maybe on a back road with thick sycamores. Or at the top of an old hill. But not here." She senses that her sons are about to turn into something, but thinks "If they have to turn into anything maybe they will change into wild swans. Anything but daughters... Maybe goats, for a moment, I pray. Hooves, I pray. Anything but daughters. It's too late. They are coming into focus. They are gigantic. And they are daughters. The soft smell of lavender soap goes sick, feverish. The air fills with the smell of dead fruit." "'Give them some sand in a teacup and tell them to pretend it is cake,' says my husband. It is possible he has been here the whole time."

I'll stop my summaries here to avoid spoilers.

You get the picture. Or, if you don't get it, then reading the book probably won't help.

I have mixed feeling about this kind of fiction. On the one hand, I'm not really sure how much I get out of it because I have no clue what is going on. On the other hand, in a cultural world where most popular stories felt like they were written by LLMs long before LLMs existed it can be a tonic to read things that are so utterly unpredictable.

I vaguely recall one of Dostoevsky's characters - the man from the underground, I think - talking about free will and how the only way to prove that one had it was by doing and saying things that were completely irrational. He would have loved these stories.

A final random thought: These stories aren't Kafkaesque, though they might be mistaken for it at a distance. In Kafka the the world is incoherent, but it does seem to have a certain internal logic and consistency - it's just not the same logic as the world we live in. Any of us could wake up tomorrow to find ourselves transformed into a beetle. For Kafka, if such a fate should befall you, you just gotta figure out how to play the hand you've been dealt as best you can. For Mark, on the other hand, you might just look a little bit closer and notice that you weren't a beetle but a tree or a can of soup. Or your family might recognize yourself and not be concerned about your transformation. Or you might just get squashed before you ever really figure out anything. There's no point in trying to make the best of things in such a world, all you can do is keep going and see what happens.