don't sleep with the dead
Jan. 5th, 2025 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaNghi Vo, Don't Sleep With the Dead.
Some years after the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful--or The Great Gatsby, which in this world is a semi-factual memoir by one Nick Carraway--dead men from the First World War are appearing on the streets of Paris, as early harbingers of a Second, and Nick is trying to figure out whether he's a real person. The case against it is that he is made out of paper. The case in favor has two parts: the man he was cut out to replace was an awful human being, and there are devils around who seem perfectly willing to bargain for his soul.
This novella is a game with voice, atmosphere, and untrustworthy narration that is going exactly where the title warns one shouldn't. Vo's writing always shines with details that give you a sense of other stories happening just outside the frame. Given the opportunity, I might have chosen to follow one of those stories--the Saint Paul cousin who either disappeared or transformed to someone three inches shorter, the ghosts of the trenches in Paris, the demon who appears as a wax model of a secretary--rather than pursuing Nick's particular charming brand of self-destruction. But that's always the question with Nick Carraway's stories: was the tragedy inevitable, or is he simply very good at not happening to act?
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out April 8.)
Some years after the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful--or The Great Gatsby, which in this world is a semi-factual memoir by one Nick Carraway--dead men from the First World War are appearing on the streets of Paris, as early harbingers of a Second, and Nick is trying to figure out whether he's a real person. The case against it is that he is made out of paper. The case in favor has two parts: the man he was cut out to replace was an awful human being, and there are devils around who seem perfectly willing to bargain for his soul.
This novella is a game with voice, atmosphere, and untrustworthy narration that is going exactly where the title warns one shouldn't. Vo's writing always shines with details that give you a sense of other stories happening just outside the frame. Given the opportunity, I might have chosen to follow one of those stories--the Saint Paul cousin who either disappeared or transformed to someone three inches shorter, the ghosts of the trenches in Paris, the demon who appears as a wax model of a secretary--rather than pursuing Nick's particular charming brand of self-destruction. But that's always the question with Nick Carraway's stories: was the tragedy inevitable, or is he simply very good at not happening to act?
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out April 8.)