I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

Starred review from February 17, 2020
In van den Berg’s startling, precise collection (after The Third Hotel), a series of women are haunted by various disturbances, often in Florida. “Last Night” sets the tone with an unnamed narrator spooked by the sudden closure of the bar downstairs from her apartment, causing her to look back on her would-be suicide many years earlier, when, as a teenager, she spent 10 months at a lax Florida psychiatric treatment facility for her suicidal ideation. “Slumberland” follows a woman’s aimless walks outside Orlando, Fla., during which she photographs the transient residents of a seedy motel while reflecting on her own state of impermanence. In “Lizards,” a woman is outraged by news reports of a judge’s alleged sexual assaults. Her husband, skeptical and fatigued by her talking, pacifies her with a sedative-laced seltzer he finds online. “Your Second Wife” follows a woman thrust into the desperation of the gig economy who becomes a “grief freelancer,” playing the roles of widowers’ dead wives. In the title story, the collection’s thematic climax, a woman poses as her more successful sister; her actions inform the various ways that the women in van den Berg’s stories often succumb to self-erasure or are erased by others. Van den Berg maintains an unsettling tone throughout these darkly imagined tales. This collection shows the author at her best.

May 1, 2020

In her newest short fiction collection, van den Berg (The Third Hotel) serves up an assortment of complex and satisfying not-quite-ghost stories. These deceptively dense tales often visit similar territory--women, less successful younger sisters or slightly flawed daughters, who have missed some imperceptible benchmark in life--yet there is no sense of sameness. Rather, in stories ranging from "Your Second Wife," in which a woman makes a living impersonating dead spouses, to the discomfiting "Karolina," where in the aftermath of a Mexico City earthquake a woman's homeless sister-in-law forces her to confront a buried history of family violence, van den Berg mines the broad overlap among loss, defeat, and horror with a deft touch, backlit by the unsettling effects of travel, natural disasters, death, and that thin membrane between the supernatural and the simply strange. The ghosts in her stories are her narrators' better, unachieved selves, the dread embodied in the realization of how easy it is to miss life's transitions from before to after. VERDICT These well-crafted and intelligent stories about the many ways a life can be haunted will gratify readers who enjoy perceptive, slightly gothic tales.--Lisa Peet, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2020
After two novels, Van den Berg (The Third Hotel, 2018) returns to short stories in a richly imaginative collection that skillfully exposes vulnerable women to grief, messy relationships, misogyny, and prejudices, while equipping them with a fiery tenacity. A woman reminisces about her ominous exit from a mental institution. A photographer encounters a neighbor who caters to clients obsessed with dacryphilia (finding pleasures in the tears of others). A wife prods her reluctant husband to confront a mystery haunting his family. An irascible wife is placated with a peculiar tonic by her frustrated husband in Lizards. In Volcano House, a woman questions a wasted life while her accomplished sister lies in a coma. In Karolina, a woman reexamines her judgment of a hot-tempered brother when her ex-sister-in-law resurfaces. A gig worker experiences the hazards of working as an escort to grieving husbands disguised as their deceased wives. In the title story (taken from a Latin proverb, "Auribus teneo lupum, to be caught in an untenable situation), a stranded woman has no choice but to impersonate her AWOL sister. In these 11 perceptive stories, Van den Berg displays her literary talents with acerbic acumen as she portrays indelible characters brimming with verve that is hungry and wild.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 15, 2020
Identity, like reality, is a slippery thing for the women in van den Berg's latest collection of short stories, all of whom are grasping at a sense of stability that seems forever out of reach. All 11 stories here are sharp as they are haunting; in this world--maybe like the real one--nothing is exactly what it seems. In "Cult of Mary," which is as short as it is devastating, a daughter takes her aging mother on a quietly gut-wrenching group tour of Italy. Against the backdrop of an earthquake-ravaged Mexico City, "Karolina" a divorcing art restorer, runs into her brother's now-destitute ex-wife and is forced to confront truths about her brother she has managed until now to willfully ignore. In "Lizards," a husband plies his unhappy wife with cans of special sparkling water, off-brand LaCroix but with sedative properties, for when she "simply becomes too much." And doesn't she also, in a way, appreciate the dulling of her own mind? "The truth is that she is angriest at her own anger," van den Berg explains, "which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use." Other stories have a darkly surreal edge, like sweaty, hyper-realistic nightmares; someone has always disappeared or is in the process of disappearing: A husband vanishes into a tree; a woman is casually kidnapped by her new friend. In the title story, a woman named Margot semiaccidentally begins impersonating her missing sister at an Italian academic conference. They are raw and searching, the women at the centers of these stories. She didn't want her sister's life, Margot thinks. "All she wants is to feel like she isn't being destroyed by the world." The stories here, vibrating with loss, but wickedly funny, are a distinctly van den Berg-ian hybrid, as biting as they are dreamy. Witty, painful, and thoroughly unsettling.

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