Review by Booklist Review
If Eika's debut short-story collection is any indication, it is not robots we have to worry about in the future. Instead, it is humans who become robot-like, their interactions disintegrating into mere transactions. In the lead story, "Alvin," a tech-support employee must put out fires in a financial institution in Copenhagen, but he is unsure what to make of the ruins, both professional and metaphorical, that remain. In the two-part story, "Bad Mexican Dog," a young errand boy must make himself "blank on the inside" to cater to an ever-rotating global clientele on the beaches of Cancún, Mexico. In what can be considered the most gripping story, "Rachel, Nevada," Eika focuses on a couple coming to terms with grief in the desert after losing their daughters to cancer. The father finds what he assumes is alien wreckage, which delivers its own kind of salvation. The global reach of the stories underscores the universality of the alienation that these characters endure. And the surreal debris Eika evokes from the fallout of capitalism has its own resonance.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Five surreal, globe-spanning stories shape Eika's startling English-language debut. The collection begins and ends with stories named "Bad Mexican Dog," each of which recounts the travails of an otherworldly beach boy and the Cancún tourists he exploits and vice versa. In "Alvin," an unnamed IT specialist scarred by his ex-wife's abandonment embarks upon an illusive and homoerotic friendship with an eccentric derivatives trader while on assignment in Denmark. In "Rachel, Nevada," a man mourning the deaths of his two daughters self-mutilates in ritualistic communion with a piece of alien shrapnel found in the desert. In "Me, Rory and Aurora," a homeless woman inserts herself in the lives of a drug-dealing couple about to have a baby. Studded with shockingly visceral images ("Suddenly his windpipe popped out of the wet flesh, distended and fluted with cartilage"), these lyrical stories are preoccupied with a sense of psychosexual loneliness that penetrates even the most absurd moments of escapism. Eika's fusing of the magic realist mode with the alienation of modernity makes for a winning formula. Agent: Astri von Arbin Ahlander, Ahlander Agency. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this collection of five stories, Danish writer Eika explores the interaction between landscape and narrator. The first story "Alvin," previously published in The New Yorker, follows an IT consultant who returns to Copenhagen to find a pile of rubble covering the bank where he works. Coping with the infidelity of his wife and the breakup of his marriage, he meets Alvin, a trader, who takes him on a wild ride of derivatives speculation. The second and fifth tales focus on a beach boy in Cancún and his relationships with other boys as well as his customers. In the third entry, a retiree grieving for his dead children confronts the uncomprehending universe through ritualized mutilation with alien shrapnel in the desert. In the fourth story, a homeless young woman in London creates a family unit by temporarily moving in with an expectant couple who deal drugs. VERDICT Set in a dystopian universe, the stories describe each character's attempt to find meaning and intimacy as an antidote to loneliness and alienation. Eika's ability to combine foreboding with magic realism generates excitement in this English-language debut.--Jacqueline Snider, Toronto
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of surreal stories from a Danish wunderkind. This debut book brings together five strange, challenging works of fiction and has already won its 30-year-old author several Nordic literary awards. Difficult and mesmerizing, the stories range from formally formidable to downright mind-melting in their creative disregard for convention. "Alvin," relayed in one paragraph that spans 32 pages, follows a narrator who lands in Copenhagen for business only to learn that the building where he was heading has collapsed into rubble. Without a place to stay, the narrator crashes with the titular character, a wildly successful derivatives trader whose friendly economic advice quickly escalates into the two acquaintances absconding to Bucharest to make money and, maybe, love. The equally inventive "Bad Mexican Dog" centers around beach boys who wait hand and foot on guests at a resort in Cancún. The story is broken into two parts: Its first half features the unsettling death and resurrection of one of the beach hands, and it's an understatement to say that the second half then gets weird. Likewise, "Rachel, Nevada" follows a man's visceral, violent encounter with an extraterrestrial device known only as "The Sender"; beneath the shock value of the man's self-inflicted tracheotomy, sincere questions about reality and authenticity bubble. It's Eika's ability to plunge readers headfirst into discomfort or even disgust and then prod for uncomfortable truths that elevates his brazenly weird fiction from crass pyrotechnics to legitimately rewarding puzzles. Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader's nervous system. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
