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zuly's review
dark
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
balancinghistorybooks's review
4.0
Originally released in 2006, and rendered into English into 2011, Alois Hotschnig’s Maybe This Time is one of Peirene Press’ earliest publications. World Literature Today declares that ‘Hotschnig’s prose dramatizes the voice of conscience and the psychological mechanisms we use to face reality or, just as often, to avoid it’. Hotschnig is one of Austria’s most critically acclaimed authors, and he has won major Austrian, and international, literary prizes over his career. The collection has been translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis.
Hotschnig’s short story collection has been described by many readers as ‘unsettling’, and this, I feel, is quite a fitting appraisal. There is a creeping sense of unease which comes over one as soon as the stories are begun. The initial tale, ‘The Same Silence, the Same Noise’, is about a pair of neighbours who sit side by side in the narrator’s eyeline for days on end: ‘… they didn’t move, not even to wave away the mosquitoes or scratch themselves’. This has rather a distressing effect upon our unnamed observer: ‘Every day, every night, always the same. Their stillness made me feel uneasy, and my unease grew until it festered into an affliction I could no longer bear’. His reaction is perhaps the most interesting one which Hotschnig could have come up with in this instance: ‘I drew closer to them because they rejected me. Rejection, after all, is still a kind of contact’. As one might expect as the midway point is reached in this tale, the narrator soon becomes obsessed: ‘I decided to observe them even more closely to calm my unease, as if I no longer had a life of my own but lived only through them’.
There are nine short stories included within Maybe This Time, all of which have rather intriguing titles. These include the likes of ‘Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut’, and ‘You Don’t Know Them, They’re Strangers’. Some rather thoughtful ideas have been woven in; they have a definite profundity at times: ‘We looked at the same views, heard the same noises. We shared a common world and were separated by it’. Each of the tales is sharp; every one relatively brief, but all of which have a wealth of emotions and scenes packed into them. Hotschnig is shrewd, and in control at all times; he makes the reader fear impending danger with the most subtle of hints.
No particular time periods have been specified within the collection, and only small clues have been left as to when each story takes place. They are, one and all, essentially suspended in time. I did find a couple of the stories a little abrupt in terms of their endings, but this collection is certainly a memorable one. There is a great fluency in Lewis’ translation, which helps to render Maybe This Time one of the creepiest reads on Peirene’s list thus far.
Hotschnig’s short story collection has been described by many readers as ‘unsettling’, and this, I feel, is quite a fitting appraisal. There is a creeping sense of unease which comes over one as soon as the stories are begun. The initial tale, ‘The Same Silence, the Same Noise’, is about a pair of neighbours who sit side by side in the narrator’s eyeline for days on end: ‘… they didn’t move, not even to wave away the mosquitoes or scratch themselves’. This has rather a distressing effect upon our unnamed observer: ‘Every day, every night, always the same. Their stillness made me feel uneasy, and my unease grew until it festered into an affliction I could no longer bear’. His reaction is perhaps the most interesting one which Hotschnig could have come up with in this instance: ‘I drew closer to them because they rejected me. Rejection, after all, is still a kind of contact’. As one might expect as the midway point is reached in this tale, the narrator soon becomes obsessed: ‘I decided to observe them even more closely to calm my unease, as if I no longer had a life of my own but lived only through them’.
There are nine short stories included within Maybe This Time, all of which have rather intriguing titles. These include the likes of ‘Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut’, and ‘You Don’t Know Them, They’re Strangers’. Some rather thoughtful ideas have been woven in; they have a definite profundity at times: ‘We looked at the same views, heard the same noises. We shared a common world and were separated by it’. Each of the tales is sharp; every one relatively brief, but all of which have a wealth of emotions and scenes packed into them. Hotschnig is shrewd, and in control at all times; he makes the reader fear impending danger with the most subtle of hints.
No particular time periods have been specified within the collection, and only small clues have been left as to when each story takes place. They are, one and all, essentially suspended in time. I did find a couple of the stories a little abrupt in terms of their endings, but this collection is certainly a memorable one. There is a great fluency in Lewis’ translation, which helps to render Maybe This Time one of the creepiest reads on Peirene’s list thus far.
mattleesharp's review
3.0
These stories grapple with the ideas of identity and loneliness. Every family seems to have a hole in it. Every child is stripped of wonder and made to see the world for a sad and repetitive place. The static things in the stories (a man whose identity changes, a couple lounging on their back porch, a woman's collection of dolls) were the most compelling. This was just a book with a big hole in the middle of it that everything slowly slips into. Some of the stories suffer because of it. The task of creating interesting stories where little happens and what does is inevitable was just too great and probably also just doesn't stand up in translation.
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