I have read two Liksom novels in translation* and enjoyed both very much, but this slim book, which I picked up way back in 2010, kept being passed over for no good reason…until now.

This 1989 book is a collection of very short fiction, which might be called ‘flash fiction” these days. It’s 117 pages of short pieces varying in length from a half page to perhaps six pages (and the pages have fairly liberal margins top and bottom). But, those stories!

Liksom is a master of dark humor. Many of her first lines seem so subtle, so ordinary, to the reader, one hardly expects to be caught by it, but so we are. A few examples of first lines:

"I got out of the handcuffs on Friday morning",
"The sun was shining behind the factory"
"Every day I eat at least two bars of Marabou Chocolate"
"While the ‘soldiers at the military were putting on their leather suits and flying boots…"

So, yes, I was hooked.

*Compartment No. 6: and The Colonel's Wife ( )

Very short stories, most of them a page or two, that are more like snapshots than stories and more like film clips than snapshots. A few of them have something resembling a plot, e.g. one beginning 'Tonight I am going to find myself a man': off to the hotel bar, find a suitable mark, up to his room, order up caviar, take off frock, refresh makeup, say good-night to doorman. Mission accomplished: the narrator had been able to flash her new body stocking from Paris. There's a high body count in the book but the murders are recounted at the same pitch and in the same detached way as everything else is and so the violence seems slightly absurd rather than realistic. Most of the stories begin and end at what seem like arbitrary points in time, have no dialogue, and don't engage one emotionally. (The last is no bad thing, and Liksom's intentions whatever they are aren't to pull at the heartstrings.) Having said that, one story--on Good Friday an immigrant re-enacts for villagersJesus's trudge to Golgotha-is touching, and one of my favourites does have dialogue: a monk and a woman in a fur coat travel to a country house. The monk goes to the kitchen, fiddles about with an amazing array of expensive gadgets, and serves the woman dinner whereupon she remarks apropos of nothing 'Such a naively theistic image of God fails to answer the existential questions of postmodern man.'

For some reason Daniil Kharms kept coming to mind as I read this, but any relation between him and Liksom is a fairly distant one. Despite the extreme simplicity of the book I feel I didn't take it all in and so shall be re-reading it.