Two Thousand Million Man-Power – Gertrude Trevelyan

Last year, I read a couple of marvellous books published by Boiler House Press under their Recovered Books imprint – Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard and Tess Slesinger’s Time: The Present – and therefore was very much looking forward to Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan, a novel and an author completely new to me. Trevelyan published eight novels in her lifetime, tragedy struck when her house was bombed during the Blitz – she didn’t immediately die but succumbed to her injuries a year later. Anyway, I thought this was an absolutely terrific novel.

More than halfway into Two Thousand Million Man-Power, in a fit of abject despair and hopelessness, Robert Thomas stumbles towards the grim, gray docks of London. It has been many months since he was laid off, and Robert has lost all hopes of ever finding a job. To make matters worse, he is overcome with guilt and shame for the stress his unemployed status has imposed on his wife Katherine, feelings that refuse to go away. After another fruitless search and afraid of heading home during the middle of the day, Robert ambles along to the desolate, grimy vista of water. Is this just aimless wandering? Or is there a darker purpose in store? The reader begins to wonder until Robert reaches the edge of the water; a piercingly sad moment when Robert’s true intentions suddenly become clear.

Robert does not go through with suicide, but it is one of the many moments of creeping dread that punctuate Two Thousand Million Man-Power, a brilliant, psychologically astute tale of a marriage with its trials and tribulations, the indignity of unemployment, the wretchedness of poverty…in a seamless blend of the personal with the global.

When we first meet Robert Thomas, he is in his early twenties employed as a chemist at a cosmetics firm. Robert spends his days in the laboratory deriving formulae and brewing mixtures to be converted into creams and lotions, while evenings are spent in a dingy rented room working on his thesis of Time. We are talking of a period somewhere in the early 1920s when the world has just emerged from the brutality of World War One. Robert is an aspiring intellectual often attending political lectures and debates after work and it is during one of these gatherings that he meets and falls in love with Katherine Bott.

Katherine is also an idealist, working as a teacher in a council school. Katherine immediately comes across as a tad cold; she is contemptuous of her colleagues and their rigid outlook and not very sympathetic when a married teacher faces the possibility of losing her teaching job (in keeping with a newly introduced law that prohibits married women from working). Despite her intellectual leanings that involve evenings spent attending lectures and meetings, Katherine’s existence is otherwise dry, residing in a dismal bedsit in what is probably a slum-infested area.

Katherine’s biggest fear is treading the path of the bourgeoisie with all the mundaneness that it entails. She yearns for an intellectual life, somewhere on the higher plane, and one of the reasons why she is drawn to Robert is his scientific profession, a calling that fits in with her ideals of progress and prosperity (“She was thinking that knowing somebody who was doing research and making exciting discoveries was the next best thing to doing it oneself”). Katherine is impressed with the idea that Robert is writing a thesis, which she thinks could translate into something momentous, although Robert is vague about what he hopes to achieve.

She thought about progress and about Robert: about what she and Robert were going to do for progress – what she was going to help Robert to do for progress – and what progress was going to do for them. 

The two begin to see each other regularly and the first half of the book focuses more on their tentative courtship – evenings that Katherine spends in Robert’s room that creates a problem with Robert’s landlady later on, going for long walks around the city just so that they can continue having a conversation, a situation that almost leaves them miserable and frustrated. Despite Robert’s proposal of marriage, Katherine remains hesitant because she frets over being a burden on Robert and his ambitions.

Robert often contemplates ditching his job at the cosmetics firm for the prospect of something better, but on Katherine’s insistence hangs on. That strategy pays off and Robert is finally awarded a salary raise which coupled with royalties on one of his inventions signals a significant improvement in fortune. Finally, the two marry, their series of furtive meetings come to an end, and the couple soon transitions into a phase of comfortable living and a marked improvement in lifestyle. A bigger house and a car befitting their status, modern furniture, the wireless, and all other paraphernalia associated with a modern suburban existence – all bought on an installment basis – give the impression that the Thomases are finally achieving their dreams of being upwardly mobile after being hampered by limited means for so long.

Sadly though, that brief period of prosperity comes to an end when Robert is fired from his job. Suddenly hurled into depths of poverty, the couple is forced to scale down and shift to dingy lodgings that scream squalor; Robert trudges every day to the city desperately seeking any work that is to be found (even those unrelated to his skills), while Katherine is compelled to hunt for a teaching post again because they are barely making ends meet.

Kath was earning, Kath was keeping them; Complexion Solvent wasn’t bringing in much now, not more than a few shillings a week. Kath was out at eight and back at six, doing the work of the flat. The thought of it drove him out early – out when she was out – and sent him tramping the streets farther and more at random. He took to applying for labourers’ jobs, though he knew they went to men from the labour exchanges. He stood in queues for hours for jobs he knew he wouldn’t get and tramped along streets of small shops with his eyes dragging the windows for Wanted cards, Apply Within.

He knew he had to get a job, because of Kath. Kath couldn’t go on, he couldn’t go on letting Kath. He plodded along with his eyes on the windows, hair-cut and small tailors, Apprentice wanted, Smart Lad to learn. He knew there was a job somewhere, and he had to find it. He turned a corner and came face to face across the street with a slab of house-high hoardings, Bovo for Bonny Bairns, and a grinning crane-top in a gap between roofs. He knew suddenly with certainty that he would never get a job. 

Interwoven with Robert and Katherine’s lives and peppered throughout the novel are snippets of headlines depicting both national and international events; encompassing a period from the early 1920s to a couple of years before the advent of the Second World War, Robert and Katherine’s earlier relationship is placed in a wider context of astonishing technological advancements but also disturbing political developments. These were a tumultuous couple of decades where transatlantic flights, rising production, manufacturing marvels and rapid industrialization heralded an era of “progress, prosperity and peace” although this march of capitalism often displayed its darker side which Katherine rationalized as “the price of progress”, only to be followed by the Great Depression and the ominous rumblings of war.

Sensation flight R.101. Conquest of peace is imminent. Wall Street. Soviet plane completes first flight, Moscow – New York twelve thousand miles. In Italy, successful trial, six thousand horse-power bombing plane. Giant submarine is launched by France. Panic strikes New York stock market. Prosperity; no danger here. Bank rate is down by half cent. Huge figures in road fund report, increase in driving licences. Gas suicides; air suicide. First. Air crash, train crash, bus crash, planes crash. New race to come through gland control. Progress, prosperity and peace.

At the height of their poverty, Robert is often struck by the symbol of this endlessly grinding machine, a heartless system that just chugs along indifferent to the plight of individual lives; sometimes the system can pick you up, sometimes it will discard you and these dramatic changes in fate are as arbitrary as the random throw of the dice.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power reverberates with myriad themes – the extent to which individuals are governed by economic developments and political upheavals, the hard reality of capitalism with its benefits and pitfalls, the damaging consequences of poverty and the narrowness in perspective that comes along with it, the crippling shame of unemployment, the quest for finding purpose in life, class differences and so on. Often during their marriage, Robert wonders about his purpose – on one hand he is glad that things with Katherine seem to be on the mend, and yet there is a part of him that feels progressively empty. He is plagued by a nagging thought that his abandoned thesis might have given him a sense of self if not fame or money.

There wasn’t much the machine hadn’t had from him. He’d thought once it was the want of money that did it, but he had plenty of money now and it was just the same. There’d been a time when he used to believe in things, and in Kath, and in himself, and now he didn’t believe in anything. He’d dropped himself, somewhere, long ago.

The class differences come to the fore when Robert’s unemployment becomes an issue – he laments at not being entitled to a “dole” like the working class even if his plight is just as bad as theirs or even worse; a statement on the ruthlessness of a capitalist system.  

“Because theoretically, theoretically mind you, we belong to the capitalist class. Although I’ve been out of a job for over a year. And the family that gets one of those flats may be earning four or five pounds a week between them. Now it’s a very remarkable thing,” he said, the hot food expansive in him, “that not only would the Council indignantly deny us any right to benefit from the rates, but the fellow in the council house earning his four pounds still feels that we are better off than he is. Still resents us. Now why do you think that is?” 

But at the novel’s very core is a story of a marriage – a relationship that is strong when the world is seen through rose-tinted glasses, but whose mettle is severely tested when the going gets tough. It’s a searing depiction of a young couple’s dreams and ideals fading away in the relentless harshness of everyday life; an intense, unflinching gaze at how a debilitating experience can scar two people and subtly drive them apart at least when it comes to what they expect from life.

As far as the two main protagonists go, Robert comes across as more sympathetic than Katherine at least to this reader. During their long courtship and earlier days of marriage, both Robert and Katherine’s goals and aspirations seem similarly aligned and differences in their personalities do not matter much when they both wish for the same things. When they are plunged into poverty, however, this gulf only widens; Robert grapples with guilt and shame, longing for some sympathy from Katherine, while Katherine turns increasingly bitter, the sediment of resentment settled well within her as she openly and internally curses Robert. With Robert sinking into despondency, one can’t help but acknowledge that it is Katherine’s practical approach and single-mindedness that ultimately pulls them out of their hole, although the two are dramatically altered by that traumatic experience. Katherine is a complex woman and it is perhaps ironic that a woman who looked down upon the bourgeoisie and was also a tad condescending towards those who she perceived to be lower than her in status, finds herself pushed into even lower depths when the tide turns for the worse.

The placing of the personal against a broader economic and political landscape is what makes the novel so unique and remarkable; two realms that move in parallel, not always converging. It imparts a real-time quality to the story and accentuates how contemporary Trevelyan was, sharply aware of world events unfolding around her. Her hard-edged often gritty prose, her powers of perception, and her keen insights into human nature particularly in the way she captures the interiority of her characters, lend the narrative a psychological edge that is riveting and compelling.

In a nutshell, Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a dark but magnificent and powerful piece of writing that has only whetted my appetite for more of Trevelyan’s work. Highly recommended!

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Salka Valka – Haldór Laxness (tr. Philip Roughton)

It was the Mookse and Gripes podcast in December 2022 that finally gave me the impetus to pick up Salka Valka; it was featured in Trevor’s Top Five of the year. It’s the first Haldór Laxness novel I’ve read and based on how wonderful it was, won’t be my last. This is also my contribution to #NordicFINDS23 hosted by AnnaBookBel.

THAT HAUNTING OPENING SCENE…

In the opening pages of Salka Valka, a coastal steamer stops at the port of a small, remote fishing village called Oseyri. Surrounded by looming mountains and fjords, the village is now in the throes of deepening winter, relentlessly hounded by driving snow. Oseyri is such a nondescript, isolated village (“you get the impression that nothing in the world could be more insignificant and meaningless than such a small village under such high mountains”), that a couple of idle tourists aboard the steamer at the time of its docking, can’t help wondering about it – “How do people live in such a place? And how do they die?”

Nobody can envisage a life here, but on that cold, bleak winter’s night two figures emerge from the steamer – a woman called Sigurlina and her 11-year old daughter Salvor (Salka Valka). Sigurlina and Salka Valka have made this journey from the North, certain circumstances having driven them away, and while Reykjavik seems to be their final destination, Sigurlina, reduced to a state of penury, cannot afford the cost of the trip further.

Oseyri, then, becomes her destination for the time being, she hopes to find a job that will help her make enough money to embark on the journey south. However, fate as we shall see has other plans…

Thus begins this wondrous, 552-paged, ambitious novel of Salka Valka, an immersive, brilliant, often harrowing tale of a beleaguered fishing community and the indomitable spirit of a woman who prides on her independence and strives to improve their lot.

ESSENCE OF PLOT & STRUCTURE

Salka Valka is divided into four sections, each section comprising two parts. In the first section, we meet Salka when she is an 11-year old girl, defiant and spirited even at that young age. She accompanies Sigurlina when she knocks at several doors, desperate to find work and in this way, along with her the reader is also introduced to some of the prominent inhabitants of the village. The foremost is Jóhann Bogesen, a wealthy merchant who has a monopoly on the village’s fishing operations (the community’s primary source of livelihood), while also managing the store; the villagers’ employment status is defined by the opening of an account with Bogesen. Sigurlina fails to find employment there as a maid and her subsequent visits to the church Dean and the village doctor also yield no results. Mostly viewed as strangers, the dean and the doctor remain suspicious of her background, it is alleged that Salka is an illegitimate child (which is true), and consequently turn both mother and daughter away.

Little wonder then that Sigurlina finds some solace in the Salvation Army, its religious teachings and chanting re-ignite her faith in Christianity. The village church looks down upon the Salvation Army branding it a heathen place, but it is perhaps a tad ironic that while both espouse the tenets of Christianity, it is the Salvation Army that welcomes Sigurlina in a way that the formal church does not.

Meanwhile, Salka Valka’s fiery persona is evident right from the very beginning as she hurls insults at Argantyr, Bogesen’s son, while at their palatial home (when Sigurlina is looking for work). In a village whose personality is largely shaped by fish and fishing, it is Salka who boldly approaches Jóhann Bogesen for the purpose of opening an account with him and demands to be given a job washing fish. Concerned that she is too young, the villagers are, nevertheless, struck by her will of steel, and she soon begins working with them because all said and done extra hands are needed for the job.

It’s also in the first section that we encounter two men who will have an important bearing on how the story unfolds and will play a pivotal role in how Salka’s destiny shapes up. First is the creepy sailor Steinþor, a raging alcoholic prone to destructive fits of anger. Steinþor helps Sigurlina find lodgings when no one else does and immediately begins an affair with her much to Salka’s chagrin. Salka also meets Arnaldur, a dreamy man, hired as her tutor for a brief period. Arnaldur lives with his irascible grandfather and an upright aunt; his mother has abandoned the family and his father is now a cultivated man settled abroad. Arnaldur is tormented by dreams of his mother which he confides to Salka, and regales her with visions of alternate worlds more captivating to him than his current circumstances.  

Part Two forwards to several years later, and Salka is now a young woman, self-reliant, living in her own house with a share in a fishing boat. She is also instrumental in forming a fisherman’s union successful in negotiating a wage hike. Despite her loathing for Steinþor Steinsson, Salka is not averse to the lure of money and there are rumors that payments received from America (notably from Steinþor) have helped fund the purchase of her home. In that sense, she is reasonably well-off in a village, where most others still struggle financially in their daily lives.

Politics, revolutionary ideals, and socio-economic issues make up for a bulk of the second section as the largely ignorant working class of Oseyri begins to get a whiff of the scent of Bolshevism, while the capitalists in the village resist its growing influence.

RICHLY DRAWN, COMPLEX CENTRAL CHARACTERS

Salka Valka, the titular character, is a remarkable heroine and a force to reckon with in Oseyri. Bold and enterprising, she is fiercely independent right from an early age, and a source of financial support to her mother who gradually sinks into despondency as her relationships fail. During her teenage years, Salka is treated like an outsider in Oseyri, often left out, and constantly humiliated by the jeers and insults of peers but she soldiers on. She is ugly when measured against the standards of conventional beauty, tall and strong, awkward even and often naïve when it comes to relationships, but sharp and intelligent in matters relating to business and money. Salka has a fraught, complex relationship with Steinþor, a man she abhors who nearly rapes her in the first section, yet she has no qualms about accepting money from him, because she understands the value of currency.

Then there’s Sigurlina who cuts a sorrowful figure, succumbing to men especially in her yearnings for love and support, and Steinþor who has a towering, disturbing presence in the lives of both women, Sigurlina wishes to marry him despite their abusive relationship. Increasingly moody and violent particularly when sozzled with drink, Steinþor desires Salka, and often disappears for long periods on sea when things get too hot for him in the village. Steinpor has grand ambitions of uprooting Bogesen’s unshakeable position but no one takes him seriously when he is so regularly drunk.

Arnaldur Björnsson casts a spell over Salka with his “face shining out of the darkness of the night, radiant with belief in another world.” Hired as Salka’s tutor, the two share a close bond which waxes and wanes over the course of the novel. Educated and immersed in books, a passionate revolutionary and an effective orator, Arnaldur’s communistic fervor awakens the interest of the Oseyri workers to the tenets of communism, but while his intensity as a rabble rouser is electrifying, he does not seem to be cut out for the execution of his ideology or the grunt work that it involves. Salka often wonders whether Arnaldur’s interest in communism is fuelled by his need to always argue and fight his enemies, only to lose interest once there’s nothing left to fight for.  

And last but not the least is Jóhann Bogesen, the wealthy merchant, who runs the show, and pretty much controls the economic pulse of the village. The Oseyri residents need him for their survival and at the same time despise him because they are at his mercy.

PANOPLY OF THEMES

One of the core themes that the novel addresses is the ugly side of abject poverty and the struggles of the working class. This is represented by the pathetic living conditions of Oseyri’s inhabitants – steeped in debt and dirt, riddled with illness and death, often at the mercy of natural calamities and the indifference of humanity. This is a deeply religious community, but the burden and worries of day to day living, not surprisingly, also fuel a wavering of faith and a hopeless resignation towards their doomed fate which God and the church does nothing to alleviate.  

Part Two of the novel assumes political overtones; the plight of the working class becomes the foundation for politics bringing in its wake sharp contrast in viewpoints. At the time when the novel is set, Iceland was part of the Kingdom of Denmark, while at the same time Russia was riding on the wave of communism and Bolshevism, the winds of this ideology blowing across the rest of Europe as well. In Salka Valka, these varying ideologies are epitomized by its central characters – Bogesen is the capitalist and a proponent of individual initiative, Arnaldur is the passionate Bolshevist and a budding revolutionary, while there are others who believe in self-determination and express a wish to break away from Denmark as well.

This novel was originally published in the early 1930s but Laxness’ stellar rendering of the intricate working of Iceland’s economy and the various cogs in the wheel (Oseyri being the hub) that support it has striking parallels with the financial crisis that crippled the nation in 2008. The rippling effects of union strikes, the ceasing of production, bad debts piling up with banks highlights a capitalist system where the fortunes of the wealthy are dented but pale in comparison to the plight of the poor, who caught between a rock and hard place, suffer the hardest.

Through debates and arguments between the principal characters, Laxness brings to the fore the complexity of myriad philosophies at play, always highlighting both sides of the coin – Bolshevism Vs Capitalism, independent initiative Vs mass production and community living, and so on.

Salka Valka is also in many ways a feminist tale. Salka’s zeal to lead her life on her own terms is strong not only because of her inherent personality but also because deep down she abhors her mother’s dependence on men to survive. That women have to bear the brunt of misogyny and grapple with shame and ostracization from the misdeeds of men is also explored.   

The novel also lays bare the widening gulf between the rich and poor in terms of money and opportunities. The Bogesens live in lavish comfort in Oseyri, and the merchant’s children enjoy the privilege of education in Copenhagen giving them an air of elegance and sophistication if not empathy, while Salka and her lot remains ignorant of the world outside, inhabiting a narrow space where nothing much happens and the only preoccupations centre around daily fishing activities.

STARK WEATHER – A FORCE IN ITS OWN RIGHT

In a novel replete with fully realised characters, Salka Valka also pulsates with a vivid sense of place – the mountains and fjords among which Oseyri is nestled, lends it a remote, distant quality; a place whose fate is determined by the vagaries of nature, the relentless brunt of thunderstorms and stark, severe winters.

AN EPIC NOVEL, EXPANSIVE IN SCOPE

Salka Valka, then, is a big, beautiful novel, expansive in its scope and incredibly absorbing. The first section is particularly haunting when depicting the plight of Oseyri’s villagers and workers crushed by poverty and barely making ends meet. The unraveling of Sigurlina’s fate is also imminently sad as she is engulfed by hopelessness and unbearable disappointment from the men she falls in love with.

Salka’s forceful spirit combined with her awkwardness and heightened sense of isolation during her early years in Oseyri are also strikingly depicted, as are the gamut of emotions she experiences with Arnaldur that oscillate between friendship and kinship to scorn and jealousy. Not to mention the increasing hatred she feels for Steinþor who lusts for her and bewilders her with his poetic fervor.

Part One is intense in the way the dynamics between the central characters play out and is in that sense more personal, while in Part Two that intensity takes a different path as the focus becomes more political.

This is entirely a third person narrative and one can’t help get a feeling that Laxness is an omniscient narrator particularly when he makes certain observations about his characters, his views subtly disguised in wit and comedy.

IN A NUTSHELL…

Epic in scope and ahead of its times, Salka Valka, then, is a simmering cauldron of various delectable ingredients – a coming-of-age tale, a statement on world politics, a strange beguiling love story, and an unforgettable female lead. Highly recommended!

Cursed Bunny – Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur)

Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize this year and has received such widespread acclaim, that having read it now I can only concur with all the praise heaped upon it.

Cursed Bunny is a terrific collection of ten stories that merge the genres of horror, science fiction, magical realism and dream logic to explore a wide variety of themes that are possibly a commentary on the ills of Korean society, but which could simply be applied to any society where patriarchy and greed rules the roost.

As usual, I won’t focus on each of the ten stories but dwell instead on the ones that really stood out and made an impression.

I’ll begin with the second story “The Embodiment”, a disturbing tale of prospective motherhood, single parenting and how the idea of a family unit is heavily defined by conventional mores. The protagonist, a young woman, is prescribed birth control pills by the doctor for a certain period when she complains of heavy menstruation and the unbearable pain that comes with it. But things go awry the day she’s shocked to discover she’s pregnant, the result of having taken those pills for a longer time than necessary. Her doctor, a heavily made up woman, is unsympathetic about her plight and makes a strange statement of how the woman needs to urgently find a father if the pregnancy has to proceed normally. So intent is the woman on the task of finding a suitable father which entails going on a slew of pointless seon dates that she laments at not having the option of considering single motherhood.

But what did it mean for the baby to not grow “properly”? She thought of the hostile glare of the obstetrician with the thick make-up. If she needed a father for the baby for its proper growth, what could explain the size of the stomach now? Hadn’t she simple been scared by a few words of a doctor – some young woman with a nasty personality? Had she been so focused on finding a father for the baby that she hadn’t thought enough about that the baby really needed? Regardless of its growth, whether it had a father or not, the baby was hers and hers alone, in the truest sense. “Live only for the child.”

The titular story “Cursed Bunny” is a story within a story, a wonderful tale on the evils of capitalism which bolster greed and unfair business practices. The narrator is a man working in his family business that makes “cursed fetishes”. We learn of how his family’s business is looked upon with suspicion by their neighbours because its very nature means that it can’t quite be conveniently classified. There are two essential principles that the business must follow, and yet the narrator’s grandfather recounts a story from his childhood, a tale that the narrator has heard umpteen times, but a novelty to the reader. We learn of the grandfather’s friend, an upright man running a distillery business, a family run affair where innovation, superior quality and technology are worth their weight in gold. But then a larger company enters the scene to disrupt the operations of the family distillery. Hugely relying on political connections and networking rather than product quality and technology, the conglomerate pretty much puts the grandfather’s friend out of business with debilitating results, paving the way for the grandfather, a master at cursed fetishes, to plot his revenge.

Another favourite of mine is the story called “Snare”, a chilling, frightening tale of the gruesome aftermath of avarice. One day a man, while walking through the snow clad forest, comes across a fox trapped in a snare. However, it’s not blood that oozes out from the wound, but something that resembles gold. The man takes the injured fox with him home and over the next few years deliberately injures the beleaguered animal to extract as much gold as he can. The man thrives in his business to become immensely rich, but the fox after his grievous injuries is reduced to skin and bones, and finally dies. The man makes a scarf out of the fox’s fur which he gifts to his wife. Soon after she is pregnant and gives birth to twins, a girl and a boy. One day in a scuffle between the children, the girl lets out a bloodcurdling scream because her brother has bit her and is sucking her blood. The mother in her attempts to tear them apart, scratches her finger on the boy’s forehead, out of which gold starts trickling. The man, as a witness, realizes the implications of this, and sensing an opportunity, begins to use his children to feed his appetite for wealth with terrible consequences.

Another story “The Frozen Finger” has all the makings of a typical horror story, a story of being trapped where the line between dreams and reality is blurred. It begins with a woman opening her eyes.

Darkness. Pitch black. Like someone has dropped a thick veil of black over her eyes. Not even a pinpoint of light to be seen.

Has she gone blind?

Frantically groping around her to find her bearings, she is able to discern a steering wheel but is unable to remember a thing. Not surprisingly, she is disconcerted when a voice somewhere near her begins to whisper her name. The voice informs her that she has been in an accident, that the car is stuck in a swamp, and that she needs to get out from there quickly lest she sinks into the marsh. Rescuing her from the car, the voice urges her to move on and acting with urgency the woman relents. She begins to run blindly in search of firmer ground guided by the frozen fingers of that mysterious being only to realize that she is stuck in some kind of bizarre but claustrophobic nightmare.

In “Goodbye, My Love”, a trio of robots with artificial intelligence capabilities revolt against their maker; in “Home Sweet Home”, a woman invests her hard earned savings into buying a building only to be confronted by a host of problems, not the least of which is her irresponsible husband; the story “Scars” is a violent, disquieting tale of imprisonment, the illusory notion of freedom and the price one has to pay for it.

There’s a wide variety of themes explored – entrapment, capitalism, patriarchy, the roles of women, body image, violence, cruelty and the distorted illusion of freedom. Women, particularly, often get a raw deal trampled by the burden of patriarchal society, their agency curtailed. We see this in “The Embodiment” where the woman is told in no uncertain terms that her pregnancy has meaning only if she can find a father; we see it in “Snare” where the man treats his wife and daughter terribly as if their wishes and opinions don’t matter in his quest for immense riches; we see it in “Home Sweet Home” where the woman pays off all her debts, saves up enough to buy a house only to see her husband squander it away with no inkling of respect for her hard work.

Cursed Bunny, then, is a smorgasbord of genres, range and style – horror, fantasy, magical realism where the bizarre sometimes effectively blends with the mundane. Chung has an unflinching perspective, which is particularly jarring but vivid in the way bodily functions are candidly depicted in her stories. In lesser hands, this would have been too much to stomach, but Chung displays a knack for making the stories she weaves around them strangely riveting. The stories in Cursed Bunny are surreal, visceral and quite unlike anything I’ve read before, but they come with a unique, interior logic that works. These macabre, fantastical setups are not only horrific by themselves, but become an effective framework to explore the horrors of real life – cruelties of men, ill treatment of women, evils of capitalism and so on. Absorbing and utterly compelling this is a collection not to be missed.