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Terese Svoboda
is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Tin God (Nebraska 2006), and, most recently, a nonfiction book, Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. In 2006 she won an O. Henry Award for her short story 80’s Lilies.
Read
an interview
with Terese Svoboda
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Win a copy of this book! See the Competitions page for details.
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"
We
were Neanderthal, our cave icebound Canada, a basement apartment. Our
Neanderthal love we expelled with grunts in white vapors, the kind of
unwavering, always-lit lust that passes for passion if you are too
Neanderthal to know better.
"
Reviewed by Nuala Ni Chonchúir
There are seventeen stories in
Trailer Girl
– one of them, the title story, is 146 pages long and has 31
chapters. That is really a novella or a very, very long short story,
in my opinion. Whatever it is, it is a seductive narrative told in
the most unusual English I have come across in a long time. Teresa
Svoboda bends the language to her own devices with musical, magical
results.
The trailer girl of the title is a troubled young woman –
a loner – who sees a small girl in a red dress playing among the
cattle that graze behind her trailer park. She follows the child,
watches her, but it’s never clear if this little girl is a figment
of her imagination – one of her fostered-out daughters, perhaps –
or maybe even a childish, dreamed-up version of herself.
This is a
tale of sadness repeated and watchful wariness; the narrator is both
naive and complex. There is enormous beauty and depth in this story
but it takes careful reading because of the ambiguity of both the
language and the events that occur. I did feel I would have liked the
main event to occur sooner but it is the type of story that begs you
to stay with it nonetheless.
Trailer
Girl as a whole is a
collection of repetitions: in characters, in mood, in its
atmospheric, closed-in situations and spaces: there are snowy caves,
caravans, hide 'n' seek in darkness, grain bins, beds to hide in
and coffins.
Svoboda’s gifts as a writer are many – she has a
genuinely unique voice and her prose is rich without being cluttered.
For example, from the story A Mama:
You are
given children when they are too
small, but if you wait, your chance is up for experiment. For now, it
fits
good inside the car seat on the table and says nothing if I leave the
room,
even when I put on salt. This disappoints me. Salt should get a noise
out of
it. She is a modern writer and doesn’t miss an opportunity to slot in
cultural references but, again, she doesn’t overdo it or clog up
the narrative with these references. Her fiction is rich with
atmosphere, and a story’s setting is, it seems, as important to her
as character, something which I relish as a reader.
In an interview
about her novel Tin
God, Svoboda was asked
about how readers perceive experimental fiction. She answered:
"Put
the word 'experimental' in front of any art form and you can
clear the house. All I ask is that you read all the words." I
don’t think this book will please all readers; some people just
don’t want
to read all the words and Svoboda’s unusual prose can be cryptic at
times. But for the committed reader of literary fiction, the one who
loves beautiful, unusual, almost obscure prose, this is a gem to be
treasured.
Win a copy of this book! See the Competitions page for details.
Watch the trailer for this collection on Youtube
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