Humiliation

It is not often a short story collection gets 5 stars from me, but each of these 9 Chilean stories from
the award winning Paulina Flores, translated by Megan McDowell, are gems. They paint a picture of Chile and Chilean lives with verve and vitality, the poverty, the precariousness and challenges of life, places where almost everyone is unemployed, disintegrating families, broken marriages and relationships, and where dreams and ambitions are thwarted. Stories are written from the perspectives of children and adults, throwing light on family dynamics, such as mother and daughter relationships, infidelities, and other disturbing and unsettling behaviours. We have a young gang of boys intent on translating The Smiths songs from stolen dictionaries, seeing themselves as having much in common with the original Japanese ninjas, as they set out to train as ninjas with a mission in mind.

A 29 year old father is heading towards an opportunity for a casting audition in Santiago, walking on a scorchingly hot day with his two young daughters, 9 year old Simona and 6 year old Pia, only to find himself humiliated by what happens. A young girl is sent into a library by her father, only to apparently end up lost, a woman ends up going to their apartment for a sexual encounter. In a dilapidated and ugly poor port city, a group of boys plan a daring heist, only for a boy to be completely unaware about what is happening in the family until he is confronted by a wretched and shocking discovery at home. A woman returns home to live with her mother after 4 years of living with a man, she is entirely unprepared when her relationship breaks down and struggling to come to terms with it. A young girl with a tendency to hide under her bed, her father gambles on making it big on the Korean project but fails, she comes to grow up with and get close to her unmarried Aunt Nana, a woman of silence, giving herself to other, only to leave home to focus on herself in a way Aunt Nana never did.

A former waitress meets a old bartender friend to hear a confession. UFO sightings are missing in a unsettlingly disturbing story of Laika. A last summer vacation for a 10 year old boy with his Aunt Veronica and her two daughters, Camila and Javiera, has him opening up to the world of books and reading, and the possibility of another life. His meeting with the posh boy, Lucas, has him committing a betrayal he finds hard to live with. The final story is of a friendship between two girls and a woman drawn towards her neighbours and engaging in voyeurism. This is a fascinating and thought provoking set of stories, and not a single one is a dud. All inevitably dwell on the darker aspects of life, failure, sorrow, sadness, suffering and pain, surviving hard lives, disappointments and humiliation. So brilliant and highly recommended. Many thanks to Oneworld Publications for an ARC.

I've been overjoyed the past few years with all of the amazing short story collections being released, especially those released my young, female first-time authors. I think part of it is the thrill of discovering your own emotions and experiences in fiction, perhaps not for the first time but definitely in a way that feels truer than ever before. Thanks to Oneworld Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In Humiliation women of all ages abound. Girls who love their fathers, girls who lie, mothers who leave their sons, women that love, women that despair, women that question, women that give selflessly, women that crave, women that learn. Although the collection isn't solely about women, I was fascinated by the wide variety of female experiences shown in Humiliation. The same is true for the stories with male narrators. Each is forced to reckon with a moment where, seemingly, everything changes and they have to become aware of the real world. There is a cruelty to how Flores unveils to her characters what the "real world" is like, with its disappointment, consequences and loneliness. This may sound to some like Millennial complaining about why the world is so hard, but what Flores shows is that universal moment in which, as the blurb suggests, innocence is lost. Almost all of the stories focus on young children on the verge of adulthood, experiencing their first real taste of both excitement and desperation, caught in a moment that might forever define them or turn out to mean nothing. Flores masterfully captions the importance children attribute to small things, while missing the larger picture.

The stories in Humiliation are incredibly acute, almost painfully so. The first story, the eponymous 'Humiliation' perfectly encapsulates the pure adoration children have for their parents, as well as the constant fear of disappointment that surrounds that adoration. As the first story, it sets the perfect tone for the rest of the collection. In multiple stories Flores shows the quiet desperation of the adults in the background. Frequently it is unemployment, an unequal share of the work at home, or poverty. It grounds the stories in a harsh but recognizable reality. 'Forgetting Freddy' is one of the most fear-inducing stories I have read recently, as we see a woman trying to get over the end of her relationship. The final story of the collection is perhaps the strongest, and longest, one. 'Lucky Me' tracks two seemingly separate narratives, one that follows the hesitant friendship between two school girls from different backgrounds, and one that follows a lonely young woman who spies on her neighbours' having sex and feels, quite simply, lost.

This is Paulina Flores' first short story collection and it was first released in Chile in 2015. Her writing is somehow both restrained and deeply emotional. There are no bells and whistles here, Flores doesn't over-exaggerate and doesn't get lost in detail. And yet the world she writes about is easily recognized, as are her characters. There are moments of dark humour, of affection, of dread, but hardly any moment of release. The sense that it all keeps going, that there is no escaping what is happening, suffuses these stories to me and makes it, at times, quite difficult to read. Megan McDowell does a brilliant job at translating the tranquil and sparse prose and I can't wait to read more of Flores' writing in the future.

Humiliation is a brilliant short story collection that captures disillusionment, hope, seduction, fear and everything in between. Truly human and yet somehow above it, I would recommend this short story collection to everyone.