Review: Here Be Icebergs, Katya Adaui (English translation by Rosalind Harvey)

 This brilliant Peruvian writer has distilled a plethora of different family and relationship dynamics into twelve short stories. 

They range from the ordinary (The Hunger Angel, with 68 distinct memories that coalesce into a stark picture of life from 2 to 68) to the fantastical (Where The Hunt Takes Place, in which a family are contending with a mysterious beast that attacks their house nightly). Some, like We, the Shipwrecked, read more like poetry than prose. 

Every reader will be able to identify with the sharp flashes of memory this collection of short stories invokes, from the most mundane and random, to memories or periods of time we would rather bury (such as This Is The Man). There is no neat ending, or order, per se, to these stories. They are like a series of vignettes that allow us to examine the fictional lives of others and see if they reflect our own experiences. 

Here Be Icebergs is publishes by Charco Press.