After a Dance is a collection of short stories
After a Dance is a collection of totally engrossing short stories that launch you into people’s chaotic, bizarre or humdrum lives from the first sentence.
O’Connor seems to drop you right in the middle of scenarios, no words are wasted on build-up. In fact, most of the time no words are wasted at all. It’s impressive how so much is said with so few of them.
The stories feel like they tear away the surface appearances of people’s lives and characters to reveal the darker, more unpleasant realities beneath.
O’Connor uses a calm, measured tone to describe appalling scenarios and they are all the more striking as a result.
There’s a sad sense of waste, that people are doing so little with their time and that life is so limited.
In Love Jobs, a man taking a friend’s dog for a walk ends up trapped in a surreal nightmare involving a botched mugging and a dead pet.
In Kissing Time, a young woman is panicking because she’s going to lose her teeth and then no one will kiss her. “The gums were receding, going nowhere fast.”
The writing is excellent. O’Connor has a way of putting things so that they stay in your mind for some time after reading.
In all of them, there’s a sense of people flailing around with no real idea of how to live their lives or even of how they want to live their lives.
Everything feels out of control. As another review put it, the stories are full of people who are living on the edges of their own lives.
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