BIRTHDAY

A mischievous young girl longs for a beautiful doll, unaware of what the adults around her are getting up to. A wife suffers a tragic loss. An office worker dates a man who turns into a stalker. A librarian gives in to a secret desire. A sister is haunted by the memory of a younger brother who disappeared. Animals feature in several stories: a pet cat, a fox in the snow. A heart transplant recipient tells his wife that the surgeon cooked his original heart, then fed it to his dachshund. The focus throughout this collection is on women: their inner lives, their desires, their complex thoughts and often contradictory feelings. There are men here as well, but they’re ancillary, never the main characters. A woman repulsed by her alcoholic stepfather tries to understand how her mother ended up with him: “What about him did she come to like, why did she want to marry this man, have children, live together with him day to day, year to year, eat at the same table, sleep in the same bed?” With a perceptive eye and a nuanced understanding, Egle shows the complicated bonds that connect families, friends, and romantic partners, their dependencies, frustrations, tenderness, and incongruities. Her characters contend with heartbreak, loss, and cognitive decline. “It’s a woman’s fate to love and suffer,” a woman thinks on a three-day hiking trip with an old flame who wants to marry her, but “she has strongly resolved to cheat fate.” The prose is unhurried, the language at times refreshingly earthy, and in any situation there’s more than first meets the eye. Of a field of beautiful flowers, the same woman observes, “In the sweltering heat they exude the aroma of a piss-filled jar of honey.”

Mar 18, 2025 - 07:35

A mischievous young girl longs for a beautiful doll, unaware of what the adults around her are getting up to. A wife suffers a tragic loss. An office worker dates a man who turns into a stalker. A librarian gives in to a secret desire. A sister is haunted by the memory of a younger brother who disappeared. Animals feature in several stories: a pet cat, a fox in the snow. A heart transplant recipient tells his wife that the surgeon cooked his original heart, then fed it to his dachshund. The focus throughout this collection is on women: their inner lives, their desires, their complex thoughts and often contradictory feelings. There are men here as well, but they’re ancillary, never the main characters. A woman repulsed by her alcoholic stepfather tries to understand how her mother ended up with him: “What about him did she come to like, why did she want to marry this man, have children, live together with him day to day, year to year, eat at the same table, sleep in the same bed?” With a perceptive eye and a nuanced understanding, Egle shows the complicated bonds that connect families, friends, and romantic partners, their dependencies, frustrations, tenderness, and incongruities. Her characters contend with heartbreak, loss, and cognitive decline. “It’s a woman’s fate to love and suffer,” a woman thinks on a three-day hiking trip with an old flame who wants to marry her, but “she has strongly resolved to cheat fate.” The prose is unhurried, the language at times refreshingly earthy, and in any situation there’s more than first meets the eye. Of a field of beautiful flowers, the same woman observes, “In the sweltering heat they exude the aroma of a piss-filled jar of honey.”