Book review: Show and Shadow, by Dorothy Tse

by Dorothy Tse
East Slope Publishing
4 stars
Amy Russell

The opening story in Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse's new collection of short stories is starkly Kafkaesque. In Woman Fish, instead of a giant beetle, the metamorphosis that takes place is of a piscatorial nature. A man wakes up next to his wife to find she has turned into a fish. And this is not the only strange awakening of the book - in Head, a mother awakes to find that her son's head has disappeared overnight.

But the surrealism in Tse's collection is far from macabre. Instead, the bizarre tales of sexual exploitation, family dynamics and intimate relationships present a charming and vividly magical world. A dreamlike quality pervades these pages, as we accept such strange and disturbing imagery in each story, then slip into another alternate reality that is just as odd.

As translator Nicky Harman writes in the book's introduction: "These surreal tales - fantastic in parts - are made the more effective for being grounded firmly in reality at the same time."

It is this juxtaposition that makes Tse's writing so effective, and its themes all the more frightening, yet captivating.

Familiar glimpses of Hong Kong sit within the book's tales of twisted realities (where the logical solution to a missing limb is to replace it or match it with one of your own), adding to the paradoxical feeling of simultaneous discomfort and enticement.