2024
Refractions takes its title from the phenomenon by which a ray bends as it passes from one medium into another, splitting into its constituent colors, revealing what was always present but invisible. Each story is precisely that: a moment of pressure at the boundary between two worlds, two selves, two truths that do not cancel each other out.
Published in Norway as Brytninger, the collection received exceptional critical acclaim upon publication, praised for its extraordinary range, its intellectual ambition, and its prose. The stories are arranged musically, each a movement in a larger composition, the voices accumulating, the themes deepening.
From Medusa to the Mona Lisa to the nameless skeleton with a brick in her jaw, the collection runs a continuous, quietly furious argument about who controls the narrative, who frames the image, and who gets punished for gazing.
Caravaggio appears in three stories; Titian and the Venetian tradition in several more, because the collection is fundamentally concerned with what great art costs, what it is made from, and whether beauty can ever be separated from the cruelty that sometimes generates it.
Characters in 1595 Venice and characters in the present day are subject to the same pressures, make the same bargains, suffer the same specific variety of damage.
The collection refuses the consolation of historical distance.
Among the most chilling, witty, and compulsively readable short fiction I’ve encountered in years.
What a sheer delight it is to encounter historical figures such as Medusa, Caravaggio, Dante, Casanova, and many more brought vividly to life.
What a literary feast this turned out to be!
“Without a doubt the finest short story collection of the year.”
”Brytninger is a short story collection in which the author ventures into the uncertain and shadowy terrain of her protagonists’ inner worlds — figures who actually lived, who crossed paths either in recorded history or in the realm of classical mythology.”
A splendid collection of short stories by Tonje A. Lissandrin. The short stories are intriguing, exciting, well written – some times both dark and quirky and/or funny and macabre and erotic and what not.
Deserves to be read. Thus I hope there are – or will be – translations available.
While reading, it is almost as though you can smell the soil in your nostrils and feel the moisture rising on your skin. More than once I found myself caught off guard by the cunning twist near the end of each story.
The book is superb!
Author Tonje A. Lissandrin has walked a remarkable path.
Tonje A. Lissandrin
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