Beneath the Liquid Skin, By Berit Ellingsen (A Review By Simon Jacobs)

 

firthFORTH Books

108 pgs./$10.95

Towards the end of this collection’s first story, Berit Ellingsen writes, “We need to be something else again.” We begin in uncertainty at the point of dissolve, as things change, and it is this unease, this perpetual state of transition that drives Ellingsen’s brilliant, undulating and mysterious first short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin.

The book begins with the aforementioned “Sliding,” the inevitable drift into winter, and ends in a duet, “The White,” which chronicles the journey of “you,” a logistics assistant who treks from a research base into the vast, shifting whiteness of the Antarctic landscape, and finds wholeness and home, the universality of everything in the ice and snow. This is followed by “Anthropocene,” describing, in fierce, poetic language, a frigid apocalypse on our age, dragging everything into the center, when “you” and “I” are torn apart in fire and ice, only to begin again:

This is where it ends: in a concrete hall between reticent, snow-burdened mountains, under a mute sky the color of forgetfulness, snow falling like soot, and the air so frigid that every metal object tears the skin from your fingers. The lashing nettle-wind shrieks and tries every door and hollow window frame, like a burglar at night, clinking across the floor’s lake of glass shards. The red-rusted ley lines with rows of disc-shaped insulators curve into the sky and sing of legacies misspent and lost, of eternal life squandered.

(These, these are the places, the ways we are drawn to follow the cold; Ellingsen, a Korean-Norwegian writer who lives and works in Norway but writes in English, is known to pine for the fjords when abroad.)

The variety and ordering of the stories throughout Beneath the Liquid Skin has a terrific fluidity to it, balancing straightforward tales with more abstract works—short, textural pieces that hover between prose and poetry. The combination situates the book in an atmosphere all its own. “The Love Decay Has for the Living”—a fable-like story of two male lovers in a drowned city, where one, the Chef, harvests the mushrooms growing from an infected wound in his Lover’s arm—sits alongside satirical fantasy like “The Glory of Glormorsel,” bizarre dream sequences like “Sexual Dimorphism – A Nightmare Transcribed from Sanskrit,” and interstellar set-pieces (“A Catalog of Planets”). In this diversity of landscapes we find a world of color and current stretching from peak to plain, marked with mountainside villages, kingdoms scraping the sky, and cities floating in the waters from endless monsoons. The characters populating these stories are both named and unnamed, collective and singular, with nationalities and homelands both real and imagined, from the Ural Mountains to a kingdom built entirely of mother of pearl, history and not-history.

These are stories that subvert themselves, restless in their bodies and heedless to the constraints of genre, blurring at the edges. Stories oscillate between the modern and seemingly ancient, with and without the markers of our modern, technological experience. Yet the pieces in this collection feel like they all come from the same world, utterly expansive in its breadth and experience.

And yet, all of them seem to explore something fundamental, journeys outward but never back, into the mountains or out into the snow to find new versions of ourselves. Ellingsen’s writing, most of all, speaks to the mutability of all things, the search for something stable: “Still Life of Hypnos” depicts preservation and decay in a series of time-lapse photographs, while “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye” depicts the life, flight, and reinvention of a Soviet agent during the Cold War, in the numbers 0 to 9. She writes:

 7 are the years that follow, when he gathers information like eiderdown. Years of warm smiles and cold handshakes, while ice shrouds and flays the Moskva River and clouds rush across the sky like time.

8 is the number of days it takes for the cosmos to entropy into chaos in the pewter sunlight off the river. Assets are lost, intentions intercepted. They take him back to the white tiles and ask him again, this time more insistently. The information he transmitted was tailored to distract. Now he is no longer useful and his employer has been notified. He expects to be killed, desires it almost.

Time is palpable; new identities are assumed. In comparison to this, in the second series of “Still Life of Hypnos,” life decays before our eyes, before the lovers even enter the frame:

The flowers open slowly, tremble in the flow of time like the lips of a shy lover. Finally, they reveal themselves in full, many-hued splendor. This state lasts for less than twelve hours before the blossoms sag, crumple, and lose their petals. Long stamen bow, dusting the steel with pollen in a final attempt at procreating before death. The plants wilt in individual tempo, but the end point is always the same.

Berit Ellingsen has the meticulousness of a painter. These are wonderfully ornate stories—populated with food, rare mushrooms, exotic seasonings, sturgeon eggs and pomegranates; with flora, the heather and chestnut trees; with animals and landscapes, from fjords and mountaintops, farmer’s fields to the white plains of Antarctica. And they are all painted in such beautiful colors, using language so precise and acute as to convince us that the mythical world Ellingsen describes could just as well be our own, a peculiar geography we’ve never seen before. Or perhaps it’s meant to make us realize the intricacy of our daily lives; the ways we eat, sleep, walk, and transform. The purpose and intent of these things.

But if Berit Ellingsen is a fabulist, she is a fabulist devoid of cliché—she presents no easy truths, no tidily-wrapped endings. As she writes in “Anthropocene,”

The world was an epic poem, but it became a dirge. The firstborn illness took everything, as hungry as its name. We wrung the air and the water and the soil like a rag, until everything became yellow and drained. When that was done, we turned on one another.

If there is a moral lesson to be learned here, it is that the world is just as strange, arbitrary and self-devouring as we’ve always believed it to be.

 

Simon Jacobs is a writer from Ohio currently living in NYC. He curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words, and may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.