Caitlin Horrocks

The pacing is slow but the writing is lovely, and the book as a whole is very sweet, if a bit shaggy at times. The characters, Erik Satie and his family and a few people in his orbit ("friends" isn't quite the word) are often obtuse even to themselves and able to connect only in small explosions of affection (except for younger brother Conrad, who is the steadfast rudder of everyone's lives). Still, they're sweet in spite of—or maybe because of—their essential sadnesses. Mothers and sons show more don't fare well here, although not for lack of love. The final part in sister Louise's voice, about how the dead brush against you softly like fur, is worth the price of admission alone—particularly the passage where she has a clerk in a department store take out all the fur coats and walks among them, just to commune: "Hello ghosts. You are so, so soft."

It's worth having Satie's music in your head when you open the book, even just the Gymnopédies—and if you think you're not familiar with them you're probably wrong. Give them a listen on YouTube. They're very nice and an effective soundtrack to the entire novel. show less

The stories in Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks are filled with people puzzling over their lives and a world that holds more questions than answers; they don't even know what questions to ask; they try to master the words themselves. They hold onto the past; they try to escape; they risk going into the unknown; they make a new start.

I lived in the aura of the first story, The Sleep, for days.

"Bounty was an assertion, an act of faith. It looked best when left unexamined." ~from show more Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks
"Our children came home and told us that we were the suckers of the last century," living in a town with no future and no prospects. Immigrants had come for the free land, and stayed out of pure persistence.

One winter the Rasmussen family decide to hibernate until spring. Soon other families also hibernate, saving money on food and heat, children happy not to stand in freezing weather for a school bus. The town becomes a media sensation. How to explain why they stayed, why they slept?

The story was unsettling, and yet, somehow comforting. The quotation from James Joyce's The Dead stayed in my head as I thought of a world sleeping under an eternal, gentle snowfall.

In Norwegian for Troll, Annika returns to the remote Keweenaw Peninsula to aid her elderly mother and stays on after her death, stuck in her family's past, until she remembers her immigrant ancestors had risked a journey into the future.

While Rose sorts her mother's estate she wonders about her mother's enigmatic relationship with her roommate, Bev.

A teacher realizes she can't save every disturbed child who comes through her classroom.

A woman at a party decides to sleep with a man because he is going to jail.

Teenage girls looking for guaranteed happiness turn to Magic- 8 Balls and Ouija boards.

A divorced father helps his estranged son, wishing he had advice for living in an uncertain world.

An elderly woman knows she is in her last days. She pities the priest. "How endless, the secrets of other. How endless, the reassurance they need,"she thinks.

A woman loses everything on the Oregon Trail, except her own life.

A traveler abroad seeks answers to questions, dreaming of a new life before he is forced to return home.

The tour guide at Paradise Lodge promises to show the 'real Peru,' but all he has are stories to fill the hungry tourists. When he gives them the real thing, he discovers their inability to comprehend what they are seeing.

A woman realizes that her childhood memories are unreliable.

The last story, Life Among the Terranauts, is also about a retreat from the world, but is filled with sinister overtones. A group of volunteers are paid to live in a biodome. They had been chosen for their "fortitude, for pigheaded faith," but 542 days in, with 188 to go, food is scarce and things are falling apart. One man has embraced this life, proclaiming they are a new society, a new start for humanity, calling himself Adam and the narrator Eve. It is chilling.

Fortitude and faith. It's what we all need in this life.

The writing is fantastic, with sentences that stuck in my head.

Seed hulls scatter dark across the sinking snow, punctuation marks without words.
Growing up had been so far a great un-knowing, an erosion of the facts that had once seemed very clear and precious to her.
The silences that exist inside all stories.

There is no blade that mends, they sing. Only the thread going forward. Only our readiness for the cut.

I previously read Horrock's novel The Vexations.

I received an ARC in exchange for a fair and unbiased review show less

This is a fascinating fictionalized account of the life of Erik Satie and his family and the Parisian art scene during the first half of the 20th century. Told from the points of view of Erik, his sister Suzanne, brother Conrad, and a close friend Philippe (based on the poet LaTour) we learn about the relationships among family members and bohemian artists of the time. The Satie family was torn apart following the death of the mother when Erik was very young, and the siblings never really show more recovered from that loss, each in a unique way. Horrocks's writing is masterful and pulls us into the characters and the art world, making for a memorable novel, with the added benefit of learning about the very quirky composer. show less

This Is Not Your City is an itty little book, but packs a punch. I have been having trouble getting into the modern short story of late, but Ms. Horrocks offerings certainly stood their own. Each story gives us a glimpse of a woman lost in her own life. Some are quite conventional in form, while others delve into magical realism and experiment with format in surprisingly moving ways. A couple, such as the title entry, lose themselves in contrivance, but as a whole we have here some show more beautiful, dark, and very funny writing. show less