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    Jagannath
    Jagannath
    Jagannath
    Audiobook4 hours

    Jagannath

    Written by Karin Tidbeck

    Narrated by Kirsten Potter

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A child is born in a tin can. A switchboard operator finds himself in hell. Three corpulent women float somewhere beyond time. Welcome to the weird world of Karin Tidbeck, the visionary Swedish author of literary sci-fi, speculative fiction, and mind-bending fantasy who has captivated readers around the world. Originally published by the tiny press Cheeky Frawg-the passion project of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer-Jagannath has been celebrated by readers and critics alike, with rave reviews from major outlets and support from lauded peers like China Mieville and even Ursula K. Le Guin herself. These are stories in which fairies haunt quiet towns, and an immortal being discovers the nature of time-stories in which anything is possible.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateFeb 6, 2018
    ISBN9781684410712
    Jagannath

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    Reviews for Jagannath

    4/5

    156 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Karin Tidbeck's got something crazy going on and I am just so glad that she exists. This book of 13 short stories is a quick, baffling, and exciting read. They were translated from Swedish to English and didn't manage to lose any of their Scandinavian weirdness. They're often dark, often whimsical, and always beautifully written and imagined. I still can't stop thinking about the unique plots and characters that inhabited Tidbeck's worlds, whether I fully understood them or not.

      One of my favorites is "Brita's Holiday Village", which you can read here. Another is "Pyret" which is a fascinating story presented like a research essay. It's about a creature that shape shifts to hide among herd animals like cows and eventually, in the case of one village that's mentioned, people. It changes from historical to present-time when she visits the old mostly abandoned village to see if there are any pyrets still there. What she finds is disturbing, it almost feels like horror. The ending is so poignant, it took my breath away. All of her stories had that kind of effect on me.

      A story that shows off just how bizarre these stories can get is "Aunts." It's one of, if I remember correctly, two stories that are set in a kind of antiquated, royal, Alice in Wonderland kind of world. There are a set of three women whose sole purpose in life is to eat. A lot. So much so that they can't move. They're brought food in this little dome in an orchard until they actually burst. Once that whole mess is cleaned up, typically a new tiny aunt is clinging to the old one's heart. The story explores what happens when there isn't a tiny aunt waiting inside. Going to be honest, I had no idea what was going on, but it was certainly interesting and disturbing.

      This hardly scratches the surface of the stories. There are people who are in love with machines, human bodies run like air ships by tinier people inside (sort of), world changing telemarketing, alternate dimensions, creature creation, fights with god, and more. If you're willing to open your mind for some really fantastical, almost mythical stories, Karen Tidbeck is an incredible writer with amazingly original stories to tell. They're inspired by sci-fi, folklore, and Nordic tradition. I heard that she has a novel out in Swedish, and I'm devastated that it is not translated and in my hands right now. I was really impressed by this collection of stories and can't wait to read more of Tidbeck's.
    • 4/5
      Weird fiction, Swedish-style. The stories in Jagannath are full of Nordic atmosphere: agrarian villages and folkloric creatures mixed with an exploration of the dark side of Human Psychology. Recommend if you like bizarre fiction.
    • 4/5
      Much of what passes for "dreamlike" is something much less than that. This is the real deal. Unsettling; murkily symbolic; attractive and frighteningly repulsive in turn. This is "fantastic fiction" in most every sense of the word, and fiction that, for all of that, feels very grounded in the human being. I'll definitely read more Tidbeck as books and stories become available.
    • 4/5
      What critics called Tidbeck’s ‘straightforward style’ came across to me as a taste for appropriate detail in both character and landscape. Tidbeck gives magical realism a good name. Her pacing flickers throughout the book, as she establishes a pattern of irregular occurrence, physical abnormality, and then revelation at the end that becomes not quite predictable, but not entirely surprising after the first few. The completeness of her world creation reminded me of Sofia Samatar, and something about the shape of her first few characters reminded me of Tom Holt’s sense of humor.
    • 5/5
      Collections can be hit and miss, but this collection of Tidbeck's speculative stories is everything a reader could want in such a collection--the tales are unique, fresh, and ripe with characters and concepts that will stick with a reader long past the book has been closed. Even the themes which come up repeatedly are treated in such unique and interesting ways that there's no repetition felt, and what's especially impressive is that the shorter stories in the collection are just as striking as the longer ones. Among the stand-outs in the collection for me were "Beatrice" and "Who is Arvid Pekon?", as well as "Rebecka"--and these are among some of the shorter stories in the collection, though I think I'll come back to read them repeatedly.I'd absolutely recommend this collection to all lovers of speculative fiction, as these stories have the depth and freshness of the best high-concept novels out there in all of the best ways possible. I'm a fan of Tidbeck for life after reading Jagannath.
    • 5/5
      Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish fiction writer who writes in both Swedish and English, and does her own translations in both directions. In her afterword, she talks about both the challenges and the benefits--the concepts that can't really be translated, the ones that can't quite be translated, but don't add anything but an extra stumble for the reader who doesn't speak that language, the insights you can get by coming at a language from the outside.She also talks about the experience of reading all of H. P. Lovecraft's work, more or less nonstop.The stories here vary a lot, but overall have a touch of the surreal, as well as a perspective that's less familiar than that of writers who grew up in the English-speaking world. We see in this collection the impostor creature the pyret, and the vittra, a Scandinavian variety of the fae. We also meet intelligent machines that form close relationships with humans who care for them, and a far-future mechanical ark on a damaged Earth. There's variety, compelling characters, and fascinating stories, here,Highly recommended.I bought this audiobook.
    • 5/5
      A call center routes calls to the afterlife. A bereaved daughter writes to her recently deceased father about her missing mother. A girl puts on her great-grandmother's wedding dress and disappears into the mountain. A society of symbiotes living and working inside their mother begins to crumble. Told in beautiful, spare prose, Jagannath is a remarkable collection of short stories from Swedish writer Karen Tidbeck.Tidbeck translates her own work, and there's a lovely essay in the back of the book about how the process of composition and translation differs between languages. But if you didn't know these were translations, you'd never guess. The pictures these stories draw are so vivid, so crisp and clear, you feel you could walk right into them - even the strangest of stories, like those about the ever-increasing aunts who grow their successors inside their own hearts. If you're only familiar with Nordic literature from the dark thrillers that have become so popular in recent years, give this collection a try.
    • 4/5
      I missed this when it first came out from a small publisher. I am so glad I got a chance to read it this time around! A range of stories that don't fit in any one box that go from weird to just plain bizarre, but always entertaining! A great choice to dip in and out of for a story or two at a time.
    • 5/5
      This volume is so short that it's barely a book (134 pages). Are these all of the short stories that Tidbeck's written? Why not put more in? This is not enough! I hope that her other writing is translated into English, because this is an excellent (if brief) collection.

      I would highly recommend these stories for fans of Kelly Link and Theodora Goss. (As well as Ursula LeGuin, who blurbed it, and Elizabeth Hand, who wrote the introduction.)

      Contains:

      Beatrice - "If you love someone, set them free." If they don't come back... oh well. A steampunk tale of a man in love with an airship and a woman in love with a steam engine. Bizarre, disturbing, and an incisive commentary of the different types of feelings which we might call 'love.'

      Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom - An estranged son finds his alcoholic father dead, and writes letters thinking back to when everything went wrong - when his mother disappeared. An effective mix of modern-day sensibilities and folklore.

      Miss Nyberg and I - A glimpse out of the corner of an eye turns into a story that might be more true than its author guessed.

      Rebecka - What if God insisted on repeatedly 'saving' a suicidal person, refusing to let them take their own life? What extremes might that person be driven to? A fantastic story that captures the harrowing feeling of friendship with a suicidal person.

      Herr Cederberg - Escape from the cruelty of this world in an airship. Or is it a metaphor for suicide? Or is it transcendence? Reminded me of a less fleshed-out version of Theodora Goss' "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm."

      Who Is Arvid Pekon? - A man is employed in a call center where the job involves pretending to be whoever it might be that the caller wishes to speak to. That's weird. But it gets weirder.

      Brita's Holiday Village - A journal from a writer who takes a cottage in the off-season to get some work done in peace and quiet, and unexpectedly encounters something fragile and amazing.

      Reindeer Mountain - Two sisters, rivals. A conflict over a family heirloom. A family tale, folklore about the mysterious Sidhe-like 'vittra.' One girl has always dreamed of other worlds. She'd be delighted to be swept off by a fairy lover to 'under the hill.' But that's not what happens.

      Cloudberry Jam - Reminded me of a warped version of Thumbelina. A woman creates herself a child - but it's not a real human child, and can't be what she wants.

      Pyret - A faux encyclopedia entry on an imaginary creature, read like it belongs in one of Jeff VanDerMeer's collections.

      Augusta Prima - A look into what it might be like to live under a faery mound - from a fairy's point of view. Fairly horrifying.

      Aunts - A further exploration of a element mentioned in passing in Augusta Prima. Like the preceding story, strongly horrific, but also sad.

      Jagannath - A very China Mieville-esque story about a group of humans who have lived for generations inside a giant insect, dependent on it for every aspect of their lives. But their 'Mother' is dying... Grotesque and memorable.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing collection. I picked it up initially because of the cover art (it is a style I wish genre fiction used more often), without having heard of Tidbeck before. Reading it, I thought it was excellent: Tidbeck has a spare, thoughtful style and her stories are vivid, unusual, and not infrequently creepy. Every piece in the collection is strong.

      But this collection is not just good: it has traveled with me. I don't have a long memory for short stories. I don't tend to return to them, re-read them, and collect them the way I do with novels. But I'm writing this a month later, and I am still turning these stories over in my head, looking for hidden places.
    • 3/5
      Boy, did this book get a bunch of undeserved blurbing. You'd think it was the second coming of Gaiman. The writing is handicapped by the author's unfamiliarity with English, and the stories were not all that striking or original. I don't see what all the fuss is about.
    • 3/5
      Contents:

      Introduction by Elizabeth Hand

      "Similarly, Karin Tidbeck has written these stories so that readers may love them."


      Beatrice

      "Franz couldn't stop looking at her. Her body was a voluptuous oblong, matte skin wrapped tightly over a gently rounded skeleton."


      Some Letters for Ove Lindström

      "You did what a dad is supposed to do. You made sure I went to school; you cooked dinner; we watched television together; you helped me with homework. I was never yelled at. You were never mean. When you started drinking it was quietly, in the armchair by the television. You'd get distant and fall asleep at odd times. I learned to make myself dinner."


      Miss Nyberg and I

      "It made no resistance as you bent down and picked it up, lifted it into the kitchen and put it down on the table. You looked at each other for a while. Then you said:
      'Did I grow you?'
      It nodded in reply."


      Rebecka

      "I wanted to tell her to do something radical--jump from the West Bridge, throw herself in front of a train--just to get it over with. But I didn't have the heart."


      Herr Cederberg

      "He surveyed the little space. There was plenty of material to work with. He rolled up his shirt sleeves, took off his jacket, and started sketching a framework."


      Who is Arvid Pekon?

      "On Arvid Pekon's console, Subject 1297's light was blinking. He adjusted his headset, plugged the end of the cord into the jack by the lamp and said in a mild voice:
      'Operator.'"


      Brita's Holiday Village

      "I stocked up on pasta and tomatoes and beans. I found old-fashioned whey-cheese, the kind that tastes like toffee. I'm eating it out of the box with a spoon."


      Reindeer Mountain

      "Cilla was twelve years old the summer Sara put on her great-grandmother's wedding dress and disappeared up the mountain."


      Cloudberry Jam

      "I made you in a tin can."


      Pyret

      "A mimic and an infiltrator, Pyret mingles with and assumes the form of pack- or herd animals, changing color and shape to match the others."


      Augusta Prima

      "More moisture ran down her temples, making tracks in the thick layers of powder. Her artful corkscrew curls were already wilting."


      Aunts

      "The Aunts had one single holy task: to expand."


      Jagannath

      "Another child was born in the great Mother, excreted from the tube protruding from the Nursery ceiling. It landed with a wet thud on the organic bedding underneath."

      Author's Afterword: Transposing Worlds

      "Writing in Swedish and English are two very different experiences. Your native language resonates in your bones. Each spoken word reaffirms and changes the world as you see it, intellectually and emotionally. Because Swedish is my mother tongue, I can take enormous liberties with it because I know exactly and instinctively how it works. English doesn't quite allow itself to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck in the same way. As a result, I'm more careful with the prose, perhaps less adventurous, because without that gut reaction it's hard to know exactly how something will resonate with an English-speaking reader. On the other, I may find paths into English that a native speaker might not, because there are aspects of your native tongue that you just don't see since you are standing in the middle of it."
    • 4/5
      A gem of a short story collection, bursting with imagination. These satisfying and seemingly simple tales unfurl their complexity and challenge your expectations.There are beautiful, whimsical ideas that have a dark human heart, like the wonderful opening story of a man who romances an airship. There are delightfully odd stories such as a player of violent croquet in the land of the Fae who discovers time and other evocative tales. I can smell the stink of dark cramped tunnels of the mothership as she births the last remnants of humanity or a starkly, beautiful mountain where old tales say the nature spirits called the Vittra live. Characters come alive briefly and connect to us, whether growing their own child to love to a pair of sisters dealing with their Vittra and their heritage. There is heartbreak and love and the aftermath of how we feel when we touch, however fleeting, the other."Cilla could neither name nor explain. It was like a longing, worse than anything she had ever experienced, but for what she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen, and she was terrified that she would miss it." Don't be Cilla, buy this book. Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      I could easily have read this book in one sitting--it's short, it's punchy and it's completely captivating. But I didn't let myself. Partly because I wanted to make it last as long as I possibly could and partly, like Lovecraft, because I felt a little bit like if I read all of the stories in one go I might go just the tiniest bit mad.

      I don't think I've utterly loved every single story in a collection before, and certainly never as unreservedly as this.
    • 5/5
      BrilliantTidbeck has written a collection of weird fiction that feels both fresh and peculiarly Nordic. There are, fittingly for the 2013 challenge, 13 stories in this collection. In Beatrice we meet a man who falls in (sexual)love with an airship, and this is one of the less weird stories. My favourites here were Pyret, written like a scientific treatise, and Brita’s holiday village where a writer spends some time in a holiday village which is populated overnight by many people claiming to be her relatives and the great story, Augusta Prima, that flips the usual “human meets supernatural and is changed by it” on its head set in a Faerie court. From subtly odd to wildly fantastical this collection is never dull and Tidbeck manages to catch your imagination and take it on a very satisfying journey. There is an interesting afterword by the author also dealing with the challenge of translating her own works and why she needed to.Overall – highly readable collection of shorts
    • 5/5
      I love the glimpse, the sense of a world bigger than what’s on paper, the single idea explored to its limits. For me, when a writer has an original mind and the writing style to pull it off, there’s nothing better than a short story collection. If there’s also a sense of a red thread, of the collection being more than just a group of stories, but a manifestation of a way of seeing the world, I’m won over for real.Karin Tidbeck has all of this in abundance. These stories might have relatives in the works of Miéville, or Link, or Lovecraft, but they are not quite like anything I’ve ever read. Because they are weird, sure, weird as all heck sometimes. And creepy. And scary and funny. But they are also filled with an unusual warmth. They are populated with people who kind of embrace the stangeness they encounter. The meetings with monsters, folklore creatures and bizarre messengers here are actual genuine meetings. And often, as in “Herr Cederberg”, the strangeness is paired with true beauty.We meet with a writer who spends the summer in an abandoned holiday village, only to one morning find it populated with smiling people who claim to be her relatives. We meet a young girl who finds out that her sister’s mental illness might be something completely different. We meet a woman who grows a strange, burrowing little creature in a tin can, to have something to love. We meet a man who falls in physical, hopeless love with an airship.There isn’t a bad story in the bunch here, and the variation is just right – the book feels diverse but coherent. In “Rebecka” we are in a world where God has returned, but everything stayed more or less the same. The narrator’s best friend wants to die, but God just won’t let her. In “Pyret” we are, in the form of a scientific article, presented to an extremely unusual folklore creature and the events surrounding it’s last sightings. And in the title story, the last scraps of humanity are living in symbiosis inside Mother, a giant centipedal creature roaming the wasteland. Not everyone comes up with a story like that. Even fewer pull it off.I loved this, and recommend it to anyone with an interest in the weird. Also, Tidbeck’s description of Sweden, both Stockholm and the far north, is accurate and full of ambience. As are her other places by the way – such as the decadent croquet court of murderous queen Mnemosyne.
    • 5/5
      Strange. Disturbing. Unimaginable, but imagined. Weird. Karin Tidbeck’s first collection of short stories, Jagganath: Stories, can be so described, but one must also include compelling. It is not usual for me to want to read story after story in a single-author collection in a single sitting, but here each story was better than the last, and I stayed up long into the night reading. This Swedish author, who translated her own work into English, has an odd mind that produces odd stories, stories that every lover of weird fiction needs to read. My fascination with this collection started with the first story, “Beatrice.” It is about a man who falls in love with an airship — not in the way a man normally falls in love with a complicated piece of machinery, not as in, “He loves his 1964 Mustang,” but actual passionate, physical and emotional love. He shares a warehouse for his love with a woman who has fallen in love with a steam engine. Somehow, Tidbeck makes this scenario work, even to the point of describing a sort of marriage between the machines and their human lovers, and beyond. But “Beatrice” is Tidbeck’s way of easing us into the weirdness she has on offer. The story that has most stayed with me the most is “Rebecka.” Rebecka is a woman living in a time after God has returned to Earth and taken up an active role in the lives of His people, which often means frying them on the spot when they commit a transgression or saving them when another attempts to harm them. Karl was fried, but only after he had spent three days torturing Rebecka in every way he could imagine. Rebecka has been left horribly damaged in mind and body, and wants nothing more than to commit suicide; but God will neither allow her to do so nor mend her mind. She finally figures out how to solve her problem. The story left me with the same sort of chills I got when reading Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” and I consider it equally deserving of the awards Chiang garnered. It’s a brilliant story. “Augusta Prima” is another especially fascinating story, which opens with Augusta engaged in an unusual game of croquet, one using balls carved from bone and requiring a violence not usually associated with the lawn game. Augusta unwittingly discovers the concept of time after discovering a watch when searching for her ball in the rough beyond the gardens. Her discovery leads her down strange paths not normally visible from her world, into philosophies of which she has never dreamt. Anyone who has ever had to call a governmental agency for help will be amused by “Who is Arvid Pekon?” I’ve often thought that the real person who answers the phone when I finally get through a complicated and contradictory message system was really the only one I ever talked to, and was inventing answers on the spot as he or she put on different voices to represent the different people I’d called. I’d love to have Miss Sycorax’s ability to speak directly to whomever I chose. Finnish customs and folklore play a role in several of Tidbeck’s stories. “Brita’s Holiday Village,” for instance, relies upon the use of a holiday village as the site for a writer’s personal retreat to complete her novel. “Reindeer Mountain” concerns the vittra, a race of beings that lives in the mountains (and that’s actually inside the mountains, not on them) and occasionally seduces a human female. The vittra are something like fairies, but not as cute, and the story dramatically illustrates how they might appeal to young women dissatisfied with what life has to offer them. “Pyret” takes on the mantle of a sociological piece describing the titular life form, complete with footnotes. This shapeshifter race appears to be benign, if not actually of positive benefit to humans, but it is difficult to study and hard to tell if it is sentient or not. The story describes a number of interactions between humans and Pyret; while it does not have a standard plot, it is fascinating on its own terms as a study of a species of whick little is known. “Aunts” and “Jagannath” both deal, in their own ways, with the nature of the body as surreal object (one maintained by internal sentient creatures, for instance, or bodies growing to unfathomable sizes) in realities that are not our own. Each, in its odd way, also deals with the question of the body as one’s home. They are marvelously peculiar stories. The introduction by Elizabeth Hand, discussing the disturbing and yet funny nature of Tidbeck’s writing and the afterword by Tidbeck shed some additional light on the stories and the milieu in which Tidbeck writes. They are both fascinating for one interested in knowing more about how stories work, but unnecessary to the enjoyment of the stories themselves. Jagganath: Stories is one of the best books of 2012. It contains writing that it new, different, alien, work that makes the normal world look strangely different, as if one’s eyes have taken in a landscape that alters our own. It is beautifully strange.