I went back to the local library this month, and picked up this collection of short stories by Paul Dalla Rosa. I knew from the first page that I was going to love this book. The writing is simple but rich, and often darkly funny. This line in the first story, ‘The Hard Thing’, for example, made me smile: ‘He was the kind of friend you occasionally email but often lie to.’ Love it.
While there are funny moments, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is, overall, a fairly bleak collection. So many of the characters in these stories are isolated from the people around them, trapped in their own thoughts and habits and (often naive) aspirations. There is a strong sense of desperation, of people seeking meaning in work or in relationships, but never finding it. A lot of the characters mitigate their unhappiness with drugs or alcohol, or consumerism. There is also a feeling of artificiality: video games, online self-help forums, call centres, Hollywood. In these spaces, characters are offered the promise of connection, of meaning, but never really achieve it.
This collection has a wide scope – its stories travel the globe and its characters range from a dishy in a pancake restaurant to a university professor to a film actress. The insight into each character’s mind is, ultimately, what kept me reading. The intimate details of their lives, their thoughts and feelings and opinions, kept me up late at night. This is what I love most about reading: the ability to experience other lives in such close-up detail. And Paul Dalla Rosa has created ten inner lives in this collection that are extremely vivid and exciting. These stories are fascinating, often sad, and sit just at the edge of bizarre. Highly recommend.
Scraps & Fragments 