Maybe This Time
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
A spellbinding short story collection by one of Austria’s most critically acclaimed authors.
A man becomes obsessed with observing his neighbours. A large family gathers for Christmas only to wait for the one member who never turns up. An old woman lures a man into her house where he finds dolls resembling himself as a boy. Mesmerizing and haunting stories about loss of identity in the modern world.
Why Peirene chose to publish this book: ‘I love Kafka and here we have a Kafkaesque sense of alienation - not to mention narrative experiments galore! Outwardly normal events slip into drama before they tip into horror. These oblique tales exert a fascinating hold over the reader.’ Meike Ziervogel
‘Clever and enticing.’ Alexander Starritt, Times Literary Supplement
‘Not since Julio Cortázar's game of Hopscotch . . . has an author so daringly undertaken to challenge the reader.’ Amanda Hopkinson, Independent
‘It is . . . very refreshing to be confronted by stories which so firmly refuse to yield to conventional interpretation.’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
‘This award-winning collection by the Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig drew comparisons with Kafka. But Hotschnig’s quietly terrifying voice is all his own.’ Jane Shilling, Daily Mail
‘Intriguing and powerful.’ Pam Norfolk, Lancashire Evening Post
GUARDIAN PAPERBACKS OF THE YEAR 2011
Related to Maybe This Time
Related ebooks
Sisters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Neptune Room Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWalaschek's Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ninth Building Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBecause Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day that I Was Born Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMotti Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Beast in Paradise Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meetings with Death Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLoquela Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Here Be Icebergs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In The Dark Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5THOU Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Specters of Algeria Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSay This: Two Novellas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dark Side of Skin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Ants Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLime Pickled and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe White Trail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Brother Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Saviour of Lasnamäe Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Children of the Cave Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIrredenta Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSilences, or a Woman's Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the Belly of the Queen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHigh Tide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And the Wind Sees All Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlien Virus Love Disaster: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salki Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Naked Woman Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Nonnets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
General Fiction For You
The City of Dreaming Books Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It Ends with Us: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cabin at the End of the World: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unhoneymooners Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shantaram: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Candy House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Outsider: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The King James Version of the Bible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Other Black Girl: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Maybe This Time
21 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This little book is a triumph. I have to confess to not being a lover of short stories, but this is in a different league altogether.Written by one of Austria’s leading authors, Alois Hotschnig, it is veritable potpourri of unique observations of everyday life in frequently unsettling detail. Each story packs an emotional punch and, in many cases, presents a conundrum for the reader to decipher. In “The Same Silence, The Same Noise” a neighbour ponders the motive of the couple next door’s continual presence on their jetty. Day after day they sit on their deckchairs by the lake side, regardless of the weather. Aside from raking the reeds, they do and say nothing at all. Why does a woman, living close to man’s friend’s house, entice him in to see her doll collection? Moreover, why does she caress a doll that resembles the man himself? That is question posed in “Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut”. For me, the most accomplished story is “Morning, Noon and Night” which portrays a seemingly very ordinary day in any town, anywhere in the world. Yet,periodically, the author injects a line which is unsettling and out of keeping with the plot line. What has happened in that bustling street? What is the cause of the newly built wall and railings, not to mention the skid marks on the road? What has taken the character to the GP and why?Oh, and this little book is addictive. You will find yourself reading and rereading each story…….just in case you missed something the first time round! All nine stories are completely different and I defy anyone not to be hooked from the first page.Another triumph for Peirene Press who have an uncanny knack of selecting the cream of European literature’s crop. This acclaimed Austrian author’s work has been lovingly translated and this mesmerising collection of stories demands to be read and enjoyed.This book was sent to me by the publisher for an honest review.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I found this a very unsettling collection of short stories. I mean that in a good way. Being unsettled is often the prelude to thinking about things in a new way, and to me that’s one of the most important functions of literature.The stories are very varied in style and content, but many of them deal with the question of identity in one way or another. In the first story, The Same Silence, The Same Noise, a man becomes addicted to spying on his neighbours. Yet he does not really seem interested in the neighbours themselves, but in seeing himself through their eyes. He is obsessed with why they don’t acknowledge him, and although it is he who is spying on them, he is the one who feels invaded by them, who tries to escape. His identity merges into theirs, and he realises that “in truth, it was myself I was now looking at.”The final story, You Don’t Know Them, They’re Strangers, also deals with the merging of identities. A man comes home one night to a flat that has someone else’s name on the door but that seems familiar still, and his neighbours and friends call him by that name, even though it’s not his name and he doesn’t know the people who call him a friend. He goes to work in a part of town he’s never been to, again is recognised by his colleagues even though he doesn’t know them, and does a normal day’s work before returning home to find a different name on the door. The same neighbours who had known him the night before now introduce themselves as if for the first time.See what I mean by unsettling? There’s a dreamlike quality to a lot of the stories, a weird kind of internal consistency that often doesn’t conform to real-world logic but nevertheless feels natural within the slightly warped reality of each story. And through many of the stories runs this same thread of loss of identity. In another one, The Beginning of Something, a man washes his face and raises his arms to wipe it with a towel, but then realises “The arms weren’t my arms.” In perhaps the most unsettling one of all, Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut, a man is invited into an old woman’s house, and although he doesn’t know her, she treats him as a long-overdue guest. She has an enormous collection of dolls, which she calls “her children”, and eventually she brings out one that looks exactly like the narrator and shares his name, Karl. She asks him, “Isn’t that why you’re here?” As he visits more regularly, he comes to identify more and more with the doll Karl, until:" Whether I liked it or not, I too had become one of the old woman’s dolls, or perhaps I had always been one. She sat me on her lap, and I let it happen, because in exchange she gave me something I wanted and each time craved more deeply – myself."Apart from Karl, very few of the characters in the book are named. Many stories have a first-person narrator, and otherwise characters are referred to simply as “the woman”, “the man”, “the couple”, etc. It all has a profoundly alienating effect, especially when coupled with the weird meldings of identity. I’d thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who’s looking for something a little weird and disturbing and different. I’m planning to read more by the same writer, but can’t find much in English translation so maybe will have to dust off my schoolboy German :-)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If the story reminds one of Kafka, it is “Kafkaesque”. If one is an ardent fan of Doctor Who, than one is a “Whovian”. If one of the short stories in this collection, “Maybe this Time, Maybe Now”, reminds one of Waiting for Godot, is it Godotian? In pathology, when faced with an entity that resembles a particular entity but which we don’t think actually is that entity, we add the suffix “-oid”. Hence, a cell which superficially resembles an epithelial cell but which we realize could actually be a macrophage or a stromal cell, will be described as “epithelioid”. So perhaps I could consider this story ‘Godotioid’. It doesn’t matter. Walter is Godot. And his whole family keeps waiting for him to show up. Waiting for Walter.
“Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut” is just sideways strange and you start to wonder if it is a bit creepy maybe? A man, Karl, is heading to a friend’s house, when he is waved over to the neighboring house. The old lady beckons him in. So he goes in. She proudly shows him her vast collection of dolls, her children as she calls them. Including one she has named Karl, who looks just like our narrator. Okay, yes, this is approaching the far side of odd now. The surreal state is the inevitable next stage, and if you are expecting that then you won’t be disappointed.
There were one or two I just did not get at all despite re-reading. A couple of the stories sounded like the human side of neurological or psychiatric disease, and so through that lens did not seem as weird. Rather like what it might be like as told from the perspective of a patient of Oliver Sacks.
These are very short stories in a very short book, another excellent one from the Peirene Press.