Night Circus and Other Stories, The

The stories in The Night Circus are alive; like the tentacles of an octopus, they come hunting you from the pages of the book, bursting into your life with an energy and zest that sweep you into worlds where reality is consumed by the passions within. In this collection, beautifully translated by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood, Uršul’a Kovalyk has written with delicacy and strength of women escaping the chains that bind them, flinging off the dull and suffocating carapaces of their lives, floating free into fantastic realms. The few who don’t make it remain trapped in nightmarish circumstances: the failed suicide whose near death causes her to recall a desperate life; the woman hoping that she won’t have to have sex with her partner, that he will fall asleep before she gets to bed, to no avail. There’s so much female power in the book that those who don’t prevail are all the more affecting – lonely desperation against a backdrop of grey blocks of flats. But, for those who break free, the world explodes into colour and opulence, and nowhere in this collection is that demonstrated more clearly than in the beautifully crafted ‘Bathroom’. Ágnes Mickievič is sixty and lives with her husband in a grey prefab block of flats. Nothing in their flat is there unless it is useful; everything has its place and there is order and complete calm in their lives. Mrs Mickievič has never had children (too ‘messy’), or a dog (‘can’t be milked’), and even a geranium is useless as it doesn’t bear fruit. So for Mrs Mickievič to open her bathroom door one night to find a pulsating, steaming rainforest where her lino and bathtub used to be is utterly confounding and terrifying. She rushes to the bedroom where her husband is sleeping, and through the night she lies there fully dressed listening to the cacophony of sounds – bird calls, the shrieks of monkeys and the rasp of insects – pouring from the bathroom. In the morning all is normal, only the oddness of her abandoned knitting and her being in bed fully clothed puzzling her husband. The rainforest in the bathroom intensifies its pull on Ágnes. While her husband is away for a week, she goes there every night, the beauty and clamour and chaos taking over her soul. All the dullness and self-imposed inhibition are stripped away. Ágnes is finally free. Uršul’a Kovalyk is able to entwine the ordinary and domestic, the dull and predictable, with a web of the fantastic and strange, the magical and monstrous, and she does so with a grace and dexterity that is a joy to read. -- Lucy Walter @ www.gwales.com