Rating:

“Another self was needed to move into the future.”

Author: Ling Ma

Running the gambit from abusive relationships to surreal pregnancies, from secret worlds hidden in professor’s closets to intimate relationships with yetis, Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage is a psychedelic dream of melancholy and trauma, wrapped in a dispassionate voice that has seen it all before, and expects no better.

While there isn’t a theme, per say, one might argue that a line of longing punctures each story: a longing to understand, a longing to be understood, a longing for justice, a longing for belonging, a longing for escape, a longing for atonement. This weird little short story collection, however, says more than can be understood, and we only scrape the surface of an idea. Many times, we step away, knowing there was more, an elusive concept, a meaning at the tip of our fingers that just as we grasp it, floats away. This is half frustrating, half dreamy. It depends, really, on how you feel about ambiguity and literary books that are sometimes so smart that they lose meaning.

I oscillated between loving the collection for the atmosphere and the deep, universal life statements that I almost got, and throwing the book across the room while shouting “but what does that mean exactly!” Indeed, what was the point of the yeti? Why is it totally acceptable in this weird parallel world for fetus’ arms to dangle outside their mothers, and what does that symbolize exactly? What did the resurrection ritual mean for the tired husband, and what was he trying to be rebirthed from – his wife, his life choices, his bad travel insurance? WHAT! WHAT! What is the meaning of all this?!

I settled somewhere between adoration and annoyance, accepting that if there was something super deep that I almost got but missed, it didn’t matter, because ultimately, I enjoyed the ride.

Each story sounds the same, but while we have some repeat narrators (at least once anyway), the stories are from different women, but all with a consistent listless, floating feeling of not quite belonging. We start with a story of a woman who lives in a mansion with her husband and 100 previous ex-boyfriends. All of them left except two: the one she really loved and the one who beat her. The story ends with everyone basically pushing for justice as she chases the abusive ex, not really wanting to catch him or see the police finally haul him away. The meaning here is obvious – how people who were in our lives leave impacts, and those we love and those who hurt us last the longest. The point is even more honed about the impacts of abusive relationships, with this same narrator returning twice more, at different points in time where she has moved further into analyzing this long-ago relationship. Another time she meets this ex for coffee, and in a still later story, she stalks him to reveal his misdeeds to his new girlfriend. These are the more obvious of the stories, and in some ways, the more satisfying.

Image by Hello Cdd20 from Pixabay

Then we have other stories with murkier meanings. A woman goes through the decidedly difficult task of having an intimate relationship with a yeti – something that literally requires you to toughen up your skin. I suppose you could say that she went from dating hidden monsters to real ones, maybe, but the ultimate thrust behind this story was lost on me. Still, it was one of my favorites, partially because it was just weird and unique, and there was something lulling about the depressing tones, the self-abnegation to something that is inherently harmful and is repeated, again and again, for numbing effect.

As with all short story collections, some stick with you more than others. I was nonplused by the world behind a closet story. I neither knew what it meant, nor was particularly entranced by the idea. The story that many people call a favorite – of a young girl stealing her immigrant mother’s story for a short story – left me cold, perhaps because it was the only one that didn’t have that aura of magical realism. I’d fallen under the spell, and the real world wasn’t welcome, even if that came at the price of interpretation.

Back in the dark lands of 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, I read Ling Ma’s somewhat prophetic Severance, and while it wasn’t perfect, something in the tone and the idea captured me. Again, in Bliss Montage Ma proves that she is coming into her craft, and her prose sparks with a dark kind of magic that confuses us just as much as it enchants us. Recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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