Book Review: I Hold A Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg

A short story collection was just the kind of palette cleanser I needed in the midst of my Goliath reads. Reading Laura van den Berg’s collection reminded me a lot of the sort of short stories we would read (and sometimes write) in my fiction workshops back in university. I don’t mean that as a bad thing, more that these are stories that are very much snippets of a moment or a character’s life, rather than a complete story. The endings are often open-ended; van den Berg doesn’t spell out for us what happens next. I wasn’t left dissatisfied, only wondering. Some of the stories are set in sweltering Florida, others have characters who are travelling, taken outside of their comfort zones. Many of the characters are women in their 30s or 40s who have yet to settle down in a traditional way. Women who move from job to job or relationship to relationship. They are unsettled but not necessarily unhappy. They are often compared to a more stable friend or sister.

In the first story, “Last Night”, the narrator looks back at her last night in a rehab centre and the intense but fleeting relationships she formed there. In “Volcano House”, the narrator is the flightier foil to her more stable, married sister. She looks back at a trip they took together to Iceland, shortly before her sister fell victim to a violent attack. In “Lizards”, a man uses sedatives to calm his wife, with some eery parallels to recent horrific news stories. Thinking back over the stories now, many highlight the dangers of being a woman – whether that’s travelling alone in a foreign country or in your own home with a partner. Van den Berg doesn’t hit the reader over the head with this but as a whole, the stories leave you feeling unsettled.

I’d be curious to see what van den Berg’s writing is like over the duration of a novel. I’m not sure how well the tensions on display here could be sustained and I think I would need more from the characters if I had to stay with them longer. But as a short story writer, there is a lot of oomph here.