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A provocative and unsettling view of relationships

BaboonThere’s nothing terribly likeable about the characters in Baboon, Naja Marie Aidt’s collection of short stories. Relationships are at the core of the stories but the situations Aidt explores in each of the 15 tales is often unpleasant; child abuse, the breakdown of a marriage, sexual assault, discordant siblings, mental and physical illness. Yet there is something disconcertingly fascinating about the bleak snapshots. A reader’s guilty voyeurism.

In The Interruption, for example, a stranger forces her way into a young man’s apartment and refuses to leave. In Candy a man launches a wild and ultimately humiliating tirade in a shop after his wife is arrested for shoplifting. In The Green Darkness of the Big Trees a man crushed by depression finds relief by looking up at the thick woodland canopy.

Aidt’s writing is angular and spare. Often she uses a chronological, sometimes almost minute by minute recounting that gives you the feeling of being a bystander trying not to

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