101 short stories, all 101 words in length. Romance collides head-on with the comic and surreal in Dan Rhodes’s uniquely entertaining first publication.
An ingenious series of perfect miniatures of doomed love.
With incredible economy – 101 words exactly – each story, complete in itself, holds up a cracked mirror to the private peculiarities of human relationships. Meet the woman who uses cider for make-up remover; admire the lover whose field-work with Mongolian gays inspires her to sprout a handlebar moustache; wonder at the caring mother who binds her baby’s feet under the misapprehension that he’s a girl. Comic monologue meets the discipline of the sonnet writer, filtered by an imagination to rival Lewis Carroll.
Sometimes violent, often hilarious, and always surprising, you will not read a more original book this year.
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If the stories are individually quirky, bizarre and amusing, paradoxically the incremental effect is one that is surprisingly revealing of the deep, tectonic instabilities in our relationships with partners and lovers.
If the touchstone of Anthropology is, in the end, a kind of disbelieving laughter, it is emphatically not observational humour, nor the bittersweet angst of wry comedy that dominates much contemporary fiction: Rhodes highlights the essential absurdity of heterosexual relationships, the fundamental incomprehension and misunderstandings that divide men and women. The wayward commandments of desire, the desperate mismatches of affection, the hilarious disjunctions of perception, the disequilibria of power, all are scrutinised in turn by the author's cool, deadpan prose; and the superficial equivalence of form mimics the fact that, while relationships may seem similar on the surface, each is uniquely odd, perverse, or disfunctional.
The structure of the book is reminiscent of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, its tone occasionally recalls Donald Barthelme's elegant postmodern short fiction, but Anthropology nevertheless mines a seam distinctly its own: quirky, surreal, often wildly funny, and cumulatively profound. --Burhan Tufail
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