Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Oyehaug

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

I ended up listening to this book because I had another book by the author on my reading list. I needed a short(ish) audiobook for some driving I would be doing last week, and this one came up as a suggestion when I searched for the other book, which had a waiting list. 

 

I must say Evil Flowers is one of the weirdest short story collections I have read, but also quite fascinating and fun. In a strange way. 

 

There are a total of 25 stories in the book, which isn’t particularly long. Thus, the longest stories are fairly short, and the shortest ones are more like vignettes. In print it is 128 pages, and barely over three hours in audiobook form. 

 

As the title suggests, the book was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection, The Flowers of Evil, and it shares some of that work’s surreal feel. The stories also allude to Virginia Woolf and Henrik Ibsen - each of those is at the center of one of the stories. 

 

There are also a number of animals in the book, often in weird and unexpected ways. A bear. A lion. Hagfish (aka slime eels) appear in two of the stories. Leaches eat fiber optic cables and become sentient. A cloud of midges reads thoughts. And so many birds. Birds are woven through the collection from the very start all the way to the end. 

 

The collection starts off with a real bang, with one of the most memorable opening lines ever.

 

“As I sat on the toilet menstruating, a fairly large part of my brain fell down into the toilet bowl.” 

 

It takes us a while to figure out what happened, but through the eyes of the narrator, we realize that she is an ornithologist preparing to defend her thesis (on Snipes), but the part of her brain she lost is the part that contains her knowledge of birds. 

 

As in, she now cannot remember what birds are, that they can fly, or that she ever knew anything about them. 

 

Other memorable stories include the old woman dying in the nursing home, who thinks about her daughter (who shares a name with the author) complaining that she was named after the evil queen. Why couldn’t she have been named after a good one? 

 

Another one involves three women who are the sole survivors of an airplane crash, who find themselves in a surreal landscape that one eventually identifies as being out of a children’s book she just read her child. As with many of the stories, we do not get an ending as such. 

 

There is the bizarre stream of consciousness story musing about how outsiders and Scandinavians perceive Scandinavia. Would they feel warmer if they weren’t always blue on maps? 

 

The title story starts off as being about a bus driver driven crazy by a passenger who gets on mostly to talk the driver’s ear off. Except that halfway through this is revealed to be a lie, and that what really happened was a creepy man at a gym. Or maybe that didn’t happen either, and only the “evil flowers” were real. Or are they? How can we know? 

 

The most pointed story - and one that is pretty horrifying - imagines a future where cell phones and guns are combined into one device - the “cell pistol.” Surely nothing can go wrong, right? As one character muses, “I think we should separate the pistol and the telephone functions, like before.” Yeah, no shit. But even though the author is Norwegian, a country that doesn’t have the fucked up lack of gun regulation that the US has, the point is clear enough. Treating weapons like ordinary consumer devices leads to entirely predictable problems. 

 

I also liked the story about three people who meet online in the comments section on a house Virginia Woolf lived in. Although the conversation starts off about a mundane but real issue: are there decent restrooms at the house? - it eventually leads to the three meeting up, before one freaks out and disappears. A lot remains unsaid and unknown at the end. 

 

The Henrik Ibsen story is all about the fact that Ibsen is not there at all. His absence dominates in a way his presence cannot. Perhaps one might read this as a commentary on the way Ibsen dominates the Norwegian literary scene? 

 

Another story has a dead narrator navigating the difficulties of booking a flight while dead - and really she just wants to see the white cliffs of Dover. 

 

There is a story about a person who may or may not be a (literal) monster, but is also pretty effective in showing that people who are mistreated all too often end up blaming themselves. (Hey, this is definitely the case for those of us who grew up under Religious Authoritarian Parenting.) It’s one of the shorter ones, but hits hard.

 

Another is an absurdity where a museum - whose title ends up misspelled as “Mational Nuseum” sinks into the ground. It truly feels like a real dream - one where everything feels real yet is substantially off. 

 

Finally, there are three that are titled “Protest.” These are kind of like the Monty Python thing where readers or viewers object to something in the show. 

 

In this case, using the royal “we,” the protestor complains about plot points. In one case, they complain about unhappy endings, and propose one where the characters get prizes - like Oprah. In another, they end up suggesting that the nursing home woman not die alone. But rather than, say, the daughter making it in time to say goodbye, instead, a lion randomly wanders in. And eats a pork chop. Yeah, that got weird really fast. 

 

But the point is excellent: too many readers do tend to get pissy about books that challenge their comfort zone. 

 

This book was translated by Kari Dickson, and narrated by Ann Richardson, who did a fine job. The only thing missing from the audiobook is the fact that one of the “stories” is merely a photograph of Baudelaire, kind of a wry response to the title story. 

 

I ended up very much enjoying this book. I acknowledge that surreal and absurd books aren’t everyone’s preference, but I have been a fan since discovering Alice in Wonderland as a kid. It is fun to discover a new author with a similar sense of zaniness.