Many People Die Like You by Lina Wolff

Review by Rachel Farmer

‘I suppose none of this would have happened if not for a dream I had when I was young, in which a woman told me I would at some point guide someone through the apocalypse.’

Thus opens the final story in Lina Wolff’s accomplished collection Many People Die Like You, a subtle yet stark examination of the strangeness of everyday life. In this final story, ‘The Year of the Pig’, the protagonist spontaneously decides to offer her services as a miracle-worker, only to then encounter a man who has been convinced to sell his body parts to give his children a better life. This story embodies the macabre, unexpected tone of Wolff’s collection, adroitly translated by Saskia Vogel. The reader begins each tale in a world they recognise—however vaguely—and is gradually led on a journey into increasingly muddy waters. Not only that, the tale is a prime example of the author’s flair for penning intriguing, subversive, and highly unusual opening lines—which is one of the most memorable aspects of this collection.

As well as their stylistic elegance, Wolff’s stories are loosely bound together by recurring thematic undertones. In some stories—such as ‘Misery Porn’, in which a man discovers that his neighbour streams videos of herself crying, and subsequently begins a volatile relationship with her—the protagonists take secret pleasure in activities forbidden by societal convention. This theme of furtive enjoyment crops up repeatedly in different guises: the attraction of a young man to his much older piano student, in a man’s unexpected affection for his wife’s lover, and in a woman’s strange interest in a Peruvian dressed as Mickey Mouse. Subtly, Wolff uses her characters’ unusual actions and desires to dissect societal expectation and expose its absurdity.

This juxtaposition of the expected versus the unexpected—the normal versus the abnormal—is reflected in another thematic undercurrent: the feeling of dissatisfaction upon obtaining what one is supposed to want. In an astute examination of the ennui and discontent engendered by modern life, a character in the collection’s title story observes: ‘“It begins with feeling like there’s no real emotion in your life. As though life were going on elsewhere. Then you think: If only something special would happen, a certain person paying attention to you or the like. Then you placate yourself with the idea you’re no worse off than anyone else. Then you conclude the melancholy is inevitable, and everyone else is suffering as much as you are.” “And then?” “And then you die.”’

Here, the protagonist is offered a challenge—make a change; don’t accept your fate. In his view, death is the inevitable end result of a refusal to subvert expectation, to demand more from life. In this story and others, Wolff asks the uncomfortable question: Will getting what we think we want or expect from life really fulfil us?

Reviewers have described Wolff’s writing as feminist, and many stories in this collection do scrutinise uneven power dynamics between men and women. Often, her female characters are swept along by the unreasonable whims of the men in their lives. But Wolff also pulls off sudden, uncomfortable shifts in the balance of power between her characters, and does so with obvious relish. In the opening story of the collection, the first few paragraphs establish a professional relationship between a woman and the private investigator she has hired to expose her husband’s affair. Initially, we see the investigator regard her with undisguised pity, while she describes herself as ‘loyal as a dog. A very dumb dog.’ But certain moments in their interaction surprise the reader, culminating in the story’s outrageous, thoroughly unexpected finale.

Not all of the stories in Many People Die Like You are as thematically rich and tautly spun as others, nor are they as memorable, but the collection as a whole sparkles with wit and insight and examines complex ideas with nuance and flair. Certainly, Wolff probes the uneasy depths of human experience, leaving the reader unsettled yet unable to avert their gaze.

Many People Die Like You is published by And Other Stories, 4th August 2020