It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. “It doesn’t take much to come into your own all it takes is someone’s gaze. Describing her controlling friend, the narrator explains: In “G,” it’s the opposite: One infatuated friend understands that invisibility, in a high enough dose, can bond people together with uncommon strength. The boyfriend in “Oranges,” it seems, would like his wronged former partner to be invisible, which is not exactly what ends up happening. In “Oranges” and “G,” two women revisit past relationships - one with an abusive ex-boyfriend, and one with an obsessive friend of her youth, respectively. Ma’s use of unreality is a terrific refashioning of the Freudian uncanny - in this case, the idea of the estranged familiar - superimposed over tales of immigrants, ex-partners, and adult children. To read them is to enter a world where strangeness is a language with a grammar all its own, and total immersion the only path to fluency. It’s a lovely sentence that captures the elegance and logic of all eight stories. “At night, they crawl into my lap, full of easily disclosed secrets, light as folding chairs.”
The woman’s description of her young children is our first glimpse of the tactful lyricism Ma deploys throughout the book: They float around her property and her thoughts like ghosts. In the first story, “Los Angeles,” a woman lives with her husband, her kids, and her 100 ex-boyfriends. Each story adds to recurring themes of immigration and violence that reflect the book’s deepest questions Bliss Montage is an inquiry into origins and dislocation. The characters in Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage navigate a slipstream version of Earth as we know it tales of recreational drugs with superpower side effects or foreign lands with strange rituals of rebirth are tempered by sharp and familiar domestic details.
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