Bliss Montage Stories
Reviews
Ling has a distinct writing style—one that people tend to either love or hate. It's hard to land in the middle. She has a way of taking strange, almost surreal situations and making them feel ordinary, even familiar. And in doing so, she flips your sense of what's normal, leaving you questioning whether you're the one who's seeing things wrong.
each short story was so so compelling and interesting
thought provoking, leaves you wanting resolution, some stories take longer to pick up than others
This collection of vignettes starts out weird but promising. But ultimately, I found it underwhelming.
stars ,, 4.0 cawpile ,, 8.14 i actually loved this, even if it took me a minute to wrap my head around some of the overarching metaphors, the writing was gorgeous 'nd i'll definitely be checking out 'severance' by the same author. :) none of the stories really fell flat to me either, i definitely had my favourites, those being 'the office', 'peking duck' & 'tomorrow' but all of them were great. not being too detailed in this rvw because there's just ,, so much going on. boobclub pick with mari !!
Without the intrusion of zombies and the numbing impact of shock, Ma finds herself with ample opportunity to engage with these narratives on an emotional level. She understands that a memoir can sometimes fall into the trap of over-explanation, disrupting the authentic flow of the story. Ling Ma recognizes that her silence is the key to allowing her experiences to organically unfold, accumulating within the space she provides, until they cleverly converge into that final, cohesive moment when they are read.
Peking Duck and Office Hours were my favorites
"english is just a play language to me..."
amy tan wishes she wrote this
i was really hoping to like this a lot more. funny enough, i also said that about salt slow. but i will always have a fondness for short story collections, even if my most recent submersions into the writing genre have been lukewarm and pretty uninspiring.
bliss montage is a collection of eight stories that, according to its publishing blurb, attempt to tell “wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home”. like most short stories, it takes a more speculative, hyperrealistic, and even absurdist approach to her characters and narratives. the thing with bliss montage is that what it proposes to offer as a work seems promising, but the actual delivery failed to hit the mark. ling ma’s writing felt limited, as she was unable to capture distinctive voices that set apart her stories. having straightforward writing is not necessarily a bad thing and i like it when done properly, but it wasn’t able to sustain the stories in bliss montage, which had a tendency to come off as too lacking and kinda patchy.
regardless, my personal favorites were “g” and “returning” — stories that both touched on some sort of homecoming and bodily change. i really thought a lot about why the other ones didn’t work for me and i think it’s because the only consistent thing that this collection had going on was that all the stories had a chinese immigrant in the US with a white boyfriend (either current or past). i think that would have been fascinating to explore further, given that the author wanted to touch on the diasporic experience and could have used her speculative approach to do so. but the end result was a pretty average and roundabout way of tackling these kinds of stories, a little too abstract that they failed to stand on their own.
also ling ma’s severance has been on my tbr for quite some time, but i’m a little hesitant to pick it up now lol … we’ll see though! she has interesting ideas going on but she’s not giving anything interesting to digest with her writing so. it all depends.
4.25? I think G, Peking Duck and Office Hours were my favorites.
Each story feels like a fever dream, but each in a different way and degree. Some of these stories might be produced on screen by A42 and directed by Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jones. Quite similar vibe.
this felt like a fever dream
i really liked returning & office hours and could easily give them a 4.5 but the rest i didn’t enjoy as much. ling ma’s writing is so pretty & detailed but most of the stories seemed to be missing something for me :[
a sweet double dose of weird asian lady~ the autobiographical peeks through a bit more here than in severance, but ling ma retains her talent for writing unsettling ennui. a thread of magical realism ties together these stories that explore all the restless parts of the modern young person’s life: bizarre romantic and sexual encounters, homesickness and displacement, a sense of precariousness as one stumbles through difficult decisions. i found the driving details of these stories really really intriguing (a hundred ex-boyfriends, an invisibility party drug, yeti lovers, a hidden universe in an academic’s office closet), and the narrators’ voices felt comfortable familiar from severance. altogether enjoyable! favorites: G Returning Office Hours
4-4.5. i liked this more than severance; the short story format lets ma's crisp, oddly specific prose shine without crossing over into the barren, overwrought existentialism of her novel. in other words, the edginess of these stories was just enough (and balanced well by the speculative concepts). "office hours" and "G" were my favorites!
Ling Ma's Severance still haunts, but Bliss Montage stumbles. Its promised "wild tales" drown in a monotone sea of lost women, narrated with a melancholic hush that blurs each story into the next. Intriguing threads unravel into frustration, leaving tension to dissipate like a stalled rollercoaster. Glimmering themes in "G" and "Pecking Duck" can't save this missed symphony, where dissonance and emotional crescendo are replaced by a muted dirge. A promising title, a disappointing echo.
A series of different people’s dreamscape.
fever dream
i enjoyed “returning” and “office hours” best. there was a subtle eeriness to a few of these stories, like “g” as well, and the eerie undertones made those stories a little more captivating for me. i could step into those worlds a little easier and felt like they had something unique to offer me, like a different kind of air on a new planet.
i’d recommend it for the interesting premises all around, but i wouldn’t put it on my list of favorites.
the narrative(s) lost me at some points, but each story had a bright thread that kept me engaged
"It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone's gaze."
favourites: G, Returning, Office Hours.
Beautiful. Ling Ma manages to turn the outlandish and repulsive into intimate and vulnerable. The stories are all gems but the words shine in their own right.
This was a weird and wild ride! These short stories had great range and really intriguing story plots. As with most short stories, there were some lulls. However, the house of boyfriends, the Yeti lover, and the protruding baby hand are things that will stay in my mind for a long long time. Not sure if I am grateful for that or traumatized, but at the very least I am forever //changed// LOL. This is my first Ling Ma collection, and I will definitely be reading more of their work!
P.S. That cover is PERFECTION. I love fruits on anything, and this cover is no exception.
Highlights
We kick this ball around for a bit, discussing the difference between appropriating someone's story and making it new through retelling…
I tell the truth in Chinese, I make up stories in English.
It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone's gaze. It's not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.
Alternating between Dior, Calvin Klein, Prada, Jo Malone, Tom Ford, we created an untenable cloud of hysterical femininity, a misting monster of jasmine, vanilla, rose, patchouli, lychee, amber, tonka bean.
It was a time when the future could have been anything, been anywhere. It was so open that it could actually crush her.
Whatever I felt, whatever this feeling was inside of me, there is no place for it. There is no place for it to go, and I would have to carry it around inside of me for a long time, so long that it would fossilize and become a part of me.
I really, really want to catch him. I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.
What if I dissected my feelings, pulled them apart and brutalized them so that he would know they were true? Is this enough? I'd ask. How about this? They would explode and drip over everything like bodily fluids and finally he'd be forced to look away.
On the other side of graduation was her actual life, the slow narrowing of possibilities that would catch her and freeze her in a vocation, a relationship, a life. She intended to avoid that slow calcification for as long as possible—if only by refraining from making any crucial choices. In other words, she was moving back home.
Humans are animals too, are they not? When an animal is sick, it goes alone by itself to find a quiet place in the woods and rests, for days, for weeks. Sometimes it cannot overcome its illness, but many times it can. The resting, the quiet, and being alone is enough. This is the way of nature. Nature corrects itself.
A woman sat alone at her dining table, reading and drinking a cocktail. It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.
It doesn't take much to convince yourself that you're doing okay, just some discretionary income and a regularity to your days.
It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.
To live is to exist within time. To remember
A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.
It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.
“At night, they crawl into my lap, full of easily disclosed secrets, light as folding chairs.”
The Pyrenean ibex, the Tasmans tiger, the passenger pigeon, the Mexican grizzly bear, the Baiji white dolphin, found only in the Yangtze River.
“This is the most depressing screen saver," I told him. The computer could've been from the nineties. "They all look like they know they're the last of their kind."
"I’d want to know if I was the last one. Then I could stop the searching for a mate, and just, you know, resign myself". He laughed.
Even the heartiest flower can wilt from overattention is a Chinese folk saying, probably.
(…) How do I know, Adam once asked before he struck me, if what you feel is real? And not something you felt for everyone else that came before? And everyone that will come after?
Whatever I felt, whatever this feeling was inside of me, there is no place for it. There is no place for it to go, and I would have to carry it around inside of me for a long time, so long that it would fossilize and become a part of me.
In the rearview mirror, I study my daughter. When I first learned I was having a daughter, the family was so disappointed. In China, a boy is always better, if you're going to have one child. But me, I was secretly happy. A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood. That was my happiest moment. The idea of a daughter.
He was doglike, by which I mean he inhabited himself without selfconsciousness. He didn't second-guess himself or what he wanted. And he liked being petted on the head before sleep, as if I were his owner. Or that was how he made me his owner.
The Husband is a resting place. He is a chair. Sometimes I drape myself over him and I get the physical comfort of not being alone. I can feel it anytime I want; mostly Saturday nights, mostly Sunday mornings. But the times I need it most are the early evenings when I feel like I am dissolving.