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Books in Review The minimalistic and uncanny stories contain enough of everyday life—french fries, ailing parents, exact change—to make the incursions of strange figures like a merman , or a teenager who eats only live birds, seem acceptable, even plausible. Often compared to her compatriots Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, Schweblin does share their mastery of short fiction. Her eerie, not-quite-right settings, however, hearken to contemporaries like Mario Bellatín and Haruki Murakami. The title story, “A Mouthful of Birds,” explores a father’s fascination with his inability to relate to the new habits of his pubescent daughter, which include dining exclusively on live sparrows that her mother delivers in shoeboxes. The symbols of blood and milk that point to looming womanhood in that story reappear in the collection, which make gender difference and parentchild relations seem alien and therefore questionable. Other stories play with Tolstoy’s famed trope of a stranger coming to town. In some cases, as in the collection’s opening story, “Headlights,” newlyweds at a rest stop discover they are part of a tradition of abandonment and suffering; in “Irman,” the narrator discovers the inexplicable violence of their traveling companion at a lonely roadside diner. In “Olingiris,” about two women who meet in their rather inexplicable line of work, one of them remembers how, as a child, “[s]he wrote a poem about fish, but invented fish. She wrote about what she felt sometimes in the morning, when she was just waking up and sometimes didn’t fully know who she was or where. About the things that made her happy, about the things that didn’t, and about her father.” Schweblin invites us to linger in that disoriented place between sleep and waking, in order to see what we accept as natural and permanent with new eyes and, perhaps, imagine another way. Julie Ann Ward University of Oklahoma Julie Delporte This Woman’s Work Trans. Aleshia Jensen & Helge Dascher. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2019. 256 pages. The first thing you notice about This Woman ’s Work is the image of struggle on the cover—a girl pushing away a polar bear—a metaphor that is investigated more fully within. Next come pages of evocative line drawings awash with color in a slightly muted yet rich palette. The text is intimate and self-revelatory and takes the form of a journal, but if this is a diary of sorts, it is one that is informed by a much larger arena than the self: that of the role of women and especially women artists in a world that privileges men. Julie Delporte is a French-speaking artist and writer whose work is steeped not only in her own experience of being an artist but in her perceptions and reading of women artists through time. This book was originally intended as an exploration of Tove Jansson, the mid-twentieth-century Finnish artist and writer best known for creating the Moomins, a family of trolls whose adventures are adored by children. But the narrative evolves with Jansson as not the subject but as an inspiration for Delporte as she travels in Jansson’s footsteps to Finland and Greece. In fact, the essence of this graphic memoir is the quest for a role model, a woman artist who is not tied to the male gaze. Hence, there are cameo appearances by Chantal Akerman, Genevi ève Castré, and an homage to Kate Bush, whose song gave the English translation its title, as well as images drawn in the style of Mary Cassatt and other women artists. Delporte’s struggle with her male partners , her own self-confidence as an artist, her early sexual trauma, and her fear of motherhood come to some resolution with a dream of women who live communally and raise orphan girls. But it is, of course, a fantasy, and Delporte must come back to the real world where she ends as she begins, with a fear of pregnancy. There is anguish here as well as a good deal of naïveté, as befits a young woman for whom a large question seems to be whether a man would be able to live with a...

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