"Cosmogony" by Lucy Ives

I'm embarrassed to say this will be a short review, not because there's so little to say about Ives' Cosmogony, but because I have no idea what to say or how to frame it coherently. In that way Ives' short story collection is akin to Haruki Murakami's collections, though perhaps even more inscrutable.

What can I even attempt? Ives' protagonists are mostly women, slightly unhinged. They appear to operate within the normal world, yet their thought processes indicate a mind driven by OCD-like obsessions with finding order and understanding in incomprehensible world. There's a lot of metacognition, of protagonists explaining themselves to the reader--as if talking over nonsense directly makes nonsense any clearer. "Nonsense" isn't even the right word. The protagonists have theories of the world that feel sort of correct yet fail to be logical in any way.

I think my favorite story--the only one I can describe with any clarity--is a dialogue between two women. It's stripped bare of any context or description. Instead, the reader simply gets the back and forth as the two women discuss one of the women's ex-husbands and try to theorize about human behavior. It's funny, as the conversation shifts from the profound to the mundane, the insightful to the petty.

Cosmogony is not a collection for everyone. Plenty of people will hate it, and even those who like it (myself included) will probably be mostly confused. But sometimes that's a sort of worthwhile ride anyway.