Bug Week

Bug Week by Airini Beautrais is a collection of thirteen short stories with a strong emotional punch. There is a varied array of themes, but the collection is bound tightly together by one repeating idea: the battle to keep everything together in a world that is falling apart. An English teacher struggles to cope, split between his job at a high school and a smoke free eco-village when all he wants to do is escape into a cigarette. A young couple struggling to find work in a new town come across a severed hand on a scenic walk. Unlike what you might expect, though, in the majority of these stories, the message is not that things will get better, it is simply to knuckle down and keep going.

One thing that blew me away with this book was the quality of Beautrais' writing. For most of the book, I forgot I was even reading; the smooth, flawless prose ran as if I were really there, experiencing the action. This, coupled with the decent sized short stories, meant that every time I picked up the book I could be fully immersed in a world, and then be finished with it twenty minutes later. My one issue with the writing was Beautrais’s habit of jumping from narrator to narrator and often also across the decades. While it can create an interesting effect, I find it pulls me out of the story with every change, and also makes it difficult to follow the plot line sometimes.

Yes, the writing was beautiful, but if I had to name the aspect of Bug Week I liked the most, it would have to be the characters. They were pathetic and malicious, obsessive and just straight up weird, but this was precisely why they were so good. The people living inside felt more real than any other fictional character I had met. They had so many flaws, but that was what made them human, and more importantly, relatable.

The book in its entirety creates an overwhelming sense of despair. Things go badly for characters, and characters do bad things to other people, but in some of the stories, there is the faintest light. That said, for much of the time, this sense of hope, or perhaps rather this sense of slight improvement, comes more from the protagonist accepting their fate rather than anything in life actually getting better. This can be seen at the end of one of the stories, titled ‘Psycho Ex’. At the end, the protagonist comes to terms with her ex’s marriage: ‘No matter how many wives you have, I’ll always be your first wife, the one who never stops loving you.’ This ties in well to the overall feeling of the anthology: life is weird, depressing and dangerous, but even so, you just have to get on with it.

From post-Cold War East Germany to central Wellington, from a young woman trying to persuade herself that she isn’t stalking her ex, to a retiree searching for the source of the pervasive smell of death in her apartment building, Bug Week traverses a lot of ground. That said, each story is consistent in its high quality of writing, as well as its similarly depressing feeling of reality, and consequently hangs together beautifully. It was one of the best books I have read this year. Parts of it made me want to laugh, others made me want to cry, and every part left me in awe of Beautrais’ literary skill. You should know though, that I am a fan of dark, depressing stories. If you aren’t, then I doubt you would enjoy this book. In addition, this book covers uncomfortable, sometimes distressing topics. It does not hold back, so if what you want is an easy, feel-good read, then look away. Otherwise, you have several amazing hours ahead of you. Make sure you have tissues on hand.

- Mattie is 16 and lives in Nelson