In this collection of two novellas and seven short stories, Alf MacLochlainn comically reduces life’s problems to the minute details of everyday existence. Socks, shoes, and trousers suggest perplexing difficulties: how best to put them on, the intricacies involved in keeping them on, the physical (as well as psychological) laws related to the interaction of body and clothing. All such speculations come to an absurd, crashing halt as the contemporary mind, filled with an overload of information, attempts but fails to make sense of some of the simplest, though of course complex, mundane facts of daily life. From Dublin to Central Illinois to Outer Space, MacLochlainn’s stories embody the imaginative spirit of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien.
