An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life

By Megan Thomas

This short story collection has managed to provide a series of snapshots which uncannily illustrate life in our hyper capitalist world and in the age of our lort and saviour, the Internet (#hashtag). Yet, to a large extent, the omnipresent disappointment which leads to existential dread and lingering expectation is really not as depressing as I surely make it sound.

The characters will – or at least, I hope, should – annoy you in what often seems like apathy or laziness, and their inability to correct their lives. They won’t fix themselves, though. But you can learn from them, and maybe identify the parts of yourself in them, and maybe you’ll even let them be, accept that they’re not quite in control. There’s a man who spends his free time spending every cent he’s earned in his minimum wage job and then working more to try and balance his growing credit card debts; someone on holiday with a group of his friends unable to enjoy himself without party drugs to such an extent that he takes them on his own in a bathroom the middle of the day when he eventually finds some; jobs built around communication fulfilled by lonely people who are ironically replaced eventually by more efficient computers; and so many dating apps… Again, seems depressing right? Well, it’s almost too morbidly real that it becomes funny – cry until you laugh? This is helped heavily, of course, by Paul Dalla Rosa’s pithy dialogue and consistently humorous turn of phrase.

I saw Dalla Rosa speak at an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year with Gurnaik Johal, whose short story collection is equally (though differently) brilliant and a review for that is to come.

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