Swallowed by the Cold: Stories

by Jensen Beach

Overview

The intricate, interlocking stories of Jensen Beach's extraordinarily poised story collection are set in a Swedish village on the Baltic Sea as well as in Stockholm over the course of two eventful years.

In Swallowed by the Cold, people are besieged and haunted by disasters both personal and national: a fatal cycling accident, a drowned mother, a fire on a ferry, a mysterious arson, the assassination of the Swedish foreign minister, and, decades earlier, the Soviet bombing of Stockholm. In these stories, a drunken, lonely woman is convinced that her new neighbor is the daughter of her dead lover; a one-armed tennis player and a motherless girl reckon with death amid a rainstorm; and happening upon a car crash, a young woman is unaccountably drawn to the victim, even as he slides into a coma and her marriage falls into jeopardy.

Again and again, Beach's protagonists find themselves unable to express their innermost feelings to those they are closest to, but at the same time they are drawn to confide in strangers. In its confidence and subtle precision, Beach’s prose evokes their reticence but is supple enough to reveal deeper passions and intense longing. Shot through with loss and the regret of missed opportunities, Swallowed by the Cold is a searching and crystalline book by a startlingly talented young writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977382
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.57(w) x 8.23(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Jensen Beach is the author of the collection For Out of the Heart Proceed. His work has appeared in A Public Space, The New Yorker, Ninth Letter, Tin House, and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College and lives in Vermont with his family.

Editorial Reviews

03/21/2016
In "The Apartment," Beach writes, "Our individual memories of a shared event mean such different things to each of us." This idea drives Beach's overly ambitious but mostly solid second collection, both thematically and structurally. In the first part of "The Village of Elmsta," a man's swift death following a bicycle fall near a canal is ignored by a group of revelers passing by on a boat. The story's second half, told from the perspective of Henrik, the captain, shows why: he was too preoccupied by his mistress, Helle, to notice the tragedy unfolding ashore. But their affair isn't all passion and bliss; a later story, "Anniversary," alludes to insecurities and unequal footing between Henrik and Helle. Throughout the rest of these 16 interlinked stories set in Sweden, characters' morally ambiguous actions continue to simultaneously provoke readers' judgment and invite compassion. In "The Apartment," a woman named Louise gets sloppy drunk while remembering an old fling with a newly deceased neighbor. But in "Kino" and "In the Night of the Day Before," which occupy earlier spots in the collection, we know why she's dissatisfied: her closeted husband, Martin, ignores her in favor of frequenting a gay club showing X-rated videos. While some of the offerings are more grounded than others—"February 22, 1944" and "The Right-Hand Traffic Diversion," though vividly described, seem too removed from the main story line—the collection memorably depicts how selfish humans can be, and how often we're alienated from one another. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Characters’ morally ambiguous actions continue to simultaneously provoke readers’ judgment and invite compassion. . . . [Swallowed By the Cold] memorably depicts how selfish humans can be, and how often we’re alienated from one another.”—Publishers Weekly

“Swallowed by the Cold empathizes with the way we get too caught up in our own messes to notice when our fellow man is, however figuratively, bleeding out alone on a beach.”—Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review Staff Picks

“Jensen Beach moves deftly in and around all of his characters’ lives, often revealing with stark and startling clarity all the absurdity and beauty present in even the most mundane of daily rhythms.”—Electric Literature

“Beach's gifts grab you by the throat. . . . Reprising an ensemble of characters back and forth in time, these linked stories enter us, dreamlike yet unnervingly real, sometimes close to sublime for their deep, fierce insights. Swallowed by the Cold is dark, seductive and worth finding.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Skillful.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Intricate, riveting. . . . The suspense woven through Swallowed by the Cold is intensified by Beach's exquisite patience and attention to detail. . . . In the face of life's random violence and disquieting volatility, Beach's collection offers an unforgettable affirmation of the interconnectedness of all things.”—The Rumpus

“[Jensen Beach’s] stark, yet multiply-layered prose explores the deep uneasiness people feel, and communicates a complexity of emotions using an economy of words.”—Vermont Public Radio

“Jensen Beach's impressive story collection is one of the year's most rewarding (and unsettling) books.”—Largehearted Boy

“Each [story] stands alone as an arresting work of short fiction, yet, read in combination, all of theme expand and intensify as they interlock. . . . This is a shrewdly devised fiction, an intricately plotted work of art.”—Seven Days

“Swallowed by the Cold moved me enormously. Jensen Beach renders his characters in a way that is both unsettling and deeply complex, and he imbues the Swedish landscape that surrounds them with a layered personality. This is a wonderful book—graceful and assured, spare and compassionate—and Jensen Beach is a fiercely talented writer.“—Molly Antopol

“The shocking accident in the first story of Swallowed by the Cold centers this collection like a knife. Jensen Beach understands the deep uneasiness of men and women, and in his stories lie surprises—mortal surprises, among others—that are revealed in vivid episodes of quiet harm. This book held me fast.”—Ron Carlson

“Beneath the charmingly lucid and tranquil surface of these amazing stories lies profound mystery, turmoil, and complexity. Jensen Beach is an exceptional witness, and this is a singular collection. Honestly, fans of contemporary short fiction can’t do much better than this.”—Chris Bachelder

“Jensen Beach is a master of linguistic restraint, a writer whose precision, empathy, and relentless honesty form the spine of this extraordinary work of fiction. Taken individually, these stories are works of art. It’s when the collection is viewed as a whole, however, that an intricate fictional latticework emerges. Each story here is the progenitor of the next, each life therein a quiet catastrophe, each character both victim and witness, bound to every other character in those unknowable ways that bind us all together. This is not just a book, but a world.”—Jack Livings, author of The Dog

From the Publisher

2016-03-03
In these linked stories set in Sweden, a host of characters considers their family histories, the flaws of memory, and the looming prospect of their own mortality. Beach's second collection opens with a memorable image: two men engaged in a heated game of tennis in a small town north of Stockholm. One of them, a former professional player named Fredrik Holm, has a prosthetic arm; the other, Rolf Strand, seems like he'll be the central character of the story, right up until a sudden bicycle accident causes his death. Both characters loom large throughout the book—Rolf's son, Lennart, figures prominently in several stories, for example. The tales leap forward and backward in time, showcasing the ways different lives touch one another. Sometimes Beach's storytelling is gradual, allowing the reader to draw connections between the stories at his or her own pace. This isn't to say he avoids striking images. One story opens with an immediately gripping sentence: "From the bottom of a shallow ditch, Henrik needed help." Perhaps the strongest story here is "The Winter War I," in which the book's many layers are reflected in a kaleidoscopic plot: Lennart brings his grandfather Bent to the opening of a work of art called The Winter War, inspired by the 1939-1940 conflict in which Bent himself fought. Bent's own memory is failing, a condition mirrored by the artwork's compression and distortion of time, but he retains some certainty about his life. "I don't think it was anything like that," he says with good reason after watching it. The unexpected convergences and dramatic shifts in fortune of Beach's characters make for a measured, quietly powerful experience.

Kirkus Reviews