Cold Sea Stories

The eleven complex, atmospheric tales in Cold Sea Stories are all set around the Baltic coast. In one story, a shepherd watches a pirate ship as a mysterious figure buries a chest on the beach; in another, a prisoner scrawls in the sand on his dungeon floor, telling the tale of his failed pursuit of the world's first language. Each story is a world away from the one before, and each story contains an entire world.

 

Huelle's language - in Lloyd-Jones's clear, flowing translation - is gorgeous, textured and almost dizzying. The attention to detail is wonderful. In one story, a man is ejected from his church:  "The women in the gallery had covered their faces, the men had tugged at their hat rims, and then such total silence had fallen that you could hear the wax dripping onto the floor and the moths circling close to the ceiling." There is not a single wasted word in these stories. They combine myth and history with modern Baltic life in constantly unexpected ways: sometimes the magic is shown to be real, and sometimes the spell is broken with a sudden crash to reality. This is best shown in the story 'Franz Carl Weber', where a boy escape from communist Poland on a night train.