The sentences in “The Nose” are grammatically correct but don’t quite cohere - it is difficult to conjure a mental image of what exactly transpires in the story. The story follows Kovalyov as he chases his nose around Saint Petersburg and attempts in vain to return it to his face. “Los Angeles” reminded me of Gogol’s short story “The Nose” (1836), in which Major Kovalyov, a mid-ranking Russian official, wakes up one morning to find that his nose has disappeared. Her Husband speaks in dollar signs (“$$$$”) she and her ex-boyfriends drive around Los Angeles, visiting LACMA, shopping, and sipping golden milk. house with her “Husband” (always capitalized, no name) in one wing, her kids in another, and 100 ex-boyfriends in the third. The first story in Bliss Montage, “Los Angeles,” opens with an uncanny setting: a woman lives in an L.A. The stories examine a range of relationships - with one’s abusive ex-boyfriend, jealous best friend, overly familiar professor, stoic mother, and supposed homeland. Ling Ma’s unsettling short story collection, Bliss Montage, is interested precisely in this gap between intimacy and its narration. But they don’t quite fit, jutting out at odd angles when I try to reassemble them.Īnd so it goes: every relationship is a story, though what really happened can never be fully captured by the words we commit to paper. I have the pieces before me, and I examine each closely, trying to put them back together. I AM TRYING to write an essay, sifting through my memories to excavate a relationship that ended last year.

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