Reflections are prominent in Molly Guy's
Terminal Velocity.
Guy is a very funny writer and yet she has a certain tongue-in-cheek
quality as well.
The myriad of short pieces which make up this highly enjoyable book are
diverting and also insistent. We remember them. A man in overalls checking
out a toaster becomes an image of every electrician.
Guy jas the enviable skill of presenting downbeat humour with a kind
of laconic casualness which speaks to us directly.
In “Siblings”, three brothers—Bonehead, Bighead and
Frog—are explored in deadpan seriousness. We are amused by their
apparently shallow pleasures.
Perhaps the real advantage Guy's writing has is that she is able to get
us laughing quickly and wanting to turn the pages.
A book for when you need cheering up.
— Christopher
Bantick, The Sunday Tasmanian
These surreal fables are populated by
the dispossessed, disadvantaged and deluded, fighting to survive in a
world of bizarre cruelty, betrayal and loss. Yet the imaginative power
of Molly Guy’s wit and compassion make these tales funny as well
as sad and heartening as well as salutory. With her own brand of magic
she delivers some revelatory accounts of life beyond the comfort zone.
She presents us with an extraordinary gallery of characters including
cockroaches and chairs as well as men, women and children. The work also
illumines some of the more grotesque failings of the Western world at
the beginning of a new millenium.The energy she creates sheds light on
misfits
struggling in a nightmare world, and puts the heat on the indifferent,
the hypocritical and the smug.
— Margaret Scott
The very next time Ruby tells Oliver a bedtime
story, she begins, ‘Not so long ago, there lived two refrigerator
salesmen who had been best friends since childhood. Their names were
Cunty and
Knob. In the mornings Cunty would greet his mate: ‘Good morning, Knob.’ Knob
would reply, ‘What's good about it?’
Stop laughing, there's more inside — much more. Molly Guy’s Terminal
Velocity is a whirlwind read, profoundly funny and sometimes merely
profound. Eccentric ladies, lost souls, boofheads, the unemployed, misogynists,
weird kids and a four-piece band of mice under Melinda's bed come and
go with surreal, dreamlike clarity, as Guy reinvents common themes — family,
food, sex, animals, poverty, sharehouses — with great stylistic verve.
The best fiction has real purpose behind it; Molly Guy’s is to
remind
us that for many people, much of the time, Dystopia is just around the
bend. But at least we can die laughing on the way: deadpan to the nth,
Terminal Velocity delivers line after
line that's as good as any contemporary stand-up, is as clever as early
Woody
Allen, as inventive as Russell Hoban, as off-the-wall as Richard Brautigan.
Best of all, it’s top class Australian fiction.
— David Owen. Island
At times, one suspects that it is not a
book at all, but, perhaps, a
crocheted d'oily studded with beer tabs or a polystyrene model of the Taj
Mahal. Molly Guy breaks every written and unwritten rule of fiction. Fiction
schmiction! I loved it.
— Philomena van Rijswijk, Famous Reporter
A collection of twenty-one extraordinarily imaginative
short stories set somewhere in the fuzzy part of your mind.
From hopelessly
doomed share houses to the humbling misadventures of a vain and surly sculpture
by the name of Gwendolen, these are witty fables fraught with compassion.
These are tales of the hilarious, and the surreal and yet the collection
manages to tackle many of the troubling issues of our time.
These stories will appeal to anyone who
has an imagination and a sense of humour. If you’ve ever felt disillusioned
in life these stories will strike a chord.
Molly Guy has had short stories published in many
publications including Overland, Southerly, Island
Magazine, Hecate, Australian
Book Review, and Australian Short Stories. Her stories have
also appeared in the Anthology of Contemporary Stories by Australian
women and she has written a novel entitled Braindeath Capital.
Molly lives in Eaglehawk Neck, Tasmania with her twelve year-old son.
