Memory-Like Flash Fiction in Light Reflections Over Blues: Short Prose, by Avital Gad-Cykman

Abstract

In the salty waters of the Dead sea, that is where Avital Gad-Cykman's second published book of flash fiction starts. Light Reflection Over Blues: Short Prose, published in 2022 by Ravenna Press, takes the reader to many corners of the earth where both the prosaic and the unlikely, or even the surreal, take place. There is almost always a war, the threat of it, or the fallout of the Holocaust in the background.And there is also loss, and love, and the pervading gloom of losing loved ones too soon. However, gloom never holds for too long -life gets in the way, and with it comes the exciting and the oftentimes uncanny quality of interaction with people, with the material world, and the seductive pull of joy, which manifests even at times when it seems like there is no space for it. Avital Gad-Cykman was born and grew up in Israel and has lived in Brazil for over twenty years. She holds a PhD and a Master's degree in literature and specializes in research on trauma, gender, and minorities literature. Gad-Cykman is also the author of Life In, Life Out, published in 2014 by Ravena Press, another great work of flash fiction, a genre whose known works and writers range from Aesop's Fables, Nasiruddin's Sufi stories, to Kate Chopin's flash fictions.In Light Reflection Over Blues, the book's 54 stories allow the reader to touch on and be touched by events that, in their brevity, produce an image-like imprint in one's mind, like a moving memory. It becomes almost impossible not to carry around the pain of a teenager who has lost her dear father and mother in the gap of very few years, the heartbreak of a teenager who is already too hurt for her own good, or even the salty skin of a child who knows the comfort and safety of having a mother home who will, upon the child's return from the sea, have prepared dinner.The stories, although they may be read separately, are chronologically ordered, so that the characters are not (necessarily) the same ones, but their ages increase as the Recebido em:Aceito em: