The Sheer Nerve
Original, sparkling, sharp and funny
Lying is so easy. Anyone can do it. You lie to your friends, your masseur, your parents, your children, your partner and even yourself. It’s difficult to stop. A lot of lying goes on in the seven stories in The Sheer Nerve. Because a lie is a great way to escape reality, which is often too painful or too boring. But a barefaced lie is too simple – these stories are about something more subtle, there’s more going on. They’re also about the image people have of themselves, in combination with what others make of them. The result: a creative approach to the truth
‘Fire’ is about a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to escape the dreary setting in which she is growing up. She and her friends play a game called ‘fire’: if your house was on fire, what three things would you rescue? In the tense climax, the girl finds herself in this very situation: forced to make three choices. In ‘Your girlfriend buys fish at the market’, a man tries to hide from the outside world that he’s being physically abused by his girlfriend. There’s something wrong in this relationship, but what? Something that’s unsaid can in fact be all-consuming. Concealing the unequal dynamics in the relationship means they are living a lie.
The stories in The Sheer Nerve vary in length and are marked by a high degree of absurdism: sometimes an element from one story reappears in another. Each story is original, sparkling, sharp funny and packed with interesting observations and familiar situations.
