Man Hating Psycho
Baal’s London is sprawling and specific, digital and physical. Her London is mediated not only in moving through its streets – which she does with a precision and a feel for London’s many faces – but also in navigating the city digitally, particularly through cell phones. In ‘Pain in the Neck’, for instance, her narrator climbs onto rooftops and roves on Google Streetview, ‘clawing at the screen, trying to zoom in to see the upstairs windows’. Her London is lived online and is also decidedly concrete: boxes are heavy to move and bash her legs; flat-pack shelves disintegrate. Even clambering out onto a rooftop into London’s ‘dark neon sky’ leaves her with the painful crunch of a cricked neck.
Phoebe Thompson reviews Iphgenia Baal‘s new story collection.