eading Blue unger is like watching a Stanley ubrick film ush, dreamlike, and you won t be able to stop thinking about it

By TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER

You can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s been rolling around in your mind since it happened and you can’t stop. You replay it over and over, how it started, how it progressed, why it ended. ou wonder if it ll happen again and in the new novel Blue unger by iola Di rado, you wonder if you truly want it to.

Shanghai was not her first choice for a place to live. Sometimes, she wasn t really even sure why she came there, e cept that it was uben s dream.

or months and months, he spoke of Shanghai, showed her maps, talked of a life as a chef living in a high-rise apartment, and he taught her a little bit of the language. She never fully understood why uben loved China and she never thought to ask before her other half, her twin brother, her only sibling died.

She was brushing her teeth when it happened. ow, weeks later, she was in his favorite city, a teacher of Italian languages in a Chinese culture, alone, friendless. hen she met u.

It happened at the nightclub called o and she later wondered, with a thrill, if u had been stalking her. u claimed that she was a student in the Italian class, but though she was usually good with faces, she didn t remember the slender, glorious woman with milk-white skin and luminous eyes.

She did remember the first place she and u had se .

It was a hotel, but u liked it outside, too in public, on sidewalks, in abandoned buildings, and in crowded nightclubs. hey took yellow pills together, slept together in u s s ualid apartment she told u she loved her but never got a reply e cept that u starting biting.

u had used her teeth all along but she started biting harder.

Soon, she was bleeding, bruising from u s bites, and seeing people in the shadows, and she began to understand that uben wouldn t have liked u at all.

ou know what you want. ou re someone with determination. nd you may want this book, but there are a few things you ll need to know first.

eading Blue unger is like watching a Stanley ubrick movie. It s surreal, kind of gau y, and loaded with meanings that are somewhat fu y until you ve read a paragraph several times and even then, you re not uite sure about it. uthor iola Di rado writes of sharp, unfinished mourning with a grief-distracting obsession layered thickly on top, of control and submission, and while the chapters are each brief, they feel too long but not long enough. here are so many uestions left dangling within the plot of this story, so many small bits unsaid, but also too much information of the mundane sort. ou ll feel somewhat voyeuristic with this book in your hands, until you notice that the se scenes here are humidly uber-fiery but not very detailed. verall, then, Blue unger is different but compelling, short enough to read twice, uickly. It s lush, dreamlike, and once started, you won t be able to stop thinking about it.

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