The Diving Pool

About

Three novellas, each exploring a different shade of obsession. A teenage girl watches her foster-brother dive from a high board, her infatuation spiraling into something darker. A pregnant woman records her neighbor's daily moods with unsettling precision. A student becomes fixated on a dormitory manager's collection of specimens. In each story, the narrator's attention to another person crosses from devotion into territory that is harder to name. Ogawa writes obsession with clinical detachment, never judging her narrators but never letting the reader forget that something is wrong. The prose is elegant and restrained, which makes the psychological disturbance underneath feel all the more potent. Three stories about watching too closely — and the discovery that the line between love and something else was never where you thought it was.