|
|
By Eric Markowsky, on May 14th, 2013  Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
The good people at Archipelago Books are out with a new Antonio Tabucchi title in English this spring, and while I can’t gush about it the way I did about The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, I think you might still find The Woman of Porto Pim worth your while.
The title short story is a classic, old-fashioned tale of love, betrayal, and murder set in a small whaling village. The voice of the narrator, an aged tavern singer, is full of longing and mystery. It’s one of the finest short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time.
The book, on the other hand, is something more curious. It’s a tourist’s love letter to the Azores, a set of remote Atlantic islands considered an autonomous region of Portugal. Fueled by a hybrid of research, personal experience, and imagination, The Woman of Porto Pim offers a brief overview on the whaling regulations governing the islands, a first-person account of a whale hunt, and a few observations on human beings from the point of view of the hunted whales. …
Continue reading »
By Roman Gladstone, on April 2nd, 2013 Author: Bonnie ZoBell
2013, Monkey Puzzle Press Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Just as the term sounds, a “whack-job” is defined in the urban dictionary as: 1. A Person for whom failure is so consistent that they are slowly driven into madness. 2. Someone who partakes in unbelievably odd behavior that a reasonable human would avoid. 3. An extremely erratic or irrational person.
The ten stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s neat little collection are full of such characters, and as the term further suggests, the characters and the tales are darkly comic. Because these are flash pieces – brief narratives that are over before a reader has time to get too emotionally involved – they are not really “tragic” stories, but tragedy hovers over them, menacing as a thundercloud, ZoBell subtly teasing out the ghastly implications with the skill of a gifted storyteller. Often as not, though, there is a redemptive detail at the end and not just imminent doom. …
Continue reading »
By Eric Markowsky, on March 22nd, 2013  Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
2013, Penguin Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Back in 2010, I ended my review of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by saying I expected to start seeing more translations of her work in English “very soon.” So I was pretty excited this past January when I first read about the release of There Once Was a Woman Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. This is what I’d been waiting for.
Things started out well enough. Translator Anna Summers’s brief introduction reminded me of everything I’d loved about Scary Fairy Tales and set the stage for Petrushevskaya’s particular brand of Love Stories, constrained and distorted by the cramped spaces of communal Soviet living. The first story, “A Murky Fate,” packed so much embarrassment and desperation into just four pages that I felt a little bad about reading it while sitting next to someone on the bus.
As I read further into the collection, though, I started feeling a little disappointed. While these stories are compact and dark, just like I expected, and while there are definitely some stand outs, like “A Murky Fate,” “Two Deities,” and “Hallelujah, Family!”, there’s also a lot of repetition here, a lot of people being unhappy in the same ways and turning to the same outlets with the same results. No one piece struck me as a total let down, but as a collection, Love Stories lacks the endless inventiveness that made Scary Fairy Tales so memorable. …
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on March 12th, 2013 [This coming of age quasi-mystery novel set on a reservation is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Lousie Erdrich
2012, Harper
Filed Under: Literary, Mystery
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
I went into this book (which won the 2012 National Book Award) completely blind, on purpose. When it comes to books that I expect a lot from (hype is one thing, collecting a bunch of awards is another), I sometimes prefer to not read even the jacket copy. So i had no idea what this book was about. My immediate association was to think of Patrick Swayze (Roadhouse; round-house kicks in Roadhouse), and thankfully that was way off the mark.
Before anything else, I was struck by Erdrich’s descriptive prose. Here’s the beautiful opening paragraph:
Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation. They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves. Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks. They had grown into the unseen walls and it was difficult to pry them loose. My father wiped his palm across his forehead and damned their toughness. I was using a rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle; he wielded a long, slim iron fireplace poker that was probably doing more harm than good. As my father prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year’s seedlings.
It’s a great description that does a great job of foreshadowing the story to come. This is a story about about a family’s seemingly futile struggle against unseen forces and the pull of decay. It centers around Joe, a young Native American teen on the cusp of maturation, who suddenly finds his world crashing down around him–and the gritty realities of his world weighing on him heavily. …
Continue reading »
By Eric Markowsky, on February 26th, 2013  Author: Amity Gaige
2013, Twelve Books
Filed under: Literary
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I have some very mixed feelings about Amity Gaige’s new novel Schroder. It tells the story of a father kidnapping his own daughter in the midst of a contentious custody battle, but the plot is far from what’s most noteworthy about this strange epistolary novel.
Erik Schroder is a fascinating, at times bewildering narrator. After immigrating to the U.S. from East Germany, he decides to take on a new American identity, Eric Kennedy, invents a new history for himself, and sets out, over the course of his life, to sever every tie with his past. He only brings it up here in this confession-cum-apology in an attempt to explain what he’s done and who he really is to his ex-wife, Laura.
Justifying his life of deception is the perfect challenge for a divergent imagination like Schroder’s. He’s at his most captivating when explaining how he came to love his own lies and their fruits, his beautiful American family. By turns charming, convincing, challenging, pleading, aggressive, and disturbing, his voice carries an emotional range that almost carries the novel all by itself.
But not quite.
…
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on February 19th, 2013 Auhor: Karin Tidbeck
2012, Cheeky Frawg Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I picked this book solely because I thought the cover was cool. And as said cover implies, the stories here are varied, but each is dark and a little creepy. Indeed, there’s a permeating weirdness across the collection that Tidbeck sometimes sponges up with her prose and sometimes leaves to soak.
A Swedish author who writes both in her native language and English, Tidbeck’s word choices often have a foreignness about them that do a lot to bring about this feeling of something being askew. I know Murakami doesn’t do his own English translations, but I was reminded of his writing in that way. Like it does for Murakami, these slightly off-key notes give Tidbeck’s story a distinctly magical–and haunting–feel.
It was June, and the flowerbeds were full of giddy insects that every now and then buzzed over to Herr Cederberg to make sure he wasn’t a flower.
The subject matter of the stories is wonderfully weird in its own right. The opening story, “Beatrice,” is about a man who falls in love with an airship. He is unable to buy the particular one he is enamored with, so he build a replicate and keeps it in a hangar as his wife. In need of cash, he takes on a tenant: a young woman who is in love (and in a relationship with) a steam engine. She dies giving birth to a human-machine hybrid daughter, whom the dirigible-loving man raises as his own. When his adopted hybrid child grows a little older, she is able to communicate with Beatrice, who relates that she hates the man, who has, from her point of view, kept her as a rape slave for all these years. …
Continue reading »
By Mike Beeman, on February 14th, 2013 Author: Sam Pink
2013, Electric Literature
Filed Under: Literary
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
If familiarity really does breed contempt then it would be hard to imagine a writer more familiar with Chicago than Sam Pink. His latest book, released on Valentine’s Day, is a bipolar love letter to the city that is at turns hilarious and hateful (albeit a love letter that contains the sentences “Fuck Western Avenue and fuck Chicago” and “How do you want me to Fuck you, Chicago”). Pulled by the two opposite poles of antipathy and sentiment, the anonymous narrator of Pink’s Rontel explores Chicago’s down and out, describing their lives with a compassion that feels genuinely heartfelt.
After calling in on his last day of work, Rontel’s narrator wanders through a hot Chicago summer day, visiting his co-workers and neighbors, playing video games with his brother, and petting his passive cat, Rontel. Written in a manic stream-of-consciousness, the narrator’s memories and fantasies (which are about punching strangers in the face as often as embracing them) sometimes overwhelm the present narrative. This balancing act would be impossible to pull off without Pink’s wonderfully profane narration, a mix of vitriol and pity cut with just the right amount of self-aware humor:
On the Blue Line towards The Loop, I sat down and took out a granola bar I’d stolen from my girlfriend’s roommate.
Her roommate had accused me—to my girlfriend—of eating her food.
Which was untrue.
But then because of how hurt I was by the accusation, I started eating her food.
Yes.
Haha fuck off.
…
Continue reading »
By Nico Vreeland, on February 7th, 2013  Author: Anis Shivani
2012, C & R Press
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
3 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
My only previous experience with Anis Shivani’s work came from reading a few of the contrarian articles he writes for the Huffington Post. One of these, published about a year ago, proclaims MFA-style creative writing to be an offshoot of therapy, and the fiction produced by workshops to be no more than pale imitations of Carver or Hemingway, or whatever writer a particular teacher might set in front of the class.
That kind of proclamation generally comes from a stunt piece designed to stir up controversy (and hence pageviews), but Shivani hates MFA workshops so genuinely and so strongly that he wrote an entire book about why they’re so bad, 2011′s Against the Workshop. And he’s pretty convincing. While I don’t agree with all of Shivani’s anti-workshop opinions, he makes some good points about the similarity and craftsmanlike tastelessness of so much modern writing.
So I expected this man who hates safe, bland fiction to write stark, bold stories himself. I expected his style to be unique and adventurous, and his stories to surprise me, if not always pleasantly.
I did not expect him to turn out a collection like The Fifth Lash: safe, bland stories that could desperately use a good workshopping. After 300 pages of clunky prose, nearly nonexistent characters, and plots that are both didactic and boring, I would absolutely love to read some imitation Carver, I would pay a stranger good money for craftsmanlike tastelessness. …
Continue reading »
By Eric Markowsky, on February 5th, 2013 This Calvino-esque collection is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
I’d never heard of Antonio Tabucchi before I tore open the wrapping on a copy of The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico this past Christmas. Turns out, he was one of the most celebrated Italian authors of the modern era until his death just this past year. His name stands along side the likes of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino, and for good reason.
The stories in Flying Creatures more than live up to comparison with the works of any other postmodernist masters. Tabucchi renders narratives as light as air in rich, thoughtful prose. These pieces are fabulist, historical, experimental, philosophical.
But rather than laboring the point any further myself, let me share how Tabucchi characterizes the tales collected here (as translated by Tim Park) in his brief introduction to Flying Creatures:
I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas, not so much for their style, as because many of them seem to wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters, survivors of some whole that never was. Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having-to-be, or bumps on the surface of existence.
If that’s enough to make you want to run off and read these stories, I won’t blame you if you stop reading this review right here. If you still need more convincing, then let me tell you about “The Passion of Dom Pedro.” …
Continue reading »
By Eric Markowsky, on January 29th, 2013  Author: Laura van den Berg
2012, Origami Zoo Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If I’m not careful, my review of Laura van den Berg’s recent collection of short shorts might end up being longer than the book itself. It’s not that I’m normally long-winded. It’s just that the whole thing is only thirty six pages long, and there’s a lot of good stuff in There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights. I’m tempted to summarize each of these little narrative gems–only one of its nine stories is longer than four pages–but by the time I finished that, you might as well have just read the book.
And you should read the book. Van den Berg’s very short stories are self-contained parables of modern life and love gone stale and the ways people sometimes try to rescue themselves from themselves. Her characters’s efforts run the gamut of realism and fantasy, from a struggling couple who rents a house by a lake for a summer to a family who adopt a couple of cannibals to help out with childcare. Whatever the mode, these stories are astutely observed and precisely composed portraits of life’s disappointments, large and small. …
Continue reading »
|
|
