McSweeney's 45

It's another anthology from McSweeney's, with dueling (ok, alternating) tales from a Bradbury anthology and a Hitchcock anthology. Some of them are classics (Bradbury's "The Pedestrian"), some are tediously long (Lucille Fletcher and Allan Ullman's "Sorry, Wrong Number"), one is out-of-place (John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio", while an excellent story, just doesn't quite feel like it belongs in here).

China Mieville's "The Design" is excellent and really impressed me, and Brian Evenson's "The Dust" certainly feels like it could be in a 50s/60s anthology. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is both terrifying and awful (and the machine described therein is featured in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun). Julian May's "Dune Roller" is an example of a really worthwhile story I was previously unfamiliar with (more than likely because Hitchcock, rather than Bradbury, picked it, but it certainly could have been a Bradbury pick). In contrast, Benjamin Percy's "Suicide Woods" doesn't belong in here, both because it has little in common with the other stories in the anthology, and because it has far too much in common with stories in other McSweeney's anthologies. I feel like I've read it a dozen times previously, and that's not a good thing, either for it or those other stories.

Overall, recommended. Even the stories I was less than thrilled with are page turners (and as far as page turners, the last story enclosed here is terrifying, and has a lot in common with a favorite, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit.")

Civilwarland in Bad Decline

Sometimes it's interesting to see how a writer thinks, how their experiences shape their stories. The afterword to Civilwarland in Bad Decline is a little on the nose in that regard; George Saunders details what he was going through as he was writing these stories, how he was relatively broke, working a job he wasn't entirely enthused about, and worrying about how he would be able to provide for his family. In that light, the stories here about parents working a job they hate to support their children, worrying about failing their family, and actually failing to support their family are a lot more poignant.

Out of seven stories in this collection, four ("Civilwarland in Bad Decline", "The Wavemaker Falters", "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror", and "Bounty", as well as the bonus story "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room") are set in amusement parks. Saunders cover this in the afterword, as well, as well as in an interview:

The truth is, I started writing theme park stories not out of thematic or political interest. I was just trying to divest myself of a certain tendency that I had, which was to be a stodgy, Hemingway-esque realist. I really loved Hemingway, so I wrote a lot of stuff in grad school that was kind of like Hemingway transplanted into my life, but somehow it didn't work. I noticed as a device if I set the story in a strange place, the language got a little more oomph in it. At first it was a way to keep myself honest, to keep me from falling back into this reactionary realist mode that I couldn't pull off. And at the time that I was working on the first book, I was also working at a company that was kind of squeezing the life out of me. It was one of those artistic accidents where I thought I was just doing something to be pragmatic, and then when I did it I could see all the political ramifications. So now I'm actually trying not to do those stories as much, but every so often one will hit me and it will seem like so much fun. It's a step up into that kind of weird fiction that's irresistible.

 The theme park stories are all a little different, of course: "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" is both funny and tragic as hell, as we see through the eyes of a downtrodden verisimilitude inspector who both hates and is lousy at his job, but sticks it out for the sake of his children (with a wife who no longer respects him). "The Wavemaker Falters" concerns a man who caused a tragedy losing the respect of his wife through dealing with it. Of the others, "Bounty" is the longest, and the most memorable; it deals with a dystopian future where society has broken down and where mutants, called "Flaweds" are second-class citizens: working menial jobs, or even enslaved. Unfortunately, it's the least tight of the stories here.

I would highly recommend this; all the stories are imaginative and effective.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Like all short story collections, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher has its ups and downs. There are a few that could be autobiographical ("Sorry to Disturb" and "How Shall I Know You?"). There's what may be a vampire story (or just an extended meditation on mortality) in "Terminus", and there's a story that was possibly written to indulge in a grammatical pun ("Comma", because of course).

There's at least one story in here that I'd never like to read again, which is "The Heart Fails Without Warning." (which, incidentally, is an incidence that occurs in one of the other stories) It's a look at a family dealing with one of their daughter's eating disorder, and it's unsettling as hell.

The class of the lot is the title story, which is (I believe) the only piece in this collection that was not previously published. It's oddly fascinating to read, given that it's a revenge fantasy for a certain class of British intellectual, and it's not played 100% straight (thankfully, because even if you believe Thatcher is odious, you have to wink a little, or it comes off as psychotic.)

This is very much worth reading -- the prose is both memorable and limpid, I knocked this out relatively quickly.

McSweeney's 44

I like Jim Shepard's "The Ocean of Air", a fictionalization of the Montgolfier brothers. The rest of the stories didn't do much for me.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

My first impression of the title story in Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove was something approaching awe -- this was a novel premise, beautifully executed, well-written. Russell uses the backdrop of vampires who've settled in a small town in Italy to show a couple falling out of love. It's a great story, and probably the best in the collection.

Of the other stories in the collection, "Reeling for the Empire" is nearly as good, and "Proving Up" is truly creepy. "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" are both coming-of-age stories set amidst unsettling conceits. "The Barn at the End of Our Term" seems a little aimless and "Dougbert Shackleton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating" has its funny moments but doesn't really rise to a point. "The New Veterans" has an interesting premise, but really lags in the middle. And the pre-middle. And the post-middle.

This made me want to seek out more of Karen Russell's work -- she puts her characters in odd environments, gives them fantastic (in the literal sense) stimuli, and in that she almost reminds me of Ray Bradbury.

The Burning Plain

The Burning Plain is a classic of Mexican literature, and I can certainly see why. These short stories are all sparse, yet powerful.

Each is short -- some are practically anecdotes. Others are apparently internal monologues. Others are dialogues that read like one person is imagining what the other would say. They build and slowly reveal.

In "The Hill of the Comadres", the narrator opens the story by stating that two of his friends are dead. As he continues, he eventually confesses to killing one of them, but even that seems almost tangential to his recollections. It's about despair, loneliness, deterioration of a community.

"We're Very Poor" is summed up in its first sentence: "Everything is going from bad to worse here."

"Luvina" almost seems like it doesn't fit here. Not that it's a bad story, but it seems tinged with fantasy, like a bad dream. It reminded me of Roberto Bolaño, although if I'd done my homework Bolaño would remind me of Rulfo.

"Anacleto Morones" is the longest in the collection,  and almost seems like an extended setup for a dirty joke.

My favorite story in the collection? Probably "The Burning Plain", which is also the most straightforward, I think. Least straightforward? "The Man."

This is something to revisit, although probably not all at once.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Don't judge a book by its cover, or an author by his appellation. I saw "Breece D'J Pancake" and cringed. I figured I knew exactly why someone would choose to do that, and exactly what kind of stories they would write. Luckily, I was way off; from reading the afterword (or one of them, anyway), I learned that the awful punctuation was the fault of the first magazine that published one of Pancake's stories, and he kept it, because why not? Secondly, these stories aren't precious and tedious at all.

The first story in this collection, "Trilobites" is one of the best short stories I've ever read. Some critics, (like Joyce Carol Oates, on the freaking cover of my edition, and at least one of the fore and afterwords) liken Pancake to Hemingway, and while I can see it, I don't think that's wholly accurate. Hemingway is just more sparse than Pancake is -- Hemingway's protagonists seem more detached. The rest of the collection is quite strong, as well. Sure, there are ebbs and flows (the foreword singles out the gothic "Time and Again" as an ebb), but the stories remain inventive and haunting. Recommended unreservedly.

That said, while this is great writing, it isn't always fun reading. These are depressing stories about lost and desperate people, the kind who "have lost a wheel, fallen off a biplane wing, or crossed yourself left-handedly . . .". Pancake doesn't let his characters blur together -- sure, these are miserable people, but they all have very different reasons and circumstances, and he's not going to let you forget that.

Interpreter of Maladies

I really wanted to hate Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies. All these neat, precious stories where everything is tied up with a bow at the end. (Maybe I was just upset because the eponymous story in the collection is about an interpreter who works for a doctor, rather than some sort of shaman). Fortunately, I was not able to -- the stories flow quite well, as the limpid prose is eminently readable, and Lahiri makes it easy to become invested in her characters.

Having previously read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children helped me avoid too much culture shock towards Lahiri's Indian characters and settings, but she does an excellent job at making the exotic familiar -- all of Lahiri's characters are easy to relate to, and as such, there comes familiarity with the things, foods, and customs that they are familiar with.

Despite their ease of reading, I have little desire to revisit these stories. They're all the sort of work that I'm glad I read, but there's little pleasure to be had here, in re-reading. I'd love to be proven wrong, but this is an experience to have once. The characters are good to have met, and the craft is to be admired, but there's little memorable or to be reflected upon.

One thing I wish I could remember -- in "Sexy", an American (of non-Indian extraction) asks an Indian what the Taj Mahal is like, and is told: "The most romantic spot on earth. An everlasting monument to love." I wish I could remember what work I'd been exposed to said of the Taj Mahal "it's a tomb" to emphasize how misguided the desire to build one for a living woman was.

Starlight

Alfred Bester's Starlight is a worthwhile science fiction short story collection. My only previous exposure to Bester's short fiction was the excellent "Fondly Fahrenheit", which is included here, and is a highlight. Like many retrospectives, there's extensive commentary by Bester, as he introduces each story. In the hands of other authors, this is occasionally tedious, but Bester sets the stage for each story well, and explains what he's doing.

As with many collections, Starlight is a bit uneven. There's gems like the aforementioned "Fondly Fahrenheit," and typical sci-fi fare like "Adam and No Eve" and "The Four Hour Fugue." "Of Time and Third Avenue" could very well be an Arthur C. Clarke story. Of course, there's clunkers as well, like "Hell is Forever", the longest story in the book, which inspires Bester to opine on himself at the time he wrote the story:

"I feel like a father to that kid, and I think he shows promise in 'Hell is Forever.' He makes mistakes, he's green and gauche, his knowledge and understanding of character is minimal, he has a lot to learn, but I think he ought to stay with it. He might become a pro some day."

Tough to argue with that, but "Hell is Forever" really drags. Luckily, most of the collection isn't Bester growing and developing, but is rather high caliber science fiction stories. I would recommend, but it's probably worth picking up The Demolished Man first. That said, it's easy to see how Bester became disillusioned with science fiction, and decided to move on during the 1960s. While the work here is something that any science fiction fan should be aware of, it's very much rooted in the 1940s and 1950s, and there's only so much that can be done there without tedious repetition. Bester had a hell of a career, and this is not a bad coda.

Short Story Review - "Dentist"

"Dentist" is probably my favorite story from Roberto Bolaño's short story collection Last Evenings on Earth. It concerns a writer (presumably one of Bolaño's alter egos, of which many of the collections protagonists seem to be) visiting a friend's hometown. The friend is the titular dentist, and the narrator wonders why he (the dentist) chose to remain in his hometown, rather than move to Mexico City, as do many Mexican intellectuals. As the story opens, we learn that the writer had been planning on relaxing, as his life was in a transitional period, but his friend is quite distraught, due to the death of a patient at a free clinic he volunteers at.

The story seems to be an allegory for Bolaño's feelings on art -- or at least Bolaño setting out a set of aesthetics for comment. The following passage is preceded by the dentist's encounter with a painter whose work he admires. An awkward misunderstanding results in the dentist being insulted, and then beaten up when he attempts to recover. After recounting this to the writer, and railing against the painter, the writer observes that this is a singular anecdote in a man's life, and doesn't discredit his work. The dentist responds as follows:

But that’s where art comes from, he said: life stories. Art history comes along only much later. That what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing/that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression of and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular.
And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home.
But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.
With a gleam in his eye he stared at me for a moment. The death of the Indian woman from gum cancer had obviously affected him more than I had realized at first.
So now you’re wondering what I mean by the secret story? asked my friend. Well, the secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another and we don’t realize that’s a lie.

Immediately afterwards, the dentist begins waving someone over to their table -- an Indian boy, named Jose Ramirez, who he clarifies to the writer that he'd met through his clinic. The boy seems like a relatively unremarkable adolescent, who's clearly the product of poverty, and already has spent significant time working in the fields -- his hands are "iron". On their second meeting with Ramirez, it's revealed that he is a writer as well, and the dentist regards him as a major talent: "And then my friend declared that there were very few writers alive on par with the boy sitting there before us. I swear to God: very few." The writer, rather than tacitly agreeing, expresses doubt, which results in the confirmation of the dentist's assertion. The boy is truly a singular talent.

The story closes with the writer and the dentist waiting in the dentist's clinic for a patient who never shows.

The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow is an unusual anthology -- the first four stories ("The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign") are considered classics of horror, and some of the themes and characters have even been incorporated into H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. The remaining stories in the collection are unconnected to the first four and are French-influenced romances. I took the opportunity to read the first four stories (which are in the public domain, and hence, all over the Internet. The remainder of the collection will have to wait until I either come across it in a used bookstore, or until I exhaust much more reading material.)

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

-The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2d

"The Repairer of Reputations", the first and best-known story, is a subtle tour of the mind of a madman. Hilbert Castaigne is not a stable individual, and he knows it -- as he introduces himself, he acknowledges that he hasn't been the same since has fall from a horse four years earlier. He then proceeds to mention that while convalescing from his fall, he read The King in Yellow, a fictional play that is the common thread that links these stories. Castaigne says of the play: "although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked." Prior to his accident, Castaigne had been a wealthy playboy and man-about-town; as the story unfolds, he's a recluse, keeping the company only of his cousin Louis, a soldier (in a very mid-19th century army), Hawberk, an armorer, and Mr. Wilde, an elderly eccentric who appears just as mad as Hildred.

Throughout the story, Hildred's companions often humor him -- while he is generally aware of it, and manages to turn the tables on his interlocutors at least twice, it's unclear if this actually happens, or only in his imagination. The mysterious Mr. Wilde is the eponymous repairer of reputations (he hangs out a shingle with that title at the halfway point of the story), and convinces Hildred that he has vast influence in society as a whole, with hundreds of members of the upper class in his sway. Additionally, Wilde holds a manuscript titled The Imperial Dynasty of America -- in it, Hildred is second in line to the throne, after his cousin Louis.

After poring over the manuscript again and again, Hildred confronts his cousin with two demands -- first, that he must give up his claim to the throne, with Louis does, laughing. The second demand is colder, in that Louis can't marry his fiancee, Hawberk's daughter. When Louis refuses, Hildred responds that it doesn't matter, he's hired an assassin. Louis and Hildred run to Hawberk's shop, where Hildred finds Mr. Wilde with his throat torn out by his feral cat. Without Wilde, Hildred will be unable to ascend the throne. As he mourns, he is placed in a straight-jacket by medical personnel, and led past a weeping Hawberk, his daughter, and Louis. It is unclear which of the events have occurred, and which have only occurred in Hildred's head.

Of the later stories, "The Mask" and "The Yellow Sign" feature The King in Yellow more prominently, while "In the Court of the Dragon" only mentions the play in passing (the unnamed narrator is troubled, because he's been reading it). Despite this, we never get much of a sense about what the play is about, other than a strange, otherworldly setting, and a vague sense of kinship with Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." I feel this is for the best, as often overtelling would make the play less ominous and more ridiculous. Other authors actually have written a play based on the fragments and clues left by Chambers, but since none of them shatter the human mind, what is the point?

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

-Cassilda's Song, The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2d

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_King_in_Yellow

Tyrants

Marshall N. Klimasweski's Tyrants is an uneven collection of short stories, likely due to the stories being written over the course of several years. "Jun Hee" was first published in 1991 in The New Yorker, and "Nobile's Airship" was first published in 1999 in The Yale Review. I'm assuming that some of the stories are more recent than that, but I'm not going to check. Klimasewiski does not provide initial publication dates in the acknowledgments, and I don't feel the need to plug story/author names into Google (and it's not in the edition notice either. So it goes.)

"Nobile's Airship", which opens this collection, is unquestionably a highlight -- it follows Ugo Lago, a Fascist journalist, and his experiences in the days leading up to Nobile's expedition, as well as his experiences while accompanying said expedition. The shock of foreign culture and climate, his solitude as a passenger on a zeppelin, and how superfluous a writer rather than a (sailor? aeronaut? crew member?) is on an airship are very well conveyed. A coda of airship accidents and the end of Nobile's life is also well done. My major issue is the lack of punctuation for speech used here, which makes the text marginally more difficult to read. Since Klimasewiski's other stories do use quotation marks, I have to assume that this is a recent affectation that I cannot support, regardless of what Gertrude Stein may think. (Two novels that I have read and enjoyed that did not use quotation marks -- The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Death with Interruptions, by Jose Saramago. Of course, that may be a function of the translation, and either of those gentlemen can write circles around Mr. Klimasewiski.) Regardless, "Nobile's Airship" is a fine story, but unfortunately not much of a harbinger of what is to come.

Following "Nobile's Airship", we have a trio of stories concerning a man and his relationship with his fiancee and her parents, taking his son in tow to a lovers' rendezvous, and finally the son's experiences with women and his memories of the father. These are crap, crap, and crap. This is followed by a surreal story about a woman's experiences with Stalin during the Second World War, which is a step up from the previous three stories, but isn't any great shakes. That's followed by another trio of stories, concerning a couple's relationship, and the stresses caused by being from different backgrounds, illnesses of parents, desires and dreams. I'd say this trio is a step up from the previous trio, but it fails to grab me. The final story is "Aeronauts", which I can't decide if I like or dislike -- it's not so much a story as it is a series of out-of-sequence short acts, as if from a play, interspersed with letters and commentary from the principals. It turns out that this story depicts a real personage, and much of the dialogue and letters are historical record, but fiction is interpolated into his life to color his acts appropriately. So what in actuality is poor planning, becomes in fiction a romantic and desperate beacon. While I did like the execution, I'm unsure if this cheapens the life of the historical personage depicted.

I really wanted to love this collection, especially after the beginning of "Nobile's Airship", but I just can't. I may be alone here -- the reviews on both LibraryThing and Amazon are largely positive, as are other reviews around the web. While there's some good stuff here (the opening story, parts of the other stories), this collection fails overall to make much of an impression on me. The title of the collection is meant to evoke how people act in the shadow of an autocrat, which helps the stories concerning Mussolini and Stalin, but the stories fall flat on their faces when confronted with the softer and more subtle tyrannies of sex and domesticity. There is material here to like, but I can't say that I'll be picking up Klimasewiski's next novel, unless I read something to change my mind in the interim.

The Stories of John Cheever

I recently finished slogging through The Stories of John Cheever. It wasn't so much the length of the book (693 pages) that caused me difficulty, it was the compartmentalization inherent in any collection of short stories -- finishing each story feels like a small victory, rather than motivation to begin the next story. Due to this feeling (lack of page turnering?), I read at least four books concurrently with this collection; alternating one or two short stories with chapters or sections in my other books. As with any short story collection (and certainly moreso for one encompassing an entire career) there's a non-zero amount of chaff here, but at least Cheever's chaff is worth reading once at a minimum. Unlike many retrospective collections, where the first few stories feature the writer struggling and grasping to find his voice, this anthology opens with "Goodbye, My Brother", as excellent a piece of fiction as any collected herein. Other highlights include "O Youth and Beauty!", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin", and of course, "The Swimmer", which comes highly recommended -- every review I've seen of this collection mentions it as a gem, and I have to agree. While at first it was tough to grasp a metaphor after so many straightforward stories, the symbolism shines through in the end. (Cheever does love his Greek mythology, with that takeoff of Narcissus, the title of the later story "Artemis the Honest Well Digger", as well as "Metamorphoses", which is four vignettes that are all overt modern reproductions of Greek myth).

As for his characters, Cheever creates an endless series of WASPs who smoke, drink, womanize, and generally are not particularly deep, although they always seem to manage to find those who are louder, dumber, or more boorish to be embarrassed by. That's not to say that the characters are impossible to relate to, since we are all imperfect. Overall, it's a collection worth browsing, of a bygone generation -- I'll let Cheever's words from the preface close it out:

"These stories," writes Cheever in the preface to this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, "seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' set sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."