Tag: Short Story Collection

  • Personal Review: “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson

    Up until a couple of months ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Denis Johnson. (And yes, the rock I live under is very comfortable.) I found out about him from a review of Ted Geltner’s biography of Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures. From that article, I was intrigued and put Johnson’s Jesus’ Son on my reading list.

    If I had pushed myself, I could have read the book in a day, but spreading it out over three seemed more appropriate. A couple of things jumped out at me, besides the fact that it was a quick read. First, this book of short stories just oozed 90’s literature, which is strange as most of the stories take place in the 70’s, while the stories themselves were written in the 80’s, and only published in 1992. I can’t fully say why it felt so 90’s, but it Gen-X despondent seemed to be lurking in corners. The second idea the book presented to me is that the drunk/addict poet or writer is rather cliché now. Maybe not as drunken muscled as Hemmingway, Kerouac, or Burkowski, but the stories in the volume ran in the same vein. Here, we are presented with pretty much the same first-person character from story to story, who is too poetic to be a regular run of the mill drunk. No, this is the tragic drunk writer whose writing is their only salvation – the thing that keeps them going.

    That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. No, I was struck at how simple, and effortless everything in the stories felt. It carried such weight but drifted on the air. The destruction of a character’s life never felt so beautiful and fragile. No, I get why Jesus’ Son is placed on best of short story collection lists, year after year. Johnson’s stories and writing style has clearly been influential. I was about half way through “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when it dawned on me how many flash writers must consider Denis Johnson a primary source, with his books lovingly squirreled away on their shelves.

    The final thought that I had while reading this book was that these stories felt like they were fun to write. Some books can feel laborious – not to read that is – such as writing it took time, work, dedication, perseverance to deliver the story exactly the way the writer wanted to tell it. Jesus’ Son felt like it was a blast to write. Either making it all up, or using real life situations, or maybe combining it all together, the end result was a book that felt like it was just as entertaining to write as it was to read.

    Having said all of this, I must now return to my home under the rock. There, I will toss this book up on the shelf, with all the other collections of short stories that I own and wonder how did I miss out on Denis Johnson when he was alive?

  • Personal Review: “First Person Singular” by Haruki Murakami

    I got The Elephant Vanishes when it first came out in the US, and for years I loaned that book out. In fact, I have bought three copies of it, and currently, I will need to go and buy a fourth copy. It makes me happy when I see that one of Haruki Murakami short stories in The New Yorker, and at bookstores, I gravitate to his name in the fiction section, just to see what they have. So, I am a big fan of Haruki Murakami, and for that reason, this personal review will be biased.

    You have been warned.

    I purchased First Person Singular about a year ago, and I am embarrassed to say this, but I read it slowly over the past four months. Normally, I try to read a book, especially one of his, as fast as possible, as I do have a stack of books calling my name. Yet, this time around, this book sat on the end table in my livingroom. Occasionally it would call out to me, but on the whole, I read a story here and there, in a very leisurely way. That’s not to say that the stories weren’t engaging, I just never felt the urge with this collection to finish it now. It was more like, “We’re here when you need us.”

    What I love most about Murakami is how effortlessly he can move between contemporary realism, then switch to surrealism. With other writers who write in these two worlds, it becomes pretty clear as to why they choose these two styles; contemporary realism is the “drama” story, and the surrealism is the “comedy” story. Murakami keeps you on your toes, never sure which will be which. It makes his works fresh and unpredictable.

    First Person Singular is made up of eight stories, and, you guessed it, each story is told in first person singular. It’s a “wink wink, nudge nudge” kind’a title; a little joke which Murakami wants to make sure we’re in on. It is implied, in almost every story, that the first person is Murakami himself, but I am not one to jump on that boat. This is fiction after all, and he wouldn’t be the first writer to create the illusion that what you are reading is actually based on real events. By doing that, creating this illusion of honesty, it makes the stories feel more intimate, and that Murakami is talking to us as a friend.

    I want to take a moment of select three of the stories to highlight. The first is “On a Stone Pillow” which recounts, for lack of a more nuanced description, a one-night stand. But this isn’t a story so much about sex, as it is about intimacy and connection. The two people find themselves yearning after others, but in this one moment find solace in each other. I found their honestly with each other melancholic, and devastating in the ways the heart can love and break. “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” is one of Murakami’s surreal stories, as there is a talking monkey in it. Yet, this was another story on the contemplation of love, and living in a world where you cannot fit in. The last story I want to mention is “The Yakult Swallows

    Poetry Collection,” about the love of following an awful baseball club, and finding creativity in such devotion. It rang very true to me, being a Cubs fan and all.

    What all of these stories, but these three especially, hammered home to me was the different forms love and connection can take. The moments that we share with people, some fleeting, some for a lifetime, and how they can affect us for years to come. The skill that Murakami displays as a writer is giving these characters an emotional weight in their worlds, which in some cases elevates them to understandings, and others pulls down into listlessness. Murakami does this by creating a tone, and a very specific mood, which is not unlike music. (Which is funny because other stories in this collection revolve around music.)

    It does make me wonder, as First Person Singular was written in Japanese (props to Philip Gabriel’s translation) how all of these touches and folds of nuances play out in its original language? It a question of pure curiosity, and not one that I actually need answered. I wonder this because, Murakami’s work makes me feel that the world he creates is a place of quiet contemplation, and internalizing the events that make up our lives. That to live and experience life is a gift on its own. Then to take those experiences, digest and acknowledge them, appreciate them, is another gift we receive in this world.

    Maybe, in a weird way, I read First Person Singular the way Haruki Murakami intended me to. I took my time, didn’t rush it, and allowed myself to enjoy at my own pace, so I could contemplate it at my own speed.

  • A Question for the People Who Read My Short Story Reviews

    For those of you who read my short story reviews, and I guess anybody else out there for that matter, are there any short stories that came out in the last six months from either big or small publications, that you would recommend?

    Please leave your suggestions in the comments so we can all enjoy your endorsements.

    Thanks for taking part…

  • Short Story Review: “Smoke” by Nicola Winstanley

    (The short story “Smoke” is part of Nicola Winstanley’s short story collection, which is entitled SMOKE.)

    I took a writing class, long time ago, and the professor pronounced to us on day one, that “Your characters are your babies. And if you want to be a good writer, you have to make your babies suffer.” He was a bit dramatic, but academically, his was correct; characters have to be knocked down to make their eventually rise have any dramatic or cathartic weight. This is not a revolutionary idea, as its just essential to storytelling.

    Nicola Winstanley isn’t afraid to make her characters suffer. In her title story, “Smoke,” she allows the nine-year old Amanda to suffer, but also shows us the suffering of her family, and how each of their own pain affects and inflicts on the others. As the story begins, children are being called home for supper by their mothers, but Amanda’s mother has recently passed away, so no one is calling for her. At home, her older sister Judy, dealing with the loss in her own detached way, instructs Amanda to make herself a dinner of toast, as that is all the food in the house that their father has left for them. They tell themselves that their father is still at work and will be home soon. Eventually, he does come home, but its late, the children should be in bed, and he seems aloof to how to take care of two daughters, let alone himself. What follows is a story about a family dealing with grief, but the focus is on Amanda and her wrestling and discovery of the emotions she is experiencing – as for a nine-year-old, these emotions are just beyond her ability to articulate and understand them, but her feelings are strong enough to engage her to action.

    At times I felt that this story was brutal in its honesty. Amanda at first believes that her mother has just gone away, as if there was a chance for her return, but Amanda’s actions betray this belief of hers. Winstanley marvelously illustrates how Amanda does everything in her power to keep the loneness and the emptiness within her at bay, but Amanda is a child, and handles these complex feelings as a child would – playing with a friend, eating sweets, hiding from her sister, and waiting for her father to return. All for not, as slowly it dawns on Amanda that she is alone.

    The other touch that I enjoyed with this story was how the other two family members dealt with their own grief. Judy’s reaction is to leave this home, and stay with a friend’s family. Maybe Judy is saving herself, finding a way to survive this situation, but to do that she has to abandon her sister. And then there is their father, who’s way of coping is to not be in the home, which clearly no longer feels like a home. Though the story never goes into detail what is keeping their father away, it’s a question that I never felt needs to be answer. No, he is looking out for himself as well, because Winstanley drops an illuminating point, by observing that while the girls are going without, he has time to get new glasses for himself.  From this point, Amanda begins to spiral down, and it is painful to watch. She doesn’t have clean or good fitting clothes. There isn’t enough to eat, and she goes to school hungry, and without a lunch. She finds some sympathy with other children, but she also finds unwanted attention from the local teenagers.

    And here the story takes a turn, in a direction I wasn’t fully expecting; Amanda tries to find her way out of where she’s at. Maybe she doesn’t fully understand why she’s doing it, but we know. The need to sleep in the same bed with her father. The attempts to clean their home. Amanda tries to eat better, and be better. Amanda doesn’t give up, she tries, she fights for security, and to keep the loneness away.

    With the end of the story, and the reconciliation between Amanda and her father, I felt that these characters were now seeing each other, acknowledging that they need to and can do better. But… but there is a melancholy to this ending. The damage has been done. The trauma has been created. These few days of this story might be some of the most impactful days of her life. I felt that at the conclusion of this story, I knew Amanda would be okay, but it would be a journey where she would have to deal with her feelings of abandonment, neglect, food anxiety, authority figures, and shame. There was such a hopeful melancholy with this story, that I just felt crushed by a feeling of compassion for these characters.

    It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting, but as the days went on after reading this story, I kept thinking about Amanda, and how this story very quietly illuminated the exact moment in this person’s life where they stopped seeing the world as a child does, and started taking the first steps toward understanding the world of adulthood.

    Nicola Winstanley made her baby suffer. Yet, Amanda came out on the other end. It was hard at times reading certain passages, and not because something shockingly brutal happened. No, difficult to read because I know that those little indignities that happen in childhood, those are the deepest cuts that take a lifetime to deal with. Maybe I would prefer to be the kid eating sweets, trying to ignore that pain deep down. Nicola Winstanley had the courage to confront that pain, and let Amanda start her healing.

  • Personal Review: Let Me Think by J. Robert Lennon

    I am embarrassed to say that I have no idea how Let Me Think by J Robert Lennon made it on my reading list. And my reading list is actually a wish list on my Amazon account. This was the book that was next up. I knew it was a collection of short stories, but other than that, I knew nothing about the author or any previous works. I was going in blind, but sometimes it’s good to be surprised.

    The collection is made up of flash pieces and short stories, broken up into five sections. There are two reoccurring stories; one about a marriage, and another about a cottage in the woods. The other thing that reoccurs in the collection is the theme of unhappy marriages. And I can’t prove it, but with the book being broken into five parts, I had the weird feeling that each section was to represent one of the five stages of grief. Again, no proof of that, but I couldn’t shake that idea.

    I liked Lennon’s writing right from the beginning of the collection. The first two pieces, “Girls” followed by “Boys” showed that Lennon has a sense of humor, and likes to play with the form of a short story. Witty, this guy’s witty, and the sense of playfulness and fun comes right through. That’s not to say that the none of the stories take on a serious tone, as some do, but experimentation is happening here as well. The “cottage” stories do take on an adult tone, but they also lean into a slight thread of absurdism, or maybe fanciful is the better word to use. Yet, the best example of this tone is the story “Subject Verb” which is told in that very simple sentence structure; just a subject and a verb. It is a format that is brutal in its simplicity, but Lennon makes it an effective tool for storytelling.

    In the end, the collection was enjoyable and entertaining, but what I was left with, and made me the happiest, was that this was a book by a writer who is trying to find new ways to tell a story. The pieces don’t follow the hero cycle, or have a hook in the first line, or even try to tie up the narrative with a button. Now, some of the stories do the afore mentioned things, but the ones that don’t, the stories that try, and poke and prod at what a narrative can be – how short can a story be – how many words are needed to create an emotional pay off? THAT was the excitement of reading this collection – it was different, and it was refreshing without feeling labored to be different.