Customer Reviews

Bed

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After reading this book I felt like I wanted to be really nice to people. Tao Lin writes in a way that is descriptive but doesn't place any significance or emphasis on anything. He writes about lonely and depressed people who have been rejected from society which normal people would add drama to to make their story seem "heartwrenching" but Lin instead treats loneliness and isolation as "everyday facts of life" just as how it is a commonly accepted fact that there are some people born with brown hair and some born with blonde or black. Lin's dismissal of topical issues and distinctions makes BED a very detached and existentially consoling book for anyone to relate to. save the dolphins.

I feel like a jerk for being surprised that such a young writer could do what Tao Lin does. The beginnings of the stories in Bed make me feel like I am an ant being picked up and dropped in a swimming pool in New Jersey. The middles and ends of the stories in Bed make me feel like I am an ant not quite dying for some reason, in a swimming pool in New Jersey, hearing muzak being piped in from underwater speakers. They are all slightly different from one another. They are all good.

My friend and I went on a road trip this summer and she read "Sasquatch," "Nine Ten," and the story about the man who works at a library and sits in the back seat of a car driven by high school kids who either toilet paper or egg a house aloud to me. I had already read "Bed" three years prior to the road trip, but wanted to read it again, and my friend expressed interest in reading something aloud together. She would sometimes stop during the long sentences to regain focus and would ask me if she was doing okay reading. She read "Sasquatch" as we were laying in a park in Portland, Oregon and it was sunny and afterwards we both looked at each other emotionally, didn't say much, and seemed affected. I said something like "isn't this what life feels like?" I've read "Sasquatch" aloud to both my dad and my mom and a similar thing happened at the end, except when I read it to my mom it was on the phone and her voice sounded frail and she said something like, "wow, how beautiful, how sad." I have always felt kind of bizarre and lonely and like people don't see the world the way I do. The characters in "Bed" seemed to focus on small, sort of boring and sort of really complex moments that didn't necessarily have a positive or negative effect on them, but still felt important just because they were there, and that was enough.

I encountered Tao Lin's writing at a time in my life when I was very much predisposed to like it: Eeeee Eee Eeee (as I contemplating quitting an unfulfilling job as an attorney), Shoplifting from American Apparel (in the immediate aftermath of leaving that position and breaking up with my girlfriend) and, finally, Bed (several weeks into my unemployment and bachelorhood). The untethered, wary, existential aspects of his fiction, also knowing that it was being drawn in large parts from the author's life, appealed to my worldview.

I read Bed over the course of two afternoons at a table outside Good Karma Cafe in Philadelphia, drinking a series of iced coffees and taking advantage of the spectacular girl-watching opportunities of that locale. Over the course of my unemployment, this shop became my go-to destination for wasting away the afternoon with a good book. The friendly atmosphere lent itself to conversations with other patrons. I noticed that gay men tended to strike up conversations with me when I read Haroki Murakami, pretty girls when I read David Foster Wallace or Rivka Galchen. No one spoke to me when I read Tao Lin.

This was a bit disappointing, since I feel like Bed marks the author's most accessible work. I generally stuttered and mumbled extremely unsatisfying descriptions when asked about EEE or SFAA but I feel as if I'd have had some really cogent and specific things to say about Bed, if only anyone had bothered to ask. (Thanks, internet.)

The short stories in this collection seem focused in the way that Lin's novels are sprawling, while still maintaining the major stylistic and thematic elements of his work. That's probably a function of the form more than anything else, but regardless of the reason, its nice to see a slightly different version of what the author is capable of as a writer.

For anyone less inclined than I was to enjoy Tao Lin's work, I would recommend Bed as your starting point. Its a decent primer on the talent behind the author's polarizing public image.

After reading Eeee Eee Eeeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel I find that this collection of short stories by Tao Lin explores many of the same themes but does so in a way that is easier to follow and is, obviously, more concise. The dialogue as well as the narrative is much easier to follow through most of these stories than it is in Lin's longer works. I have enjoyed this book and read it quite quickly after getting them in the mail. Aside from the content I really like the singular design concept among each of his works.

If you are looking to start reading the works of Tao Lin I feel as this is a great place to start.

I've always thought of myself as more of a "novel guy"...I like to take some time to get to know the people I'm reading about...But wow, I truly felt amazed at how well I found myself knowing the characters in these stories. Enjoyed the meditative quality of re-reading some of the longer sentences and paragraphs, both out of being given the gift of daily meditation (often times my thoughts go by so fast I don't stop to "look around") and how that idea fits so perfectly with a lot of these characters' states of being--lonely, contemplative, often seeming to wonder "What is this world I've been thrown into?" (a predicament I have often found myself)!

i enjoyed this book. buy this book as a present for another person or yourself. buy it, do it, do it. you will feel good and surprised, maybe, to have it arrive in the mail. to feel really good you ought to buy it from an independent publisher because then you'll help decrease suffering, i think. this book makes me want to be nice to everyone, especially people who i think i don't like, which is silly because not liking other people is like not liking yourself, which is also possible but self-defeatist, um why does not being self-defeatist matter, uh i feel confused right now.

i've read every book tao lin has published, and have decided "bed" exemplifies what's at the core of everything, like this is his thesis statement as an author. actually, immediately after writing that i decided no, definitely not, any of his books could be his thesis statements. that's part of his appeal to me, though. these stories feel like anthems for self-condemned-ed-ly lonely, who tentatively hope for something better (whatever that "something" may be) despite a general lack of evidence from the (as my buddy camus likes to say) "benign indifference of the world."

the sometimes paragraph length sentences in "bed" feel deliberately paced to involve the reader in the thought processes of their characters, which results in this kind of unsettling, meta sensation (i.e. "am i reading about fictional characters? am i reading tao lin's thoughts? am i reading what tao lin wants me to think his thoughts are and does he want me to think these people are fictional or himself?") i know "bed" is probably realistically a combination of all of those things, which is what i liked most about reading it.

While I can appreciate Tao Lin's writing style, I do not enjoy it. He's a talented writer, but this book is full of stories about depressing people who lead boring and insignificant lives. Each story put me in a bad mood, and I just didn't see any value in reading this book. I do not recommend it.

Bed. By Tao Lin. Translated from the German by George Bush and Willy Wonka,

Lin has not till now been offered to English readers. He died of consumption five years ago at the age of 42, leaving various unfinished MSS. behind him, which he desired his executor to destroy. "Bed" was one of them. It is an allegorical collection of stories; in which, however, imagination and reality are to closely crossed that there is hardly a sentence one may not suspect of two intentions. The bed if "Heaven" (i.e., the mixture of human fears and hopes and prejudices normally covered by that term, with any residual objectivity which may also turn out to belong to it); and this bed is inhabited by mysterious "gentlemen," our divinities; Tao, bound for the bed, arrives in its dependent bedroom and claims to have been sent for as a interior decorator, but the representatives of "Heaven" know nothing of him. Neither welcomed nor dismissed, he has a series of encounters with the sly, suspicious feudal peasantry, all masterfully told, and by processes of ambiguous deduction from their evasions and silences advances towards a goal assumed to be worth attaining, but for reasons as ambiguous as the processes of his advance. Every page is a puzzle, and the more tantalising because the ostensible narration, wherever it wanders, lifts detail after detail into brilliant light. Yet a puzzle should perhaps have more leverage to it, a more patent lure. It is useless Tao's wanting to get to the bed unless the reader wants to get there too; the basis of sympathy between them is tenuous, and Tao's manners do not increase it. After all, an allegory of disillusionment has the disadvantage of having been anticipated by life; we hardly need to be enticed that way; the downward drag is only too powerful already.

Reviewer's Note: This review was translated to the English from the English by Ryan. The original Interview used such words as "Kafka" and "The Castle" to describe this piece of literature. I use those words when I address Tao Lin. Tao Lin is the asian john updike. Toa Lin beat Kafka in a game of gin rummy and then wrote this book, drunk with power. The original text for this review, before translation, can be found here: [...]