Customer Reviews

The Coast of Chicago

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

 

 

Lovely stories that take place in the intersection of dream and waking life, stories you'll want to read again and again from one of the most original and lyrical writers working today.

Stuart Dybek is truly a gifted writer. But moving beyond my humble opinion, this unique collection of short stories shines. Dybek's prose is haunting, his language at times startling and spare, at others languid and nearly musical. His characters are alive and absolutely believable in their mistakes and victories. Each story stands as a reflection on everyday beauty; Dybek that takes time to notice the details other authors overlook or dismiss as mundane. In 'The Coast of Chicago' Stuart Dybek has managed to do something quite rare in the all-too self-conscious realm of short story writing-- create stories that are rich yet still real without trying too hard to be so. Allow yourself to get sucked up into the twisting paths of his Chicago-- it's a journey you won't regret.

It is only fitting that this collection of 14 short stories was chosen for the One Book - One Chicago program hosted by The Chicago Public Library this spring. What a better way to promote communal reading in Chicago than to sponsor a book about life in their own city. While reading each short story it is apparent that Stuart Dybek has an intimate knowledge of Chicago. He successfully uses his memories and fondness for the city from his childhood of growing up in the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods during the mid-20th century. Each short story details with the passage of time and what it means to live in Chicago. A sense of place is an important factor running throughout each story and successfully unites each story into this collection. The story that resonates the most for me is "Chopin in Winter" about one boy who is immensely affected by an upstairs neighbor who plays the piano each night. The portrayal of the grandfather Dzia-Dzia and his relationship with the principle character are noteworthy and memorable. THE COAST OF CHICAGO is a wonderful collection of short stories that will remain in a special spot on my bookshelves for enjoyment for years to come. I love living in Chicago; and these stories resonated strongly with me. Highly recommended.

Dybek is one of those few writers whose work finds rare common ground between comic naturalism and tragic myth. The language of his stories honors the special poetry of the working class -- a poetry elastic enough to range from street slang to high diction, and from cynicism to a stubborn innocence that approaches the heroic (a touch of Damon Runyan at the one end, a mythic reach at the other). His characters struggle with their hearts and minds in ways that are fresh and original, without giving the sense that Dybek is contriving to keep them so. He is the genuine article, a natural myth-maker with an empathy large enough to let his characters behave badly without trying either to condemn or justify them. Dybek seems awed and enthralled by his world, deeply attentive to its particulars, on the lookout for magic but not desperate for it, with a richness of vision that makes his mythic Chicago echo loudly with the voices of the world at large. A wonderful writer.

I have read all of Stuart Dybek's books and have even had the privilege of having lunch with him and discussing his works. Being of Polish descent, I have lived in the neighborhoods that he describes. All of his books accurately depict real Southside Chicago people and their histories, their hardships, their heartaches, their woes and their lifestyles. I read his stories and I am transported back 20 years to my childhood neighborhood. I am always overcome with a feeling of nostaglia after I finish one of his books.

WARNING: I can't say enough about this book.

I stumbled across Stuart Dybek's short story, "We Didn't" (I Sailed with Magellan) in my university's Short Story class, and immediately fell in love with the prose:

"We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you'd slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father's rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't in your mother's Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs."

I mean, does it really get any better than that? So I did the next most obvious thing a girl can do... I bought his collective works (Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, Brass Knuckles, and Streets in Their Own Ink), and fell so much in love with two of them that I had to also purchase signed, first edition hardbacks.

Now, I must to mention that I am an avid reader, averaging 5+ books per month (at the very least), so Dybek rocketing past Kerouac, Joyce, Faulkner, and Emerson for me really says something.

As far as "The Coast of Chicago," is concerned, I believe it to be the very best of Dybek's short stories, "Streets in Their Own Ink" being my favorite of his poetry anthologies.

"Coast" includes the following stories:

*Farwell
*Chopin in Winter
*Lights
*Death of the Right Fielder
*Bottle Caps
*Blight
*Outtakes
*Bijou
*Strays
*Nighthawks (Includes my favorites, "Transport," "Insomnia," and "The Gold Coast")
*The Woman Who Fainted
*Hot Ice
*Lost
*Pet Milk

"Coast" is beautifully written, including lines such as:

"A kiss crosses the city. It rides a glass streetcar that showers blue, electric sparks along the ghost of a track--a track paved over in childhood--the line that she and her mother used to take downtown.

A kiss crosses the city, revolves through a lobby door into a rainy night, catches a cab along a boulevard of black glass, and, running red lights, dissolves behind the open fans of wiper blades.

Rain spirals colorlessly out of the dark, darkens all it touches and makes it gleam.

Her kiss crosses the city, enters a subway tunnel that descends at this deserted hour like a channel through an underground world. It's timeless there, always night, as if the planet doesn't turn below the street. At the mouth of the station stands a kid who's gone AWOL and now has nowhere to go, a young conga drummer, a congacero, wearing a fatigue jacket and beating his drum. He has the pigeons up past their bedtime doing the mambo."

- "Transport" (within "Nighthawks")

I could go on and on, quite literally, quoting passage after passage of electric words from each story, but I won't. Buy the book, PLEASE, buy it, read it, and share it with your friends. I find it to be such a shame that it isn't better known, that more people are not reading Dybek, because they really should be.

Dybek has been compared to Richard Carver, in some circles, and as a Polish Kerouac in others. I personally feel he is in a league of his own, his stories painting brief snapshots of various areas in Chicago (think "Dubliners" set on the Coast of Chicago). It's really very beautiful and hypnotic; quite easily the best book of short stories I own, and I can't recommend it enough.

It is my humble opinion that this book belongs on everyone's bookshelf. Especially yours!

You would have to search long and hard to find stories anywhere with this originality and beauty. They will stop you in your tracks. Dybek has staked out a territory purely his own, the lost and dispossessed of Polish Chicago. Chicago has proudly produced Dreiser, Norris, Algren, Levin, Bellow and Farrell--and now Dybek. His work is enduring, funny, incisive and unforgettable.

Stuart Dybek is my favorite short-story author. The stories in this book,ranging in length from 'flash' fiction to moderate-length (20-30) page short stories,are written in a sharp and efficient style that is contemplative at the same time. Not overly contemplative, though. It is difficult to explain why you will like these stories. To give you some idea, I would compare the mood of these stories to the stories and longer fiction of John Fowles. Get this book!

A book I would never, ever have found on my own; thanks, my Chicago friend. Reading it on the plane ride home after a stay in Chicago made the words resonate for me, so much so that I've decided to send it as a surprise to a friend who loves beautiful words and who is headed to Chicago at the first of June.

Honestly, I didn't finish it. And it isn't because it's poorly written. In fact, the author's style is very evocative, poetic in places. Some passages have a strong dreamy flavoure, while others are surreal and suggestive. But... there's not story. My problem was just this: no one of these pieces (and I read more than half the book) tells a story. These are pictures, beautiful pictures, sure, but that's it.
There isn't a beginning of the story, there isn't a conflict, there isn't a climax, there's no conclusion. And it can just be me, but when I read a story, I like these things to be there. I like when I can sympathize with the main characters and hope everything will turn good for them in the end.
I can't do this with these stories, because basically there's nothing that's going wrong. In many of them, there's just nothing going on.

And it's a shame, because the author can indeed create an interesting world. I saw it in the first story, "Chopin in winter", which characters do things, even if in the end very little happens. I like the surreal way all the characters were described, as if they were real people and fantastic people at the same time. The music filtering from the flat above to the boy listening downstairs and his grandpa teaching him music by listening to it. It was lovely.

I wonder if I could have liked any of the stories in this book if I read it first. Because the thin atmosphere and the dreamy characters are fine for a piece or two. But many of them, back to back... it's just too much for me.