27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
moment by moment, April 4, 2010
This review is from: The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Paperback)
Eisenberg is both a great and a limited writer. Her greatness is in her minute observation of moment-by-moment consciousness. When she gets into a character's mind, the reader shares every twist and turn as if it were his own. What I find most remarkable is that her characters frequently express states of consciousness I myself know but have never been able to articulate, or never knew I wanted to articulate because they are semi-conscious parts of my movements through everyday life, things I thought neither I nor anyone else could care about. Eisenberg makes you care because she shows even the most desultory states as luminous moments of human existence. No other writer makes boredom so interesting. There are a couple of passages in "Days," for example, that express those times I can't seem to get myself going even though I know I have to. Eisenberg does with with such precision I KNOW she's been hiding in my apartment, watching my every move and inhabiting my mental space. She does this over and over, though her main characters tend to be young, youngish or middle-aged women.
She's limited because she's not much on plot, if she can be said to have plots at all. This makes her writing go slack at times, almost as if she's marking time because she doesn't know where her narrative is heading. At her worst, she seems to stall with her characters, but after a few pages she gets them going again. Eisenberg is like Alice Munro in that she writes "long short stories" about characters who are similar. Munro is a better plotter, meaning she keeps her stories moving at a brisker pace. On the other hand, she doesn't quite have Eisenberg's Proustian vision into the personal worlds of her characters. Among contemporary writers, Eisenberg seems unique in this regard.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL AND TELLING FICTION, March 4, 2010
This review is from: The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This collection brings together in one volume stories from four previous collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986(, Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Eisenberg has a distinguished pedigree: she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant and has received other awards and fellowships, and is professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia. Her work has been praised by practically every major publication, from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle to Harper's to the Times of London. Critics have described her stories "concentrated bursts of perfection (London Times) and possessing "all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet" (Boston Globe). She's not just good, she's very good.
This is my first exposure to her fiction but it won't be my last. As a writer of short fiction, she is the equal or superior of any writer of short fiction today, and I include my longtime favorites Alice Munro and William Trevor. At 980 pages of stories, this compendium is a chunk. The reader who attempts to conquer it through brute force will be doing him or herself a disfavor. Eisenberg's stories deserve time and space between readings so the full shock value isn't attenuated.
The sections are, respectively, the four separate collections previously published of her stories.
A passage in the first story in this volume, "Flotsam," captures a mood, or an insight, that runs throughout Eisenberg's work:
Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.
She writes of disconnected people and troubled loves, above all of the loneliness and emptiness in these people's lives. Her protagonists suffer from a withdrawing from or atrophy of experience. They are drifting, seeking an anchor sometimes, or a jolt of experience at other times to reset their emotional clocks. An experience, sometimes the most mundane and inconsequential experience, shocks them into an awareness of how separated they are from feeling, the people around them, their own past histories or a consciousness of a meaningful future ahead of them. All of the stories in the first collection, Transactions, are first rate. It's hard to pick a best one but the last story in the collection, "Broken Glass," exemplifies them.
A young woman, exhausted and disconsolate after the drawn out illness and death of her mother, flees to Mexico to regain her bearings. She rents an upstairs flat in a villa owned by an expatriate American couple, who are older than her but of indeterminate age. Against her wishes, they draw her into their routine of daily meals and nightly party giving: she sees that it is their way of keeping at bay the Demons in their utterly trivial and purposeless lives. After an especially excruciating evening spent with utterly boring people, mostly expats, the mistress of the house confronts her, and engages her in this banal but revealing discourse:
She took both my hands as I stood up to go, and she looked in my face searchingly. "The main thing is, Are You Having Fun?"
"Yes," I said. "Of course."
"Good." She released me and shook her head slowly. "Because that's the main thing."
If anything would turn one off a life of hedonism living abroad as an expatriate, this story should.
The vision of these poor people's lives that Eisenberg spreads before us is scarifying, discommoding, hard to stand up to, but it is intensely real and heartfelt. This superior fiction deserves a wide readership.
There is a devastating story in the second collection (Under the 82nd Airborne) entitled "The Robbery." Most of the story is the description of a dinner party -or is it drinking party? The young beautiful, or at least successful, people talk and drink and eat and talk some more. Longing looks are exchanged across the lines of partners. The talk grows more vivid, more looks, hurt feelings, and by then you know that something is broken in these people -something is wrong- and it will never be fixed. It is done so gradually and obliquely that it is difficult to tell what has happened that is wrong or when you first notice the malaise of living that has settled across all of the members of this seemingly happy, prospering group of young marrieds. Half way through the story, the hostess feels ill -she is in the early stages of her second pregnancy. She feels, she thinks, "like an apple with a hidden soft spot spreading under the skin." That is phenomenal writing and Eisenberg does it over and over in this phenomenal collection.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A singular writer deserving of your full attention, March 9, 2010
This review is from: The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
One hardly knows how to describe a Deborah Eisenberg story, let alone this volume which brings together all five of her collections under a single cover. Adjectives like "exhilarating" or "dazzling" feel too light, too insubstantial to give the sense of the power and precision of her work. Others like "genius" have been so over used as to become common as crab grass and as such would feel like an insult to a writer who can fairly and without hyperbole be described as perhaps the best currently active American short story writer.
Eisenberg's stories aren't the minimalist sort that has gained so much traction in recent decades - her prose are weighty, the word bulky comes to mind. Many feel as if they might well be novels, yet the don't have the stripped down feel of other such stories - one doesn't get the sense of characters imprisoned by an author's commitment to the form, as if the shortness of the length were walls which they can't claw through to get to their real potential. No, Eisenberg's characters breathe in the moment.
Her stories, usually on the longish side at thirty plus pages, would rather meander a bit, often down tangents letting the reader gain an attachment to the character in a way that other practitioners of this form tend to eschew. As such they deliver a feeling of a being on a journey, the emotional baggage and humor giving them a heft which rests not on a single word or moment, no it is the flow of her character's relationships that carry the reader along, pulling us in their interior lives. As such, each story can at times feel exhausting, an emotional investment, making this collection a thing to be sipped, not gobbled, almost 1,000 page of prose to be digested slowly over weeks and months not hours, less one be left totally spent.
Eisenberg is funny, often sardonic, and always poignant. The title story of her fifth collection, "Twilight of the Superheroes" brings forth beautifully both the sense of mourning and melodrama that permeated New York in the wake of 9/11. Another, the "Girl Who Left her Sock on the Floor" holds much of the same sense of loss. As with many in her collected works, these stories permeate with questions of the end of childhood and what it means to be an adult.
"The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg" deserves a place in your home. Not on a shelf gathering dust, but on your nightstand, so that you may indulge yourself, one story at a time, to treasure every visit into the world of her singular talent.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
