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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than Snow, January 26, 2002
I'm aghast when I read the reviews of my fellow readers but then I take in account the common misperception that a short story is somehow easier to write or a lesser achievement than a novel. The truth is that short stories are more difficult to write, every sentence must punctuate, there is no breathing room. In the two novels I have read of Guterson, the endless pages of description are wonderful but can be top-heavy at times, whereas these stories are lean creations, leaving me wanting more. While it's no Pigeon Feathers, Guterson has been handed the wordsmithing baton from Updike, and the rich prose reminds me of Updike, satiating a yearn I have for quality short stories. I thoroughly enjoyed these, I liked them better than either of his novels, I hope he writes more.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A very mixed bag, March 25, 2002
This audio collection contains two cassettes and unabridged versions of many of the short stories in Guterson's collection, but not all stories are included in the audio version. Sorry I can't tell you which ones are here, cause the cover for some reason has no contents listed, and narrator Campbell Scott often moved so fast from one story to the next I never heard the title of half of them. By and large, I liked the stories on tape number one, especially the poignant tale of two brothers growing up in the 1960's whose family leaves their Oregon coastal motel and moves to Seattle. I think that one was titled "Day of the Moonwalk" or something like that. There is a real sense of nostalgia here, and the interplay between the brothers was heartwarming as they realized they didn't share a bedroom anymore, and as they scoured downtown Seatlle for a basketball hoop. I also enjoyed the duckhunting tale (probably "Opening Day"), as well as the doomed romance between a bookish young girl and a minor league pitching prospect. I thought the book was narrated effectively by actor Campbell Scott (he of the movie "Singles"), who handled dialogue especially well. However, especially once we get to tape two, Guterson sometimes lapses into an overly descriptive, somewhat experimental style that probably would give creative writing professors nationwide fits. I was particularly appalled by the story involving the young guy who wanders over an old man's land in Massachusetts, on his way to a nursing home to care for the elderly. Throughout the story, Guterson bombards the reader with an endless array of adjectives and adverbs, over-extending his sentences with unnecessary verbal flourishes that ruined the otherwise mediocre story for me. Hemingway, always a proponent of lean, unflowery prose, would have spun in his grave had he heard this one. I really liked Snow Falling on Cedars, and Guterson has a knack for writing about the Pacific Northwest and using the setting as an integral part of the story. These stories show a young writer first experimenting and finding his voice, with a handful of successes surrounded by an occasional clunker.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
When I was one and twenty..., November 9, 1997
By A Customer
My daughter said Guterson is a good writer. She is right. This collection of his short stories is interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes upsetting. Guterson's stories are set, loosely, in the Northwest; Washington, I take it. They are the narratives of men who remember events or chains of events that had meaning to them, but who offer no interpretations. That is left to us. Though the specific events weren't all familiar to me, the situations and feelings were. All of the stories in the collection deal with boys growing into men, of poor starts and poor transitions into manhood, of friends who drifted away, of love that was thrown away. Some of the pictures Guterson draws are sorrowful, as when he remembers the hunt on which his father began to show the first unmistakable signs of old age, and the romance that the author left behind to become a baseball star. This road that we travel with Guterson, the one stretching behind and ahead, is a hard one. It's full of pain. But the journey's to a better place, and we have to make it. The stories affected me powerfully, especially as I read them in middle age. Guterson is not shallow, and his prose is often difficult. In a few stories the syntax was so involved that I had to read passages several times. Sometimes I understood them. Other stories were written simply; they communicated easily to me. The fault is largely mine; I had been reading so many escape novels that I wasn't in shape to contend with stories full of real thought written in challenging style. But Guterson's writing isn't easy. When he wrote these stories he was younger. Was he under the close guidance of a mentor he wanted to impress, and so felt encouraged to exercise his prose? I'll try the other Guterson book my daughter recommended when I can find it. This young Guterson is a good writer with a good early insight into something worth examining. He's older now. With a little age undoubtedly will have come more stability of expression.
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