Customer Reviews

Forgetting English

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I loved this book! I could not put it down, and neglected my family and my job while I plowed through it. Each piece was so entertaining and the characters and scenes so well-developed I was engrossed immediately. I was disappointed when each story ended, but the next one grabbed me right away. I hope this author writes a novel next. I'd love to sink my teeth into a longer Raymond book. If you liked Jumpa Lahiri's stories, you'll love these. They're set in exotic locations but feature women with stories/situations you'd expect to find among your own friends. This book would make for a great book group discussion--in fact I'm choosing it for my own book club.

The following story breakdowns (no spoilers) have been edited from a private e-mail written by me and adapted to fit this forum... R.A.

"First Sunday"
I read the first sentence of this story and got a big kick out of it. What a fine way to begin a collection, with that sure touch of character placement as well as humor. This one got me on, if I may call it, a 'linguistic level,' in that its concerns with language (as evidenced in part by the section headings) felt very real to me. I like the positioning of this story re the collection because it sets up the reader thematically. And on that note, I appreciated that theme aspect, too; that here we have a range of tones and keys, but that certain melodies come back again and again.

"Translation Memory"
This one is among my favorites. The text shifts back and forth between words, as Raymond writes, "liminal(ly)." Last few lines very strong. Playwrights talk about 'curtain lines' -- the crucial last line at the end of an act or play -- and there are some great ones in this collection.

"The Ecstatic Cry"
I feel that this one might be the 'strongest' story in the collection. Let me define 'strongest' (smile): the most artful and real blending of fact and fiction, of style and substance, of concretism and absolutism. I keep thinking of the idea of the signature story. We hate to sum up authors, but it is a challenge and kind of fun, too. This one may be it. It begins with "I stifle an urge to start cleaning it up." Right away, we're dropped into the mystery as to why. And then it keeps pushing you forward, not only into odd physical terrain, but also into odd psychological terrain. I think the first-person helps establish a firmer reality to make the fantastic even more grounded.

"The Road to Hana"
The symbolic story. If you stripped this one down to its barest essentials, you could make a neat Freudian dream out of it.

"Forgetting English"
"[W]ords hiss and snap in her ears..." Again, we've got a nice dichotomy set up in this book between language-as-barrier and language-as-communication, and the cultural/linguistic divide. In these stories, women are in foreign lands with foreign men, and both aspects of foreignness provide transitional opportunities.

"Rest of World"
You can feel the spin of jet lag on this one. The pairing of the two 'how-to' books I found really funny, and sadly poignant.

"Beyond the Kopjes"
One of my favorite sentences lives here: "Then she lies awaiting sleep, staring up at the ghostlike shroud of the mosquito net, feeling trapped and weighed down, even though it hangs far above her, so sheer and light that it flutters in the ceiling fan's breeze." Well, that's life, isn't it? A simple affair, really, when you see it for what it is, instead of what we cling to believing it is. I think there's quite a lot of that feeling in the book. The difference between, for example, the way the animals in the story understand what to do with life, and what the spectators/tourists understand.

"Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean"
Being is acting, acting is being. When you do both well, you do neither. But this is what, in part, the protagonist experiences, as I read it, and what the book points to: that we are travelers even inside our own skins. That the idea of 'foreign' is only an idea, not the reality of things. We can either act or be. Other lands can reveal to ourselves who we are only if we stop our acting, and instead embrace the foreign inside of us. This may sound a little metaphysical/New Age-y, but I see it here in these stories. Cody's right: you CAN turn your back on the ocean if you accept your part of it (or its part of you) and realize the lack of real difference.

These stories are amazing! Honest. There aren't many writers who can gather the intricacies of the human condition and make them interesting. The title story is...breathtaking. I can easily see it transformed into a film. "The Road to Hana" and "First Sunday" capture what I love most in stories -- the conflicts people find within themselves and the small, inner tortures they don't quite know how to deal with! A great collection; I can't wait to see a full-length work from Raymond. Soon, I hope!

Sublime and transformative. Pick this one up and just let Raymond take you away to these wonderful places. A real triumph. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next!

This book is unforgettable! Forgetting English is tenderly written to guide its reader of fully engaging themselves in exotic locations and emotions. Its gently crafted storytelling provokes contemplation of man's flaws and hopeful redemption. It stirs reflections of one's own life and the choices we've made in our own past. The characters skirt around the gray matter of joy and pain, daring the reader to resist the temptation of judging their stories as those whispered by our own friends. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the adventurous nature of the heart.

I read Midge Raymond's Forgetting English on the train ride from Bellingham to Portland. I love that train ride no matter what, but having Midge Raymond's lyrical and smart voice in my ear for the ride made it the best trip ever. Each story takes us deep into the landscape of another country and another heart. Highly recommended.

I don't like short stories -- Reading one is like a fantastic date that ends when the man says, "I'm moving to Antarctica. You'll never see me again." What? This was so wonderful -- why does it have to end? Why did I commit for this short time only to have it end so abruptly with no chance for more? The feelings of betrayal are strong... The short stories in this book produced the same feelings...the small gestures were captivating and once I had fallen in to the space of each new story, I didn't want it to end.

Readers will get more than just a lift from this book. The venues are unfamiliar, with stories from Tonga, Taipei, Hawai'i the Serengeti and even Antarctica. The names are also not within our realm of imagination, with characters, animals and places tagged like nothing we have ever read before. But the author uses simple themes to get and keep our attention, and the book is one that once picked up, will be hard to put down.

Even for people who consider themselves world travelers, this collection of short stories has a few exotic surprises. The author is able to describe and detail relationships, from the bottom up and from the inside out. The characters are easily seen as if a person living the life, in real time, would see them. The conversations between the characters are real too, and are reminiscent of conversations we have all had at one time or another. The themes are clearly thought out, with many of them highlighting a person who has to live with herself, and coming to terms with what image others think she has become.

Many of the stories leave the reader with more questions to ask, than are actually answered. Most of the stories deserve a sequel, since after reading them, we always want more information. For anyone considering reading this book, I suggest that it is read the way you eat your favorite meal. Stop to consider how lucky you really are after each tasty morsel. And once finished, revel in the memory of how great it was while you were eating it.

Forgetting English by Midge Raymond is a striking, suspenseful collection of
stories. The writing is extraordinary as are the insights into the human condition. Set in many exotic locales, the stories explore women and mens' relationships, sometimes amusing, sometimes with an undercurrent of menace and dread. The poignant title story yields humor and heartache with a keen understanding of alienation and self-discovery. An English teacher in Taipei finds her way back to her life after a suicide attempt. A one of a kind book, it justifyingly won the 2007 Spokane Prize for short fiction.

Forgetting English by Midge Raymond is an exquisite thematic collection of short stories. The stories describe women in exterior and interior transit. The characters face a myriad of crossroads such as, divorce, infidelity, unemployment, abortion, and attempted suicide while a moonlight mile from home.

Each story deftly details the characters' impact and adaptation to their foreign surroundings. Raymond's masterful prose transports the reader to various locales including Antarctica, Japan, and Tonga to name a few. Similarly, the author's keen insights into matters of the psyche gave this reader much to ponder after each story's coda. Every story in the collection is a like a fine chocolate to be savored, but I especially enjoyed the lyrical prose in "Translation Memory."

The mixture of characters in crisis in exotic locales made for highly enjoyable reading!