I Sailed with Magellan [Paperback]

Stuart Dybek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2004

Following his renowned The Coast of Chicago and Childhood, story writer Stuart Dybek returns with eleven masterful and masterfully linked stories about Chicago's fabled and harrowing South Side. United, they comprise the story of Perry Katzek and his widening, endearing clan. Through these streets walk butchers, hitmen, mothers and factory workers, boys turned men and men turned to urban myth. I Sailed With Magellan solidifies Dybek's standing as one of our finest chroniclers of urban America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dybek's third work of fiction (his first in over 10 years, after the story collections Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and The Coast of Chicago) comprises 11 elegiac, interlocking stories narrated by Perry Katzek, a young Polish-American growing up on Chicago's racially diverse South Side in the 1950s and 1960s. Although it lacks the narrative momentum of a linear novel, the book offers a powerful, cumulative portrait of the lives of Perry, his family and the people in his neighborhood, where "it seemed that almost every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars." "Breasts" follows three men with only tenuous connections to Perry, including Joey Ditto, a gangster who keeps getting distracted from making a ruthless hit by the ethereal forms of past lovers. "Blue Boy," which begins as a tale about a sick youngster, ends as a gorgeous contemplation of loss. The strongest stories deal directly with Perry's exploits. In "Orchids," Perry and his friend Stosh try to scheme their way to Mexico by stealing exotic orchids, and in the much-anthologized "We Didn't," Perry and his girlfriend's erotic lakeshore tumbling ("Swimsuits at our ankles, we kicked like swimmers to free our legs") is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body. "I was the D. H. Lawrence of not doing it," Perry reflects, "the voice of all would-be lovers who ached and squirmed." Indeed, all of these beautifully written stories teem with aching recollections. They are lyrical odes to wasted lives, youthful desires, vanishing innocence and the transformative power of memory, which is "the channel by which the past conducts its powerful energy; it's how the past continues to love."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Whenever Perry Katzek's much loved Uncle Lefty takes him up on the roof of his building to see the pigeon coop and the great grid of Chicago, he says, "Welcome to Dreamsville," which could serve as an alternative title for this magical suite of linked stories. In his first book since the unforgettable Coast of Chicago (1990), Dybek writes of his hometown with the poignant realism of Henry Roth, the mythic intensity of Leon Forrest, and the poetic otherworldliness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Eleven perfectly formed and exquisitely sensual tales--each so saturated with personality, event, and revelation they feel like novels--illuminate transforming moments in Perry's life. Imaginative, adventurous, and romantic, Perry falls in love and loses loved ones, witnesses violence and experiences transcendence, while Dybek masterfully and tenderly conjures the edgy ambience of Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods and the great divide between the bucolic North Side and the broken-glass-strewn, tavern-spiked industrial South Side, where bravado, musical gifts, and witty repartee are highly valued. Set in a chimerical world of ice and flowers, soul-bruising hard work and sweet dreams, ruthless mobsters and die-hard friends, Dybek's mesmerizing tales coalesce into an epic of survival and spiritual growth that is, by turns, gritty, surreal, hilarious, tragic, and bittersweet. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (September 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312424116
• ISBN-13: 978-0312424114
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #117,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Its Inventiveness and Spirit are Undeniable, January 17, 2004

By 

Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Sailed with Magellan (Hardcover)

Stuart Dybek's I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN arrives more than a decade after his previous book, a short story collection titled THE COAST OF CHICAGO. While it's neither a blockbuster nor a doorstop tome like Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited MIDDLESEX or Donna Tartt's years-in-the-making THE LITTLE FRIEND, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN is definitely worth the wait, serving as a reintroduction to a writer who captures his old Chicago neighborhood with documentary detail and raconteur flourish.

Despite its billing as a novel, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN is actually a series of short stories that have locales and characters in common. All feature a teenage narrator named Perry and all are set in the Little Village community of Chicago during the early 1960s. Dybek lovingly and often humorously evokes this time and place through telling observations.

Poor families use old bed sheets for curtains and veterans order shots for friends who didn't come back from the war. It's a dangerous, often discouraging neighborhood, and in strong, unfussy prose Dybek describes "the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars."

Fortunately, Dybek lets his lively characters --- including a junior high writing prodigy named Camille Estrada and a slob hitman named Joe Ditto --- run wild in this setting. Rather than engineering plots and scenes for them, Dybek simply lets them tell their own stories, a rare talent that gives the book a personal, unrehearsed quality. Plus, it makes for some truly weird goings-on. As a coming-of-age story, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN eschews any predictability in favor of a dreamlike flow of events and characters, many of which are supersaturated with local color.

There is, for instance, the Chickenman, who walks around town with a chicken perching on his head and pecking corn off his tongue. And there's Little Village's unofficial child saint, Ralphie Poskozim, who was born with blue skin: "The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he'd been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother's mascara. Even his lips looked cold."

All of these strange characters are filtered through Perry's perspective, and as the novel progresses, he grows up and his concerns become more adult. Fortunately, as Perry gains more freedom, the stories don't lose their charm or their sense of wonder.

Memory works in flashes, not in fluid narratives, and it allows for exaggeration of facts. In the end these chapters cohere into something larger than a short-story collection, but the book is not like a proper novel. This is certainly not a criticism: the form of I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN may be unclassifiable, but its inventiveness and spirit are undeniable.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing, deeply known characters, January 1, 2004

By 

J. Rosenberg "reggieroy" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I Sailed with Magellan (Hardcover)

I especially liked the stories in the first half of this book, those that focus on main character Perry, a boy growing up in a Polish neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest side in the 1950s. They are deeply felt, wonderfully detailed, highly realistic and with excellent characters. Toward the middle are a few stories more "poetic" in style that appeal to me less. The last stories return to the old neighborhood and again, the perfectly noted details and highly individualized characters drew me back into the lives of that time and place. Highly recommended for those who enjoy short fiction and anyone who appreciates excellent writing.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Majestic writing, August 9, 2011

By 

Al Lecks (IN) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: I Sailed with Magellan (Paperback)

Reading Stuart Dybek's writing is like being lulled along by an improvised vocalization. It dips and weaves and soars and hums, and at the end you're not really sure what to make of all you have experienced, but you know you are better off for it and that you do not witness such beauty often. This is art of the highest caliber.

Each story in this collection is a work of art. They are linked more by feeling and emotion and the musical quality of language than by themes or plot or even character.

"Breasts" is often criticized as being out of place in the collection, but for me it is the anchor of the entire piece. Consisting of two diverging storylines, one involving a former Mexican Wrestler, the other a mafia hitman. It is the impossibility of each storyline's compatibility with the other that holds them together. Like the heart breaking lullaby of a saxophone rising from an El platform in the dead of night (an image taken from one of the passages in the middle of the story . . . some of the most graceful writing I've ever read.)

Then there is "Blue Boy," a story with such depth and compassion for its characters that you are moved enough to accept the direct revelation of the narrator at the end.

"Orchids" is the ultimate story of teenagehood. All the angst, frustration, adventure, romance, and heartbreak of adolescence, particularly an adolescence growing up poor, is captured in these meandering pages. This is my favorite story in the collection. I cannot explain why.

"We Didn't," taught in every reputable university creative writing class, is very near to being a perfect short story, and also one with the clearest independent themes and plot in the collection.

And so on.

This is that rare kind of book that only comes around once in a decade (think _Angela's Ashes_ or _The Things They Carried_). The book might not change your life or the way you look at the world, but it will remind you why we read stories and why language is so precious.