I Sailed with Magellan (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

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.

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (November 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374174075
• ISBN-13: 978-0374174071
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #555,949 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 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

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

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great writer, December 8, 2004

By	David Evanier (Brooklyn, Nw York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is timeless fiction of the highest order, on a level with the finest contemporary writers from Stephen Dixon to Philip Roth to Bliss Broyard. Dybek writes with depth, precision and deep feeling; this is the work of a lifetime sketching out a milieu (the Chicago Polish workingclass community) with loving, compassionate and haunting details. James T. Farrell and Nelson Algren were the pioneers of Chicago fiction, but Dybek digs deeper. This is unforgettable work, sketching out the turf he knows so well and making it as universal as Sherwood Anderson, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful, graceful look at Chicago's past, March 23, 2006

By	L. Blumenthal "lynn" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I suppose I would love this book even if I weren't a Chicagoan. The characters are so richly crafted, and the action poignant yet well paced. Perhaps the most heartbreaking story is "Blue Boy," with its message in the final paragraph so lushly written I took a sharp intake of breath before reading it again--aloud. An interconnected series of short stories, not everything meshes, especially "Breasts," which takes a side trip into the life of a hit man. But for the most part this is a special, nostalgic look at a Second City that really doesn't exist anymore, but lives on in gorgeous detail in Dybek's prose.