Customer Reviews

I Sailed with Magellan

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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

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.

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.

First of all, let me say that I absolutely love Stuart Dybek and everything he has written. Although my favorite of Dybek's books are "The Coast of Chicago" and "Streets in Their Own Ink," I must also praise "I Sailed with Magellan," for including the magnificent story, "We Didn't."

I stumbled across "We Didn't" in my university's Short Story class, and loved it so much that I invested in all of his works.

"We Didn't" begins with the following prose:

"We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you'd slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father's rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't in your mother's Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs."

and ends with:

"But we didn't, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn't see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love - because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter? - we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn't, we didn't, we never did."

I mean, does it really get any better than that?

I could go on and on, quite literally, about Dybek's prose, but I won't. I will, instead, encourage you to buy this book. Buy it, read it, then buy and read his other works, especially "Coast" and "Streets." If you love his prose as much as I do, share them with your friends. I find it a great shame that he isn't better known, that more people aren't reading Dybek, because they really should be.

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.

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.

stuart dybek is a gifted writer who truly understands the short
story. His characters are full of life and wonderfully human.
I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys great writing.

The review below posted by Reggieroy captures my thoughts on this book exactly. The writing was beautiful, the characters so real I felt I knew them. I especially liked the stories of young Perry with his brother and his friends. I think my favorites were of the prom date he took to the junkyard and the one near the end about Perry and his Babushka.

A fan of Dybek's work for years, I looked forward to the publication of his third book. As I sit at my computer to write this bit, my new kitten, Gus aka Pooky, follows with deftness and alertness each letter as it appears on the screen. Right now she's affixed upon the little AOL symbol in the upper right hand corner that rotates and fades and reappears while I'm online. Gus/Pooky notices with enthusiasm the nuances in life and language, and honors them. She is smart and charming and not only does not disappoint, she makes living all the better. Same with Dybek and his stories. He's crafty as a magician, and has the heart of a lover of words, of the world. His writing is at once a gift and a friend, and I'm always happy to have it around.