Customer Reviews

The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Macabre, hilarious, desperate, heartwarming, Mark Richard's collection is stunning in its stark juxtaposition of a gamut of emotions and moods. The prose is sparse, and all the more evocative because of it. The world Richard depicts is itself sparse - his characters take their comfort where they can. It is a world of immense cruelty and immensely harsh beauty. There is pain in this washed out, painted over landscape of mudflats, fairgrounds and burning shacks, but also a piercing redemptive vision. As I read I found the first story superlative, then the next, then the next, right to the end. Books may not change your life, but this one may well leave its images searing your imagination for a long time. When I consider the lack of attention Mark Richard has received for his fiction, I'm tempted to believe there's no justice in the world at all, but then I realise that for such a gem of a book to exist at all is a kind of secret miracle. Witness it while you can.

Mark Richard is simply the best current short story writer (with some competition from Tom Franklin). While no single story in this collection rivals Richard's "masterpiece," the story BIRDS FOR CHRISTMAS collected in CHARITY, each piece is subtle, precise, brilliant.

However, the overall enjoyment of the book is hampered somewhat by the shameful job performed by the publisher (Doubleday). ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD feels like it's printed on two-ply paper towels shoved between dry cleaning shirt cardboards which serve as the cover. You worry something must be wrong with the book because the publisher did such a cost cutting - dismissive job in producing it.

I loved reading this collection of short stories. The stories are dark, haunting, beautiful, and some even heartwarming. Mark Richard's stories are quite similar to Faulkner's work in that they are set in the South and have a gothic, no-nonsense quality to them that make them unforgettable. Richard's voice is one of brutal honesty, and I found myself nodding in agreement with various passages. My favorite stories are "Happiness of the Garden Variety," "The Ice at the Bottom of the World," "On the Rope," "The Theory of Man," and "Strays." The one bad thing about this collection is its lack of popularity. I cannot believe that such a beautiful book could go almost unnoticed, but that is often the case with true literary offerings. I feel bad enough that it took me ten years to give this collection a whirl. Mark Richard is a brilliant storyteller and I would have liked it if he had written other works. I shall give this wonderful piece of work all the word of mouth it deserves.

The other nine are Allan Gurganus' "White People;" Lorrie Moore's "Like Life;" William Vollmann's "Rainbow Stories;" Robert Olen Butler's "Good Scent from a Strange Mountain;" Lewis Nordan's "Sugar Among the Freaks;" Walter Mosley's "Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned;" William Trevor's "Collected Stories;" Thom Jones' "Pugilist at Rest" and all of A. S. Byatt's stories. Mark Richard has talents that are so profound they transcend quantification or qualification, and if we continue to neglect great writers--such as Richard--into oblivion by declining their generous and gracious gifts in favor of the tv or other numbstruck visual entertainments, we deserve the perceptual pabulum we consume and the distrophy of our hearts and brains that will surely accompany such suspect diets. Buy this book today. If you don't agree with me, send me an e-mail and tell me why.....END

Bravo to the previous customer, but I would like to add a collection to his list from a writer in his own back yard. Fred Chappell's "More Shapes Than One" has the range and humor of any collection ever set to paper. Mark Richard and Thom Jones define the contemporary short story as William Trevor and Peter Taylor did a generation before them. Taylor is another Greensboro boy to add to the list. Anyway, Strays, the first story in Richard's collection is as fine a story as a man could write and I use it as a high water mark for my own scribblings. As to the TV wasteland you condemn America to be wallowing in, Richard now lives in L.A. and writes for a TV show if I'm not mistaken.

Richard is a virtuoso, a master of the craft. The first piece in the collection sets a high expectation that is fully satisfied with the writing that follows. Here are stories about the south with voices as clear as daylight. There are familiar landscapes of the south: a small cabin near the river as in "Her Favorite Story" and a farmhouse as in "Strays." This modern landscape grows, too, to include the suburbs as in "This is Us, Excellent."

There is a haunting simplicity found in Richard's characters. They live life without the fear that perhaps they should have. A sense of dramatic irony grows in the reader as if it were a play inside a theater. All of these stories are freighted with disappointment, marred by traged, or terrorized by old ghosts and various wants. There is a resigned sorrow througout and the feeling that doom is not far off like a dark cloud moving in from a distance.

What is deeply moving here is that many of the characers do not anticipate change. They do not even seem aware of it or of hope. Instead, dead things rise to the surface as in "On the Rope" where a former flood rescue worker glimpses a plastic bag caught on a fence and is brought back to memories of the "boiling waters" that drowned the town.

The immediate sorrows are understated either by voice or events that follow so that in a way, the immediate pain is cauterized. But once we look away from the wound we realize the whole body has gone with runny sores and rot.

Richard's stories speak loudly about doom, decay, and seemingly incongruous naivete in the same fashion as Steinback in The Grapes of Wrath and Faulkner in The Sound and The Fury.

What may be perhaps most disturbing here in all the lyrical prose and landscape is that the people do not change-- they are immobile like statues. What changes life then is only the inevitable event that is death.

A path of clear words directly to the feeling. Strays, the first story on the book, is just a masterpiece. Forget about complex metaphors or shining adjectives. This is a clean picture with the essential elements. Mark Richard's command of the language drive us inside a delicately composed environment of hopeless hopeful pain. The carvering after Carver. The headrest after Hempel.
A friend from Spain recommend this book.

Mark Richard's collection of stories "The Ice at the Bottom of the World" is a rare gem. Not many writers are so capable of dealing with so much and being so profound using so short a form of narrative. Some writers need hundreds of pages and don't develop so beautifully their characters or plots. Here with something like 10 pages, the author is able to break our hearts, heal it and explore some dark sides of human soul.

At his best, in stories like "Strays", "This is us, excellent" and "The Ice at the Bottom of the World" (my favorites, by the way), Richard takes his reader to a wild ride to an unknown place. But, every story has something in common: it takes a little while to realize where the writer wants to take us to - in other words, it takes some pages until he reaches the actual plot of the narrative. This is a risk device since readers may find themselves to be lost in the first paragraphs, but Richards is so good that he keeps you reading until you find where you are going to.

On the other hand, they are not easy stories. Neither the theme, nor the language is easy. This is a barrier that we have to overcome every new beginning. A daring move that every reader should accept with pleasure. His characters are normal people trying to find a place in their own world, therefore, what 'we' would call outsiders. Most stories are about them getting to know themselves better, but readers are aware of them a lot better.

Richard's "The Ice at the Bottom of the World" is a book that should be read every now and them. His stories are short - it doesn't take to long to read them - but their effects on the readers lasts even longer.

Not since William Faulkner or Eudora Welty have we seen such a consummate master of the Southern short story as Mark Richard. Like Faulkner, his style (or styles, perhaps I should say) can take some getting used to, but if you just relax, and let the words flow over you without "waiting for the paint to dry", you'll find you get the picture. Indeed, this is the same way I read Faulkner, allowing the stream of consciousness to form its own image and successive afterimages (it's a more passive kind of reading, I suppose, than what you would engage in with a post-modern novel by DeLillo, say).

The opening story, "Strays", is, in some ways, the *perfect* Southern short story. Farcical and funny, you can read the entire story online here. Do, and I bet you'll be hooked. They're all terrific, and the final story, "Feast of the Earth, Ransom of the Clay" is a triumphantly disturbing Southern gothic tale. "Fishboy" is probably the most stream-of-consciousness and disorienting of the bunch -- and if you like it, note that Richard subsequently took this story and developed it into his novel of the same name.

Very, very highly recommended!

Really not sure what to say about this book. Weird but interesting...Couldn't put it down, but not sure how much I really enjoyed it when I finished...Yet I remember the stories and they continue to intrigue.

An interesting collection of short stories told in stream of consciousness style using vernacular language for realism. All effectively done.

Some stories make you cringe, then a moment or two later, make you laugh. Like life, I suppose, so read the book.

You will find it intriguing, a book of stories you will think about (and try to figure out) for some time.