I'd Like [Paperback]

Amanda Michalopoulou (Author), Karen Emmerich (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2008

The thirteen short stories that make up Amanda Michalopoulou's I'd Like read like versions of an unwritten novel: each riveting tale resonates with the others, and yet a sense of their connectedness remains tantalizingly out of grasp. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by the uncanny repetition of certain details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, accidents small and large. Michalopoulou's characters are both patently fictitious and profoundly real, as they move through a world in which even the smallest of everyday occurrences can take on enormous significance. I'd Like offers a touching, utterly unique reading experience from one of Greece's most innovative young storytellers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A novelist and columnist for the newspaper Kathimerini, Michalopoulou has fashioned a baker's dozen of tart, experimental, grown-up stories for literary tastes. The most fully fleshed story is the title piece, in which the narrator, a weary painter trapped in a marriage to an even wearier writer, acts out her frustration upon meeting another, more exalted literary couple whose matrimonial malaise reflects her own. Many of the stories seem like tentative beginnings of novels; in Light, for example, an elderly widow invites her even older sister to live with her, but soon regrets her decision. Daily life seemed meaningless to her, the author writes of the older sister, and so she leaves, while her younger sibling takes solace from Mormon leaflets promising a paradise in which the two will be reunited. Pointe demonstrates how tricky the author's narrators can sometimes be, allowing the reader to believe a bored wife and mother is entertaining several lovers when the reality is much more complex. Another standout story, The Most Wonderful Moment, recounts the queasy meeting between an elderly Great Writer and the admiring woman journalist interviewing him. Michalopoulou's tales are uneven, but delightful when they hit true. (Apr.)
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Review

"An innovative collection of short stories that overturns expectations and surprises the reader, full of sarcasm, humor, and anguish, with a sob that escapes at the end—after all, that's what life is like." --Eleni Gika, Ethnos

"Michalopoulou's artless, lively style endows her narratives with sweetness, vivacity and sensitivity, softening their sharp edges. Of course, beneath the narrator's stubbornly cheerful tone we can discern a constant but muffled lament for a childhood now lost. . . . In this latest book, Michalopoulou treats her thematic obsession—the issue of writing itself—with greater daring and ingenuity than ever before." --Lina Panteleon, Eleftherotypia

"Moving against the current, Amanda Michalopoulou calls her new book a collection of short stories, though its thirteen texts read as a unified whole. After we've finished I'd Like, we realize that we have to read it again from the beginning, to reevaluate the information we've been given. And therein lies the appeal and innovation of this work." --Elizabeth Kotzia, Kathimerini

"Michalopoulou's artless, lively style endows her narratives with sweetness, vivacity and sensitivity, softening their sharp edges. Of course, beneath the narrator's stubbornly cheerful tone we can discern a constant but muffled lament for a childhood now lost. . . . In this latest book, Michalopoulou treats her thematic obsession—the issue of writing itself—with greater daring and ingenuity than ever before." --Lina Panteleon, Eleftherotypia

"Moving against the current, Amanda Michalopoulou calls her new book a collection of short stories, though its thirteen texts read as a unified whole. After we've finished I'd Like, we realize that we have to read it again from the beginning, to reevaluate the information we've been given. And therein lies the appeal and innovation of this work." --Elizabeth Kotzia, Kathimerini

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (April 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564784932
• ISBN-13: 978-1564784933
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,883,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I like "I'd Like"!, January 6, 2011

By 

J. R. Brookes "www.readingtheworld.co.uk" (St Albans, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I'd Like (Paperback)

I started this book of short stories called "I'd Like" late on Saturday and finished it early Monday, which probably tells you how much I enjoyed it.

As the author, Amanda Micalopoulou, states in her afterword, instead of a general anthology; she ended up writing "stories that would read like versions of an unwritten novel", and indeed they do. That is not to say that the stories themselves are not self-contained, they all are, but there is a - sometimes bewildering - series of motifs and themes that occur throughout this book (often of the visceral type: a red beret, a broken little finger, bloodied feet, theft from corpses etc). Yet this fragmentation works, especially as there is a central core of two sisters called Stella and Christiana who interlink this loose narrative (despite the timescales of the stories meaning that these cannot be the same characters throughout the book as a whole). And of course the other constant is the author herself (not necessarily Amanda herself) who pervades this works with a touching sense of self doubt about her own writing. That particular device reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut's appearances in his own fiction (under his own pseudonym of Kilgore Trout).

I am probably making this book sound complex and difficult, and it isn't. The stories are honest, fresh and interesting, funny and poignant, - and the overall sense one gets is of a profound awareness of the shared human condition with just a glimpse of redemption (although the short story "Story for fools" puts that squarely in our own hands rather than any wider God).