Customer Reviews

I'd Like

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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).