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42 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the future of the short story, September 26, 2007
This review is from: Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories (Hardcover)
Much has been in the reviews (including Lemony Snicket's glowing commentary in the New York Times) on the range of subjects treated here. I think that this sound bite risks reducing these thrilling stories to novelty pieces... not the case. These hit with tremendous impact. We are skillfully, swiftly, convincingly led to see what we have in common with Russian physicists, Roman soldiers, or a little brother in Connecticut, and their emotional upheavals slam vividly close to home.
Two things, in my opinion, make this book particularly current and essential:
-For whatever reasons, popular taste seems to have shifted from fiction to nonfiction. Memoirs have famously succeeded where novels could not be published. New popularity of documentaries, reality television, etc. Everywhere we see claims to "reality-based" entertainment, though in most cases it has clearly been punched up to inject a little excitement into the proceedings. Instead of fictionalizing a dubious reality, the project of grounding a fiction in the dirt and busted concrete of actual events is far more compelling. This is what I see in the intensive research behind Shepard's stories. But these are not at all dragged down by an abundance of detail, as if to prove that the research was done. Instead, the details were clearly internalized: the voice and setting that emerges is fluid, captivating, real. And on top of these realities, we are able to inhabit the minds of the characters who were there.
-I may have lost track, but I think this is the Information Age, or else the Age Immediately Following It. We have seen periodic writers come and go that purportedly capture this new era. Much of that work is a disorienting blather, loosely attempting to be about everything but in fact being about nothing. That type of work is sometimes, in fact, impressed with itself that it is about everything and nothing. As if that were a difficult thing to pull off. As if those weren't already attached at the hip. Shepard's work is radically different. It is always about everything and something. By getting specific, by inhabiting the wholly imagined meat and bones of people who participated in extraordinary events, he captures the essential of what made the event live on, he captures the essential of human soul.
At any rate, this is highly recommended.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant!, November 16, 2007
This review is from: Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories (Hardcover)
What's left to say? The stories here are brilliant.
People have commented on how various the stories here are, taking you from Chernobyl to Australia's inland desert to revolutionary France. And there's a marvelous treat in experiencing these exceptionally evocative, varied settings--every time you pick up the book, you're taken somewhere entirely different. But it's not just a party trick--even as they take you all over the globe and human history, they also feel like they fit together with their own kind of cohesiveness, led by concerns about family--a cohesiveness that makes each individual story even more rewarding upon re-reading. I have a feeling I'll be returning to them for a long time, always looking forward to finding something new.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Like you'd understand, anyway, January 6, 2008
This review is from: Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories (Hardcover)
Like You'd Understand, Anyway is a collection of short stories written over a 4 year period by Jim Shepard, professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. The stories vary widely, but an underlying structure subtly peculates through, barely wetting our feet, inviting the curious to seek out the source of the spring. As Shepard says in an interview for the 2007 National Book Award nomination: "while lots of people have talked about how different my narratives and/or my narrative voices might be, the emotional preoccupations tend to be very similar. I probably obsess about the same five things, over and over."
The book is dedicated to Shepard's brother, and most of the stories explore brotherly relationships, in particular how "the past enters and floods our present" (p.140) - the football player in "Trample the Dead" who finds motivation in the pain of his past and future brother; the summer camp kid in "Courtesy for Beginners" whose brothers trauma inescapably creates his own nightmare. As the picture on the cover suggests, the more two brothers (or fathers and sons) struggle to achieve identity, the more their lives intertwine and become indistinguishable, driven by the "tsunami" of people and events outside their control.
As the self-referencing title of the book alludes, this is a somewhat post-modern book, the stories are not really about anything, they often end with no satisfying closure or even a discernible plot. Yet it is more than a self-conscious artsy exploration of post-modernism, its true value lays in how the subtle yet powerful stories come together to form a whole greater than its parts, and Shepard's uncanny ability to convincingly place the reader into the mind of anyone, anywhere. Shepard finds the smallest detail to bring alive a scene, time and place so that it convincingly reads like a non-fiction memoir. For example in the first story, "The Zero Meter Diving Team", about survivors of Chernobyl, Shepards "voice" is almost indistinguishable from real-life accounts such as those found in the non-fiction work Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2005).
There are no bad stories, but my favorites are "Trample the Dead" (high-school football), "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" (1958 Alaskan tsunami), and "The First South Central Australian Expedition" (19th century Australian explorers). A book like this probably won't attract the typical non-fiction die-hard, but it could; most of the stories are based on historical incidents - there is a lengthy bibliography of non-fiction works used in its creation - and as all good fiction does, it explores the emotional side of things in a way non-fiction rarely achieves.
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