Customer Reviews

Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 Memoirs have famously succeeded where novels could not be published.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.

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.

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.

Jim Shepard is an author who has flown above most readers' radar far too long. Simply put, he is one of the five or ten finest fiction writers in America. His novel PROJECT X was far superior to VERNON GOD LITTLE--both books addressed the incendiary subject of school shootings but while DBC Pierre's book went on to win a Booker, Shepard's take on the subject (which was far superior in every aspect) hardly made a ripple. That's a shame.

LIKE YOU'D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY shows that, if anything, Shepard is even better when it comes to writing short fiction. The stories in LIKE YOU'D UNDERSTAND range far afield, the subject matter encompassing everything from the life of first female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova to the French Revolution as seen through the eyes of an executioner. There are tales set in Ancient Greece and pre-World War II Tibet.

Shepard's "style" is not intrusive or obvious, he is much too smart and conscientious an artist for that. His is a selfless talent, undemonstrative and restrained. The stories and characters are front and center, the author graciously declining to step from the wings and acknowledge his rightful applause.

The funniest thing happened while reading "Like You'd Understand, Anyway". I didn't like it. I was telling myself how absurd these stories were and I should just put this thing down. I wasn't connecting with the book. The characters were weird and the endings were weirder.

After plodding through the book, I found myself thinking about the stories. The tsunami in Alaska, the weird family in The Zero Meter Diving Team, the soldier with the wacko father. I actually enjoyed reflecting in those stories and characters. It was like Shepard wrote the book that way. It was so far out that it burned onto your psyche.

It makes me think of some of the other books that I didn't finish because I wasn't into them. What did I miss?

Bravo! Bravo for Like You'd Understand, Anyway. It's the finest book I ever hated.

This is a wonderful book of short stories, beautifully worded illustrations of the convoluted relationships between men--brothers, fathers and sons, friends, strangers. Each story is told of a different place and time, but the theme runs constant. I don't even like short stories, as a rule. But these were great. Ordered for a gift as soon as I completed my library rental of the book.

As mentioned by other reviewers, each story is set in a descrete landscape, with a distinct history. These stories are obviously carefully reasearched, with the underlying theme being the connections between brothers, one of them usually damaged. They resonate in the memory after the page has turned.

This collection of short stories was written by a man about men for men, and frankly, I didn't really understand.

The stories are all very well written and carefully researched. From Ukraine to Alaska, Russia to space, Shephard has done a bang up job of weaving his tales. His themes deal with father-son and brother-brother relationships, and the power struggle within them.

I found it a bit like reading Faulkner - some of the stories spoke to me, but most went right over my head.

"Like You'd Understand Anyway" - Stories is quite the collection, a smart, witty collection.

Jim Shepard is famous for his short stories and I wanted to be the next person to say that his stories are amazing, I'll go with good and I can say that after reading them, I think Jim Shepard has an incredibly brilliant mind.

My favorites-

The Zero Meter Diving Team
Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian
Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak
Ancestral Legacies
The First South Central Australian Expedition

The downside of this book to me, were the really boring stories that literally put me to sleep and there were only a few.

Smart writing, good reading!

As others have mentioned, each story is from a different place and different era. And this is good, since it keeps one interested: if you don't like reading about American football protagonists, maybe you'll like to read about a Roman empire soldier.
What is really mind boggling, and it takes some time to realize it - is that each and every story has also a different writing STYLE. It is subtle, but once you get it - you realize what an excellent, gifted author Jim Shepard is.
Well researched, eclectic, and an absolute must read.