2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Love sucks and yet they go on..., May 28, 2009
I came upon this lean collection of short stories by Maxim Biller after reading Francesca Mari's review of the book in The New Republic in which she contrasted Biller with Raymond Carver. No doubt, Biller's style is spare -- with 27 stories spanning just over 200 pages, most of these little portraits would right qualify as "sudden" fiction. But it's not the brevity or simplicity that marks Biller's style, it's that for a collection of "love stories," his tales and characters are stripped of any apparent remnant of emotion or sentimentality that are more typical of the kind of characters that inhabit Carver's world (but I'll leave the Carver contrasts to Ms. Mari in TNR), or arguably the real world.
As the title suggests, most of these stories are portraits of love, or rather relationships. Invariably, the 20-to-40-something male and female protagonists seem to have some history of love (though we're never privy to that foundation) that has gone horribly awry, such that they're left trapped in some kind of distorted version of love. They can't seem to love without hurting, and often intentionally. And it's not that the lovers are saddled with hardship -- by all accounts they mostly seem to be yuppies living in urban Germany -- it's more that they're victims of themselves, having become empty, barren, and lost. They don't seem to be trying, or they're beyond trying. Yet they go on in their self-destruction, bouncing back and forth in love-hate ambivalence, without seeming too much to care. As a reader trying to make sense of it, there's a fair amount of time spent vacillating between, "Do these guys love each other ...or hate each other?" Almost all of Biller's characters seem sentenced to live in this grey zone.
"The Mahogany Elephant," which appeared in the New Yorker, and "Two Israelis in Prague" (as an aside, Biller is Jewish, was born in Prague, and writes from Berlin and often includes Jewish protagonists) are emblematic of this ambivalence. Things seem to take a more than usual turn for the worse in "Fearing for Ilana," where the protagonist is murdered by an ex-lover. And yet even then, Biller recalls for us that, in contrast to the man she leaves him for, the man who kills her was the one who was able to was able to make her come to orgasm immediately.
In other stories, Biller isn't afraid to reveal the bleakest inner thoughts of his characters. A father in "Aviva's Back," says, "I watched Aviva [his daughter] for a while - and felt nothing. You don't always have to feel something at the sight of your child, I told myself..." The man in "Yellow Sandals," says, "In the end I'm left lying on top of them, exhausted, I kiss them listlessly on the throat and hold them tight, although I'd rather not, and then I go to wash myself, but if they too want to wash I feel just a little insulted. After that we sleep side by side, we wake up, it's morning, I go into the bathroom again, and when I come back the smell of the bedroom tells me that I absolutely must spend the next night alone. It's always the same."
Indeed, it's mostly the same in these 27 modern tales of woe, with one dyad after another stuck in a painful rut of non-feeling. The New Yorker calls Biller "the sad optimist," but it's hard to detect much of a hopeful feeling in any of these stories... and this coming from a guy (me) that has lived on depressing short fiction. Really, there are only two stories that betray any semblance of sentimentality, or hope -- "Ziggy Stardust," in which two childhood friends come together and move apart over the course of their lives, and the final story, "Happy Ending With Sticky Tape" -- aptly titled, and a bit more experimental in content.
It's not that relationships don't go this way in real life -- they do -- and so I suspect these stories will indeed resonate with some. But I read this work at the same time as Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road," and as a result, I'm now find myself almost eager to go out and catch a romantic comedy with my girlfriend. The thing about these stories is that rather than rooting for any of the characters in the collection, I found myself rooting instead for mankind... that Biller's portrayal of "Love Today" is wrong.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
modern love, July 2, 2008
I first saw the story "The Mahogany Elephant" in The New Yorker and was amazed by Biller's insight and precise rendering of the tricks and currents of modern love. I flipped back to the start of it a few times just to burn his name into my head so I would remember to buy the book when it came out.
And the book is no disappointment. Biller is sharp, almost surgical in his spare portrayal of relationships. Any reader can recognize moments they've lived themselves -- except with a new understanding from getting the perspective of Biller's all-seeing eye. Not every story coheres; at times the emotional distance keeps you from connecting with the characters. But many of the stories will just blow you away, and collectively, they have real power. You realize you're in the hands of a master, that his apparently simple writing is anything but, and that Biller not only sees but understands.
A great debut. Can't wait for more!
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