Customer Reviews

Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories

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

 

 

Ms. Eisenberg has a wicked sense of literary creation. The colorful book jacket alone encompasses so many meanings and allusions. The battered Batman-like superhero watches over the mayhem of 9-11 and over the New York City loft where Ms. Eisenberg's characters of the titled story have gathered. The title itself invokes the opera of Richard Wagner, "The Twilight of the Gods." And the reader has not even reached the actual story itself.

The author is an acquired taste who makes the reader work at understanding the motives and actions of her flawed but all-too-human characters -- this is not beach reading. For those who enjoy the craft of her story-telling, the reader is referred to last year's "Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg" and to 1996's "The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg" -- the latter is the reprinting together of her first two books of stories while the former is a 'best of" collection from all her published works.

With "Twighlight of the Superheroes," Deborah Eisenburg is throwing another log onto the early but incipient literary bonfire of "Post-9/11ism." Indeed, these stories are a testament to Post-9/11ism's leading attributes: expectation of imminent doom, the globe as a child that has lost its innocence, the theory that, contrary to the trend prevalent throughout most of history, the teenagers, 20- and 30-somethings of today will be the first generation to live less happily than their parents, as well as the feeling that our world, through its fast-paced ambition and utter forwardness, has made tragic mistakes for which our children and grandchildren will pay.

The title story, of course, says this the best. And as a 17-year-old who expects to reside one day in no place other than a city like New York, I finished it with tears in my eyes. Not because the story was dark, or polemic-sounding, which it was, but because, counter to those strides, there is empathy for the characters, and an underlying, godless faith that we as people will survive, continue to wake up in the morning and live the lives we make for ourselves. The world in which this story was written is not the world that existed ten years ago. This is a time of monumental change, and I welcome the recent movement of Post-9/11ism with open arms.

The stories in this book are absolutely stunning. I want to know more about every single character. I care about them and hope that during my lifetime Ms. Eisernberg writes more stories with these characters. They are real, yet each one represents something. Amazing.

Ms. Eisenberg is one of the masters of the short story, winning award after award. Her stories have the tight composition characteristic of writing that has to tell a story in a few pages. The actions, the characters have to be distilled down to the essense of the story. In short stories you do not have the option of stringing out the character development over time, each word, each sentence has to ahve meaning.

Here are six of her latest stories. If you are a fan of hers, here is your next fix. If you are new, you are in for a special delight. Here are characters living out their lives as best they can. They are limited by their own abilities, their own beliefs, their families, and basically the beds that they have made for themselves.

Ms. Eisenberg is provessor of fictional writing at the University of Virginia.

There is no doubt that Ms. Eisenberg is a talented writer. Her style and structure are like a trim little sailboat coming out of the mist, and the closer it comes - the more open it lays itself for inspection - the more the observer admires the work that went into it. I, on the other hand, write like a man carving a canoe out of a fallen oak tree with a sharp rock, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize Ms. Eisenberg's skill.

To beat a dead metaphor, once the sailboat docks, and the admiration and envy wear off, one has to meet the characters, the passengers if you will, that Ms.Eisenberg has worked so hard to transport to the reader. At this point, one has to wonder why she bothered.

How exquisitely tired they all seem to be in this collection. These characters are just barely holding up under the weight of their poor priveliged lives, mugging for the hidden camera that Ms. Eisenberg uses to record their drama. Tired twentysomethings, not sure where their lives are going, tired homosexuals exhausted by their own pettiness, tired wives having affairs for relief from loving husbands, and on and on the tired, tawdry little merry-go-round goes.

I think that the people Ms. Eisenberg chooses to write about all need to spend a few months carving canoes out of oak trees with sharp rocks. Perhaps then they might skip tired and get up close and personal with exhaustion, thereby losing the energy required for their clever listlessness. It's difficult to juggle self absortion when you have blisters on your hands.

This "Twilight" aura of decline surrounding these characters may indeed be what the author tried to achieve, and if so, she nails it. But I shudder to contemplate the reader who, after finishing "Twilight of the Surperheroes", thinks to themself, 'why, yes, that's me exactly'.

Given all my dislike for this collection, I would still give Ms. Eisenberg one more try, simply because it's obvious she's too good of a writer to dismiss after one effort. But one more only. If it too had the same drained characters, then I could easily lay her work aside. After "Twilight", I'm already tired of being tired.

Deborah Eisenberg's stories are highly intelligent, witty, and complex--so complex they're like small novels.
They're actually about something, too. This collection is her apotheosis as an artist (thus far); and she has
just won a well-deserved MacArthur "Genius" grant!

This is the first time I've tried reading Deborah Eisenberg and I'm simultaneously impressed by her non-linear narrative as much as bothered by it.

This narrative device of moving back and forth between the present and the past is most evident in the titular story about a bunch of young adults whose lives converge at a Manhattan loft. Their fortunes reflect the magnificent view of the vibrant city and also plunge as the twin towers collapse on 9/11.

In each of the six stories in this collection, an ambivalent main character is presented. We have the intense, loving brother in 'Some other, better Otto', the school-marmish Kate in the company of a suave, debonair foreign gentleman in suitably romantic settings of old churches and museums in 'Like it or not', the naive and ditzy Kristina who finds herself saddled with a mysterious free-spirited lover's young son in 'Window', and the wife/mother coping with geographical as well as emotional displacement in 'Flaw in the Design' who turns to adultery for solace.

Perhaps the appeal for some readers would be that none of these characters are perfect and therefore real. However, at times these characters grate on my nerves simply because they are so contrary. Otto, while coping with a schizophrenic sister whom he adores, seems unnecessarily hostile to his patient lover, William, and patronisingly scathing towards his other siblings and their families. While humorous and witty, these exchanges tend to be too smart-assed and show up qualities of the characters that fail to attract this reader. Other characters like the abused Kristina in 'Window' and Lulu in 'Revenge of the Dinosaurs' drop in on friends (possibly unannounced) and are visibly annoyed when they find out that they are not the centre of the universe when their friends tend to their routine lives and arguments.

Fine writing, though just a tad unsettling for its refusing to stay in the moment long enough for the reader to feel involved before it moves into another time zone in the narrative.

I like the length (long) and ambition of these stories. I felt she gave a lot of thought to big questions, what 9/11 meant to the sense New Yorkers had of the world (Twilight of the Superheroes), what a brilliant sister's mental illness costs a middle-aged gay man in terms of his feelings for his family and everyone else (Some Other, Better Otto). Only the first story deals with 9/11, btw. There is only one story that I felt had a flaw, and it was a good story nonetheless.

I can't believe these stories are only earning three stars. If you were not 'conned' into reading these stories and actually enjoy literary fiction, you will probably love these stories. I did. Eisenberg's craft and artistry are amazing

I was conned into buying the book, Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg (2006), after reading the "chim" review by Washington Post's Lisa Zeidner, which was reproduced on Amazon.

In Singapore, we have a Hokkien word "chim" (deep) to describe things that are intellectually pretentious and seemingly profound but which says nothing in the end. Chim is how you would describe both the book and Zeidner's review.

Nowadays, literary short story writers are unable to tell a good yarn in the tradition of Chekov and Conrad. Only trashy fiction like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have page-turning plots.

I have to read many of the same passages 2-3 times in Superheroes before I could figure out what this Eisenberg was talking about.

The only saving grace in the book were some random insightful remarks scattered across the pages. The trouble is, these remarks are isolated and seem unrelated to the narrative.

The bottomline is: don't read reviews by salaried reviewers -- they are paid to craft expressions that appear elegant and chim, in order to justify their fat salaries. Life is short, cash is scarce, and good fiction and good yarn are already plentiful (e.g. Joyce, Chekov, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Melville, RL Stevenson, etc & etc), so, do yourself a favour: save your money and save yourself from frustration by ignoring this book.

One of the reviews here, on "ennui", summs up what Superheroes is all about.

Hsiaoshuang