Vanilla Bright like Eminem [Hardcover]

Michel Faber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2007

Michel Faber is not only a master storyteller but a daring innovator as well. Here are the pitch-perfect prose, indelible characterizations, and deep empathy for which he has been highly acclaimed. Here also is a satirical streak that depicts individuals at uncanny and all-too-familiar turning points in their lives. The alienated find sanctuary in "The Safehouse," their histories and diagnoses written like endless ads on their T-shirts. In "Andy Comes Back," a man awakens after a five-year coma, only to flee his home. In "The Eyes of the Soul," perpetual televised beauty replaces the derelict view from a suburban picture window. In "Finesse," a dictator holds his surgeon’s family hostage to the outcome of a risky operation. These sixteen stories move from unspeakable sadness through moments of exquisitely distilled happiness.

(20070701)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scots author Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White) practices a distinct and finally winning form of defamiliarization in these 16 short tales, creating characters with very low thresholds for overstimulation, so that the everyday, through their eyes, looks nightmarish or sublime. A man wakes in a pile of garbage in The Safehouse, strips off his fetid raincoat and then can't understand why, as he tries to figure out what day it is, the townspeople want to help him—even after he discerns his name, an address and a phone number printed on his T-shirt. In Serious Swimmers, a recovering drug addict is overwhelmed with love for her son during a swim at the local pool. The homicidal wife-beater on a rampage (in Someone to Kiss It Better) is oddly sympathetic as his misguided coverup goes very wrong. More fantastically, legions of Western businessmen are held in ecstatic captivity by a machete-wielding Miss Soedhono (Explaining Coconuts), while the grotesque 1861 demise of Alchester's richest man (in Flesh Remains Flesh) is freakish and deeply satisfying. Faber's elaborately imagined stories often end at a moment of tension or ambivalence, underscoring his characters' fragility and giving the book an uncanny coherence. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

In the 16 short stories collected here, Faber (The Crimson and the Petal, 2002) continues to demonstrate the full range of his talents. Most of the stories contain a fantastical or magical element that only serves to underline Faber's disquieting take on alienation in modern society, and the effect is somewhat like an episode of The Twilight Zone as penned by Ian McEwan. In "The Safehouse," an emotionally exhausted homeless man enters a shelter where the residents, emitting "an aura of consensual hopelessness," are required to wear T-shirts emblazoned with their psychiatric histories. In "In the Eyes of the Soul," a depressed single mom, who can't afford to move out of her violent neighborhood, agrees to purchase a virtual picture of a living garden to replace her view of the rundown, graffiti-laden store across the street. Not all the stories are as grim, and, in fact, the collection seems to move from dark to light, closing with the title story, a snapshot of a time when the father of two, on vacation with his family, experiences the happiest moment of his life; what should be overly sentimental becomes instead profoundly moving. Expertly crafted short fiction. Wilkinson, Joanne

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151013144
• ISBN-13: 978-0151013142
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #360,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars (four and half stars) A dizzying variety of genres, February 16, 2008

By 

trainreader (Montclair, N.J.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vanilla Bright like Eminem (Hardcover)

I suppose anyone who has read Michel Faber's two novels - the Twilight Zonish "Under the Skin," and the historical epic "The Crimson Petal and the White," will hardly be surprised at the extraordinary array of ideas that are contained in "Vanilla Bright Like Eminem," which consists of 16 well-crafted and insightful short stories. Very briefly, here they are:

1. The Safehouse: In a future dystopian society, the homeless are warehoused in barrack-like surroundings with their histories written in code on their t-shirts.

2. Andy Comes Back: Andy, long in a semi-catatonic state,wakes up, but will he want to resume his old life?

3. The Eyes of the Soul: Trading a harsh reality for fantasy in the squalor of one's own home.

4. Serious Swimmers: A recovering junkie makes another go at the joys (and potential perils) of motherhood.

5. Explaining Coconuts: (Notable) Hard-up businessmen watch an exotic woman do something that will give them a sexual charge they can't get anywhere else (but wait to you find out what that is!!!).

6. Finesse: (Absolutely riveting) A flippant and brutal dictator gives a choice to a female surgeon, who's already spent time in one of his prison's, to either perform a risky surgery and save his life or suffer the consequences.

7. Flesh Remains Flesh: Horror and taxidermy.

8. Less than Perfect: A fantasizing loser believes he finally has the opportunity to take advantage of his job as a grocery store "detective".

9. A Hole With Two Ends: (notable) Even if you have good intentions, don't mess with wild-life unless you know what you're doing.

10. The Smallness of the Action (highly disturbing) A new mom, losing her identity, becomes unhinged and takes it out on her baby.

11. All Black: I'm not even sure what this one's supposed to be about, but the world grows dark as a divorced father, now with a gay lover, attempts to return his daughter home.

12. Mouse: A computer geek, who rarely leaves her apartment, helps his neighbor get rid of a mouse in her apartment.

13. Someone to Kiss it Better: Trying to get away with murder.

14. Beyond Pain: A love story with a backdrop of heavy metal music.

15. Tabitha Warren: (notable) Written as a letter in response to an obituary, it's about a recently dead author who, in the last years of her life, could not publish her "masterpiece" because of a controlling husband. But things may not be as they first seem.

16. Vanilla Bright Like Eminem: (notable) One person's surprising happiest moment of his life.

Although I'm sure that I probably missed some of the important "points" of the above short stories (which is what I often think when I read short stories), it didn't diminish from my enjoyment, and I will certainly re-read it someday. I also plan to read whatever Michel Faber writes next.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unsettling epiphanies, realized or suspended, November 22, 2007

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vanilla Bright like Eminem (Hardcover)

With a nod to the American market, what in Britain two years ago appeared as "The Fahrenheit Twins" now comes, after the success of his Victorian novel "The Crimson Petal and the White," as Faber's third collection of his more usual genre, the short story. If you're wondering about the similarity with his blockbuster, triple-decker, door stopper of a novel (I'm told a sequel's in the works), there's only one story, "Flesh Remains Flesh," that takes place in the mid-19c., and this was one of the weakest entries, in my opinion. However, even this macabre tale displays Faber's genial wit, his edgy sensibility of an outsider, and his fascination with the outré amidst the mundane.

These stories often depict a character out-of-sync with society, or one who shifts slightly away from the norm and finds wonders or horrors. The first two, "The Safehouse" and the slightly less successful "Andy Comes Back," present protagonists who in the first case leave and the second case return from the margins. Faber conjures up a marvellously sinister take on the Panopticon and an Orwellian society of surveillance and suspicion in "The Safehouse" and ends it perfectly. He does this with "Andy" and the "Eyes of the Soul" also, and after three strong stories that begin this collection, "Explaining Coconuts" veers off into an off-beat satire of a deadpan recitation of the properties of that magical fruit to an audience of lustful middle-aged rich men; impossible to explain the tone of this story, but it's almost extraterrestrial in its strangeness. It reminds me a bit of his haunting novel "Under the Skin" in how it evokes an alien sensibility within otherwise ordinary surroundings.

"Finesse" takes what appears a predictable encounter of revenge between a female doctor whose family has been held hostage by a dictator and his need for an operation and manages to rework this conflict satisfyingly. Likewise, "Less Than Perfect" takes adolescent angst and longing for the unattainable woman and presents an encounter that proves more faithful to reality than most fiction; "The Smallness of the Action" tries this with a harried mother caring, or not caring for, her infant but the touch is too heavily ironic here for the reader to care. "A Hole with Two Ends" makes the Scottish Highlands (the author's adopted home) into a wilderness akin to the harsh savannah. "All Black" balances a breakup with a man's male lover with his weekend visit with the man's daughter after he's been separated from his wife-- complicated enough-- and sets as a backdrop to this domestic set-up what appears to be a catastrophic plague of oncoming global darkness. An ambitious story, but Faber manages to keep the familiar and the terrifying blended in perfect proportion.

"Serious Swimmers" dramatizes an addict who must begin to care for her long-estranged daughter; at a public pool under the eye of a social worker, her courage becomes no less engrossing than the quest of an ancient superhero. "Someone to Kiss It Better" efficiently details the downfall of a thug, "Mouse" sets the worlds of gaming and nature and desire against each other neatly, and "Tabitha Warren" handles the decline of a hack bestselling writer of treacly animal-narrated potboilers brilliantly in her rendition of a cat's true stream-of-consciousness narration. It's both funny and poignant.

So is "Beyond Pain," when the unlikely pairing of a Scots small-town musician for a death-metal band and his Hungarian girlfriend brings them into a moment of beauty at a roadhouse csardas. The title story movingly relates the one moment in a father's life when it all comes together perfectly as he watches his daughter rub his son's spiked and bleached hair on a train. Faber's humanism softens and sculpts this final entry.

I wanted to conclude with a few samples of Faber's prose, for those unfamiliar with his style. Whether depicting the world outside or the torment within, Faber avoids the predictable yet keeps his control of the human. Like George Saunders, he manages to provide a moral grounding while he enters the altered, deformed, or stunted sensibility of the nonconformist, the misfit, or the repressed Everyman. All of these sixteen stories are worth reading, twelve are recommended, and half of those I found met the already high expectations I had for this writer after his two novels.

"All around Neil and Sarah, the picture quality of the world was being adjusted as if by brightness and contrast knobs on God's remote control: the sharper contours of grass and scarred earth were sharpened further, almost luminescent, while the duller stretches were retreating into darkness." (The Highlands, in "A Hole," 133-4)

"He seemed unconvincing as a new arrival to the world. There was a darkness in his brow, a slyness to his eyes, a set to his mouth, which made him look like he was a man already, as if her womb had been some sort of a public bar where he'd already spent half a lifetime sipping beer, swapping grievances with his mates, and staring at women's breasts." ("The Smallness," 141, as the mother looks at her son.)

"In the lurid electric light of the train interior, traveling backwards with my eight-year-old daughter at my side, I suddenly realize that my gorgeous, talented, award-winning partner's play wasn't really about anything, except being gay. Judged next to any children's story, it had no plot to speak of." (One moment of self-scrutiny, "All Black" 157)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars so far, so good! - update (upwards), November 10, 2007

By 

S. Lawrence (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Vanilla Bright like Eminem (Hardcover)

I picked this up because (1) I adored The Crimson Petal and the White and (2)I liked the title and jacket cover! Seriously, though, I just started it yesterday evening and reading the first story realized I was with a writer who knew what he was doing. A genuine ability to create characters that are both unusual yet enormously relatable. Not exactly sci-fi but it hovers a few feet above the terra firma...in a good way.
---Have now finished the book. Note to American fiction writers: THIS is how you write short stories. Even when the situations are odd or upsetting the writing and characterizations in VBLE are gorgeous. Really, really talented, just the gold standard for short fiction.