Customer Reviews

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
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Perhaps one of the core narratives through this collection is love, lost love, women trying to own their lives through the natural and cultural world after relationships go south for any number of reasons. But that's too simplistic. The quasi fantastical and mythic search for mystery larger than us, and in the world around us, is brought down to human size, with all the misery, desire, loss, and uncertainty attached. These characters are human, rich and earthy. A solid debut collection.

"It was late, 4 A.M., and I'd just finished the story for the third time. I turned back to the title page, "We Are Calling to Offer You a Fabulous Life," and just sat there, not thinking of anything in particular. Instead, I sat there in the sleeping house, doing my best to chain-smoke myself into a coma, and rolled the feeling of the story back and forth. It was smooth and delicate, with just the right pacing, nothing too high or low. It was the delicacy that grabbed me. Laura van den Berg certainly has hands for the delicate things -- things like longing and loss and being compassless in a strange land -- things that any writer with clumsier hands destroys in the telling."

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Lost souls live in these stories. And like the great Joy Williams, what is remarkable is van den Berg's achievement in fully immersing us in her characters' worlds, illuminating what we might think of on first glance as mundane and turning them into treasures. For these characters, elements of the fantastic wait in every corner as they search to find some form of peace with their lives, and I was happy to follow them, experiencing their discoveries and their surprises, their disappointments and their restless determination, their off-kilter worlds that were both familiar and foreign, and simply marveling at the beauty and precision of the prose, which hits the heart. I did not want their journeys to end. This book, for this reader, is the best debut I've encountered in a very long time; and Laura van den Berg is a writer to pay attention to in the coming years.

Not long after picking up this debut collection I was lucky enough to hear the author read aloud the first story and to see the way it hit her audience: at times they were spellbound, at others uproarious, but entirely rapt throughout. That's exactly how I felt when I first encountered these deeply moving, startlingly original, uncommonly sensitive stories. There is an emotional thread stitched expertly through this book - people gut-punched by life trying to get back their breath - but that's not all that holds the collection together. Here, the mythical mingles with the mundane, outlandish creatures work their way into the lives of characters who feel anything but. Whether writing about a failed actress who impersonates Big Foot by day and tends to a dying lover by night, or a girl who learns to know herself through her mother's obsession with the lemurs of Madagascar, van den Berg manages to pull off the near miraculous: stories so strange and beautiful I felt like I'd been pulled out of the world I know, and yet, somehow, by the end, came away knowing not only more about the world, but about myself.

I love short story collections. I don't think I'd consider myself an expert on the genre but I do read a lot of short stories. This collection has been my favorite since Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart. The sense of place the author brings to these stories made me feel as if I were right in the middle of these people's lives. Highly recommended. I bought the collection based on the title of the book catching my eye.

When i discovered the first story in this collection was about a bigfoot impersonator, i expected absurdism. I expected to laugh. What i got was somber, tender, poignant. I was hooked.

The stories that follow are filled with cryptozoological beasts -- The Loch Ness Monster, mokele-mbembe, mishegenabeg, undiscovered primates -- yet these creatures remain on the peripheries, as elusive as the sense of human connection for which the characters search. These stories are really about loss of relationship, impending loss and its aftermath. We all want to know why it didn't work out. There are no answers here, but van den Berg forges a sense of connection through her work.

I was suprised to read on the backcover that this is a debut collection. The prose here is as polished as you'll find anywhere. The stories are beautiful, original and masterfully told. I'm looking forward to more.

These stories are full of subtle parallels. Besides images of water, there are also mentions of or allusions to cryptids (the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot and his South American cousins, Mokele-mbembe, etc.). Though these creatures never actually appear in the stories (at least, not literally--in one story the protagonist is a professional Bigfoot impersonator) they inform the human drama of the stories, in which people are often disappearing from the characters' lives. Parents die under mysterious circumstances in a faraway rainforest. A husband abandons his wife in Paris. These losses leave mythic-sized wholes in the lives of those left behind, and this is often the conflict the stories hinge on: brutal and tragic but also often funny.

Van den Berg's stories, true to the collection's title, have elements of water running throughout. Hannah Tinti's claim that she "finds the tension between science and magic and walks it like a tightrope" is very misleading. Her stories, while utilizing exotic travels to Africa ("The Rain Season") and South America (title story and "goodbye my loveds") and the people and creatures that dwell there , should not be confused for "magic".

Her main characters, all female, carry the same voice regardless of who they are, what age they are, and how they are feeling. Van den Berg seems to lack the ability to fully form her characters, and instead they seem to be mere versions of herself. And she must be boring.

Van den Berg utilizes exotic places, animals, and customs to try to hide the fact that the stories and characters themselves are flat, underdeveloped, trite, and dull. Her attempts to display "the human condition" are often cliched and overdone. An older woman haves an affair with a younger man, a failed actress wanders to a strange place trying to find herself, many women nurse broken hearts, and so on....

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This is a wonderful collection of short stories that captures the obscure around relationships that are both familiar and intricate. Great imagery and sophistication in every sentence.