Customer Reviews

The Withdrawal Method

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I love Pasha Malla. I thought maybe his short story collection would be on the flippant side, and not just because of its (IMHO not very apt) title, but more because of his hilarious silly punts on McSweeneys.com. But no. The stories are mostly sad, a little bit funny, sometimes surreal, invested in the loss and manifest of what I call Americana but in this case should call Canadiana since most of the stories are set in Canadia, and this last quite unexpected quality: beautifully written.

None of the stories is like the others, and I was continually amazed at how inside everyone's heads Pasha gets. Middle aged blue collar white dude? Check. Estranged adolescent daughter? Check. Renaissance courtier? Check. And he has to be a basketball nut and have spent some time in or thinking about hospitals. My only critique was that a couple of the stories have abrupt transitions, like they were written in parts, or from different perspectives and then mushed together ("The Slough" and the Automaton Turk one are two where I felt this).

My favourite story was "The Past Composed" and I don't know why exactly. There was something clean and compelling about it, despite nothing drastic happening (no amputation, no bull in a china store, no chimp swallowing snake, no coma inducing accident).

Naturally I didn't love all the stories, but I loved the writing throughout. Every story had a few sentences or phrases that were flat out gorgeous, bits of description, setting, detail (I wish I had written some quotes down). (It was also the book that made me realise that short stories are great for subway rides.) This is Pasha's first book and I'm much looking forward to his next.