Customer Reviews

I Would Have Saved Them If I Could.

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Leonard Michaels has, in the last six months, become one of my literary heroes. "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could" features his talent at writing extremely short stories as well as more fleshed out pieces. It's a shame this book is out of print, try finding it at your local libraries. "Murderers" is perhaps one of the best short stories by an American writer I have ever read. Do yourself a favor, read this book.

I wanted to like these stories more than I in fact did. I knew of Leonard Michaels as esteemed if not prolific short- story writer.This was my chance to get to know his work. This book is his second collection after the perhaps more well- known 'Going Places'.
Michaels is a writer of the quick punch and the fast word. His writing is clipped, and sharp. He often throws in intellectual references and ideas from what is clearly a wide reading.
The stories arouse initial interest but do not follow through as narratives, but rather take the form of cut- up comments, digressions, sequenced reflection.
They also do not go deep emotionally.
The feelings here are quick hungers and lusts, sharp angers and violent misperceptions.
Michaels has a real talent for compressed utterance, poetic epigram. So the best part of the title - story is I think, the title itself. It truly aroused my curiosity but after reading the story I still was not sure what it was about.
"When you are hungry and poor you grab at what you can get" This line summarizes what I take to be the spirit of Michaels' work.
I can be wrong. And I may not get it.
I also know Michaels had a good knowledge of Yiddish, had a sense of the Lower East Side world, also of the Shoah. A Jewish writer in a way though it is difficult to see any special message in that regard coming from this work.
When alienation was the fashion he was alienated. And yet still not fashionable.