After waxing poetic in my first post about how much I love short stories, I haven’t dedicated a whole lot of time to short stories for this project. This week ended up being all around crazy: among things, there is SO much happening at work (plus the very unceremonious end of my summer of short weeks) and I’ve been preparing to start my second graduate program on Monday (while still limping along and finishing my first grad program’s thesis). My sincerest apologies to Mindy Kaling, who thinks it’s boring when people talk about how busy they are. And she’s right!
If nothing else, when you’re managing a lot at once, short stories give you a sense of accomplishment. It’s not hard to make time to finish a story when it’s not that many pages and you get your beginning, middle and end without having to make it through an entire novel. I had initially had a way loftier reading goal this week but recalibrated and realized that perhaps it wasn’t a good book to tackle this week, though now that I’ve purchased it, said book will definitely pop up on here sooner than later. It was refreshing to acknowledge my own limitations without sacrificing my goal- I bet that pops up again later in my life!
I’m not super sure how this book ended up on my list- it doesn’t seem like one I’d have picked out of nowhere, but I’m not sure what I could have read in a review that would have piqued my interest. It’s not that the book wasn’t good- it won a top prize!- but it’s definitely not my preferred style of short story.
This may make me an awful reader of fiction (or, as I suspect is more likely the case, just a really great candidate for non-fiction books) but I tend to prefer the realistic to the surreal and these stories definitely dipped FAR into surreal territory. I don’t mind aspects of surrealism when inserted into an otherwise firmly realistic story, but these stories were on a new level of strange. It’s not hard to accept, for example, the premise that a boy is born as an old man and ages in reverse in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, since the story is told so realistically (side note: I do simultaneously love and hate that a short story was made into the longest movie of all time). Bertino’s stories are surreal in character and in concept, and I personally didn’t connect particularly well with it.
That said- there are glimmers of hope for fellow realistic readers like myself. Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours was a witty look of literally what an alien would think of humans- it’s well established that I like observational humor and this completely fits the bill. Less successful were This Is Your Will to Live and The Idea of Marcel, but if you’re into strange scenarios, there are many for you here.
You’ll like this if: probably if you liked BJ Novak’s book but wanted it to be even weirder. I can’t really think of anything else I’ve read that compares- if you like surrealism, this could be your book!
Happy reading!
carlyreads 