I’m struggling to find words for “Tenth of December”, a wonderful and powerful collection of short stories by George Saunders. The plots, the lingo, the style were like nothing I’ve ever read so far, were not expected to be liked by me. Yet I adore it, treasure it, reading through each story with an earnest hurriedness and meanwhile reluctancy to finish. The tenderness and warmth in the unbearable pain in each story of this collection makes life, whatever life, bearable. “A book to make you love people again”, as Sian Cain wrote about the book for The Guardian, who finished reading it in tears in a cafe in Notting Hill. This is not to say that it’s melancholic, quite the contrary, it’s brutal and controlled, in a very honest and ordinary tone. However weird and distant situations the people find themselves in the stories, you feel a certain relatedness and empathy. And that’s humanity. GO READ IT. And don’t read the reviews by The NY Times or NPR. Why do the Americans have to mess everything up with politics? Read The Guardian review here. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/dec/28/tenth-of-december-by-george-saunders-a-book-to-make-you-love-people-again
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Claire Vaye Watkins definitely has talents. You can tell that almost from the first paragraph of the first story in her first collection “Battleborn”. Her words are both poignant and poetic. I read half of the collection and tried hard to like it, until I finally decided that I am not obliged to like every author who made their name into the “best of the year” list. Nevada - the place and the people, the myths and the miseries - just cannot connect with me, even though the author / narrator weaved cleverly her real own life and history into it. Her narrative techniques, shifting time, tenses, and formats, are a bit too much effort for me, and I am not surprised at all to know that she teaches creative writing at a university. Alors, to counteract my fussy comments, here is a positive review written beautifully by Antonya Nelson for NY Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/books/review/battleborn-by-claire-vaye-watkins.html I have always had mixed feelings about reading Victorian literature. It was a big part of my literature education back in college, so reading, or rather re-reading, Oscar Wilde feels like revisiting the pure and immature love one had at one’s young age. Wilde is certainly charming, witty and hopelessly romantic. If anyone wants to strike an impression in conversations, just memorize some quotes by Wilde, which are plenty. Though I enjoyed “The Importance of Being Ernest” half-heartedly, I could hardly finish “De Profundis”. Repetitive narcissism in a very witty and artistic manner, which could be swallowable if it was half the size. Mais quel pauvre! He just couldn’t get rid of Bosie, after all that he had done to him. Even after he came out of the prison at the end of two years, physically, financially and socially destroyed, he got back together with Bosie. What is that but love? Period.
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