Strange stories, not interested in any.

How funny that I should have just read the essay "A Reader's Manifesto", by B. R. Myers, when I picked up this book. In the essay (available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107... for now) Myers skewers various superstars of "literary fiction"--Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, David Guterson, and others--for turning out poorly-written books that are all flash and no substance. The brilliantly bizarre set pieces here, unfortunately, suffer from the same problem. Bender is all about the good sentences, without much thought given to making sense. Its the kind of writing critics describe as "scintillating" or "virtuosic". It sounds great, but then you realize that it doesn't really mean anything.

Opening at random, I find:

"Had the imp lifted the can, he would have been stunned: it was so light! Where did the beer go? Had he looked closer, he might've seen it riding up the strands of her hair, brown droplets on a lime escalator, sucked up by that straw of a lock, foam vanishing into the mane in front of him, the mane he pictured at night floating over his small shoulders when he was in his bed, naked, eyes closed."

Dear lord. The inner voice, with exclamation point. The droplets on an escalator (?), which is also a straw, which is also apparently part of a horse. And none of this actually happened anyway, since he didn't actually lift the can (interior exclamation notwithstanding) or look at the hair after all ("had he..."). If you read this quickly, it seems to sparkle--but a closer read reveals that it's just nonsense. There's nothing wring with wordplay, but a good author can both make a sentence shine and make it worth writing in the first place.

Collecting 16 somewhat magical realist / surreal very short stories. Bender is a great short story writer in that she gets you into the setting within the first page and keeps you interested 'til the last with her surreal characters and sometimes surreal worlds. 7 out of 12, Three Star read.

2013 read

Short stories aren't really my thing. I also kind of felt these were lacking in substance a bit, and felt weird for the sake of it.

Non ho ancora letto i romanzi della Bender. Questo suo libro d'esordio (l'originale risale al '98), una raccolta di racconti mediamente brevi, è comunque sorprendente e lascia intravedere il carattere di una scrittrice estremamente inventiva, originale e fantasiosa, che molto deve a Kafka, ma altrettanto a Carver (da cui discende anche il Murakami - che di Carver è stato traduttore in giapponese - dei migliori racconti). La sua capacità di sintetizzare e quindi di padroneggiare l'arte del racconto ad alti livelli è totale. Altre cose, anche più interessanti di queste mie poche righe, sono state dette in un paio di commenti che mi precedono, e, condividendoli pienamente, non intendo ripetere o aggiungere alcunchè. Semmai solo che mi accingerò presto ad assaggiare anche Bender romanziera. Con molta fiducia.

This book tries to put the cart before the horse. In an effort to be an artist (and I suspect to impress her writer's group peers) she has made some sparkly that lacks substance. A couple stories are just plain boring and/or bad but some had real promise. An interesting an idea, an opportunity to dig into a character - but they then fall flat. Was the idea to just wow the reader with strange set-ups?

At least it was a fast read. Nothing to see - move along, folks!

I really wanted to love this book, but it just didn't happen for me. Andrea was right--these stories read great out loud, in a performative medium, but on the page, there's not much happening. Each story contains so much whimsy, coupled with such simple, economic language, that the stories come off as mere fairy tales rather than moving stories. And by the end, I was kind of sick of the whimsical stuff, the imps and fire and deformed individuals of sideshow nature.
Bender's images, however, are beautiful. I wonder, though, if certain passages, sections that are absolutely gorgeous and seem so tight and organic, were what Bender started with, and whether she crafted her stories around beautiful images. I guess in that regard, Bender taught me that a beautiful image isn't enough to make a story.

2.5 stars (?)

Overall, I was very unimpressed by this collection of short stories. I started it really excited, knowing it would have strange little stories I hoped to find interesting, but my interest petered off the more I read. Most of the stories in this collection didn’t go anywhere, didn’t have any kind of resolution, and, eventually, that really got to me. It annoyed me A LOT. What made it even worse was that most of the stories centered on, I'm gonna be really honest here, a super pathetic woman who was desperate to find meaning or excitement in her life. This just made the stories so DULL. I couldn’t find anything interesting about most of these women who were so thoroughly unsatisfied with their lives. It was all just incredibly disappointing. I really wanted to love this collection, but I just didn’t.

Here are my brief thoughts on all the short stories. They all pretty much reiterate what I summarized in the previous paragraph.

The Rememberer: There was something so melancholy about this story. Its absurd narrative of a man undergoing reverse evolution was very existential. It was short, sad, and beautifully written.

Call My Name: This was. . .a wild ride. Can’t say I’ve ever read anything like it. It subverted gender roles in a peculiar way. The story didn’t really go anywhere, it was sort of stagnant, but the characters were both crazy as hell (and, therefore, interesting). I appreciated the contrast between the narrator's impatience and the other character’s calm.

What You Left in the Ditch: A very sad and desolate story. It felt a little bit ableist, not gonna lie, but it was interesting (not because it was slightly ableist). There was a very melancholy tone to it which I enjoyed. It was kind of depressing, but relatively normal compared to the previous stories.

The Bowl: This story didn’t click that much with me. It felt unremarkable, a bit bland. I liked how it emphasized the need humans have for their ordinary lives to have more meaning or adventure (to have things be more connected to each other than they are), but the story fell kind of flat. For me, the final message was that there is no deeper meaning or significance to our lives (which is kind of depressing).

Marzipan: This story only got weirder and weirder. It was kind of fun, but I felt like it lost its voice or tone somewhere along the way. Although I liked the fantastical ideas the main character had, I wasn’t super blown away by the story itself.

Quiet Please: I really enjoyed this story. It very much felt like it was about the need we have to control what surrounds us when we are faced with something we cannot control, like death, and I liked how that was expressed in this fantastical story. The story wasn’t just bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. It felt very purposeful. I had a good time with it. Plus, it took place in a library. What’s not to love?

Skinless: I’m not sure how I feel about this story. It left me feeling icky. Nothing really got resolved, and I didn’t understand what I was meant to take away from it. It felt very...unpleasant.

Fugue: I would have preferred if the main focus of this short story had been the sections where it's narrated in first person. These parts of it were so engaging and interesting in their whimsical ways, but I felt like the other parts of it ruined it. I liked how they all came together, but I thought the story would have been stronger if it had just focused on that one point of view.

Drunken Mimi: I didn’t really like this story at all. It didn’t go anywhere and was too brief for me to truly engage with the characters. It felt very out of place in this collection.

Fell This Girl: Ugh. I couldn’t stand the main character of this story. She was vain and empty, and clearly trying to fill that void, but her utter failure at figuring out how to properly fill that void annoyed the crap out of me. She was terrible, and the fact that she didn’t even do what she wanted to pissed me off. It felt like she was stuck in the middle, and I wanted her to just go all the way or fucking get over it.

The Healer: This was my favorite story of the entire collection. It had its “magical” element, but it wasn’t absurd merely for the sake of being absurd. The story also had an ending that felt properly resolved! In general, although it was a pretty violent story, it at least didn’t feel directionless and purposeless. Plus, for once, the female characters weren’t completely insufferable. Their suffering felt relatable and genuine and not just “oh boo hoo my life is empty of meaning”.

Loser: I really enjoyed this story. The ending was really sad; but it made the story that much more meaningful. Additionally, I enjoyed its “quirks”. It was really good. Not too long, and not too short.

Legacy: This was okay. Wasn’t bad, but wasn’t amazing either. I struggled with its meaning, its message, as it clearly had one. Maybe if it had been slightly longer, I might have enjoyed it more.

Dreaming in Polish: Hm. I liked the way this was written, how it had parts narrated in 3rd person and others in 1st person, but the ending was unsatisfying. It sort of matched the mood of the story, but I was still left feeling unsatisfied. Meh. It was okay. . . I guess.

The Ring: This story felt very rushed. From beginning to end, it read like it was desperately trying to reach the end, but this wasn’t necessary. There was nothing particularly interesting to rush to. It wasn’t the worst of the stories, but the urgency in it felt out of place.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Like many of the other stories in this collection, this one didn’t go much of anywhere. I enjoyed the tone of it, and most of it was interesting to me, but I was unhappy with how it ended almost like in a question or an ellipsis. Nothing about the “plot” of it got resolved.

I'll start with the positive: people always seem to notice when an author writes about sex badly, so it's only fair that credit be given to Aimee Bender for writing sex really, really, well. This collection of quirky short stories positively sweats, pants and drips with cumulated sexual activity, and it never becomes dull or clichéd. There is a rhythm in the writing that lends itself well to powerful emotions, and the desire to use sex against them as a palliative or antidepressant. Thus when it comes, it feels natural, unfeigned, human and yes, kind of sexy (James Salter, take note). And like a good lover, Bender knows to end her stories with a little bit of mystery, always leaving us wanting more.

Strong emotions are very much the motif of this thin book, whose other narrative device is the ubiquitously supernatural. Allowing magic to signify roiling inner tension allows the young heroines to affect hip dispositions of apathy reminiscent of (recently shamed) Tao Lin - but make no mistake, here lies none of the aforementioned's dour neurasthenia. These characters - with dying fathers, wounded veteran husbands, noncommital boyfriends - feel deeply. And it is their very sensitivity which makes it difficult for me to take these stories seriously as capital-F-fiction.

Literary snobbery has been on the radar lately, via an insipid n  Vanity Fairn piece about The Goldfinch, and some Salon clickbait about (ugh) The Fault in Our Stars. I don't intend to rant about this here, because my opinion on it hasn't yet percolated into something halfway articulate. But my gut feeling is that there's a relationship between the complexity of a work of fiction, and the extent to which its characters can control their passions. Just like in real life, the difficulty and the pleasure of interaction with high-level fiction is in confronting the personae of real people, and growing to understand the artifice they have built around their infant selves. And the fascination, as well as the weakness, in YA fiction, is in how it deals with people on the cusp of adulthood, expected to function as grownups, yet constantly struggling to control raging hormones, which bubble up and explode, in an out of control shouting fit - or a fiery hand, or a set of premonitions, or a flammable skirt.

อ่านก็ได้ ไม่อ่านก็ได้
นี่ตั้งแต่อ่านงานของ Aimee Bender มาก็ยังไม่ชอบเล่มไหนเลย แต่ก็ผูกจิตจะอ่านต่อ เพราะสนใจการสร้างองค์ประกอบเพี้ยนๆ เป็นองค์แบบเดียวกับที่ Miranda July มี

Aimee Bender's debut collection of stories is comprised of the sort of fiction which excels in theory, but not in practice. As advertised on the back cover, these stories are supposed to be twisted, unconventional and grotesque - but are they?

The first story in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, The Rememberer, is the most successful: it's about a woman whose partner is experiencing reverse evolution. From a man he slowly morphs first into an ape, and then into another lower form of life, a sea turtle, ultimately to end up as a microbe. His wife realizes that she cannot stop the process and that he'll soon be completely gone, and tries to hold on to the only thing she'll have left - memories. Despite the absurdity of the premise Bender's short (just a few pages long) story is a poignant piece which just works - we connect with the woman and understand her grief as her husband's slowly turning into a salamander.

Not much else in the collection impressed me. The stories were full of weird and uncanny concepts, set for the sake of an epiphany which never arrived; Richard Brautigan wrote the exact same sort of fiction in the 60's, which is largely forgotten today for a reason - Brautigan's absurd moments were pretty much a product of their time, a drug-fueled decade of love and hippie music, a time when things he wrote about probably made sense to at least some people. But if Brautigan was a product of his time, what does it make Aimee Bender? I'd like to think that it makes her an author who in this debut has yet to find a way on how to invent a fantastic and outrageous premise and write an actual story - with real people that readers can care about and relate to, just like Karen Russel does so brilliantly. Since this collection was published 16 years ago, there's a real chance that she did exactly that - and I'd report to you with the answer when I'd read her other work.

Have I mentioned that I love Aimee Bender yet? I wonder: If I start experimenting with drugs would I be able to come up with this sort of writing? That would be great. Pity I can't afford drugs. Silly drugs, I mean, of course. Like mushrooms or whatever it is that makes things look a little brighter and sparklier. I'm giving this book a 5 because I think that being the type of person who writes these sort of weird and confusing-for-most-people stories is kind of important. Year ago when I read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake I did not love it as I expected to because I hadn't been expecting magical realism (I knew little of the genre back then) and I was almost frightened by the darkness of it. I have kind of evolved since then, and am honestly kind of writing in that direction myself now. I have become more open to obscure voices sharing beautiful content. I am so grateful to be meeting these voices. They are growing me. Even when I don't like them, they are growing me. I have learned to set aside expectations and receive what I am given instead of bemoaning what I have not. I cannot help now but envy Ms. Bender. How free she is in spirit. How unconventionally wise. How odd. How exquisite. How real. I should read Lemon Cake with my fresher eyes now. Soon.