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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
Sometimes books find me and I marvel at that luck. This is one such book. Given away by a book club member in a pile of other discards, I took it because I like reading short stories, thinking I'd get around to this someday. Do not make the same mistake in delaying this discovery that I did!
These are very short stories and so all the more amazing in their depth; I was sucked into each one within a paragraph and was in awe of Haslett's ability to create such a rich experience in so few pages. I will read his other works, for sure.
These are very short stories and so all the more amazing in their depth; I was sucked into each one within a paragraph and was in awe of Haslett's ability to create such a rich experience in so few pages. I will read his other works, for sure.
Original review available at my blog, HereWeAreGoing, here: https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/reading-5-days-5-books/
Why did I order this book from the library? I wish I could recall where first I heard about it, who recently wrote about it, which website or Twitter-Literati recommended it, but, I didn’t share decades with Gary Indiana and David Bowie and not suffer some brain-cell loss in the process.
However it came to me, I am grateful. A collection of nine short stories dealing with disturbing degrees of alienation from the world, from others, from the self, this is a well-written though hardly easy read. I devoured all the stories in a two-day binge and that was not, I think, the ideal way to appreciate this work. One should space these stories out, as having them all too quickly follow one another is akin to spending too much time with that friend whose life is one after another tragedy and trauma and who, one suspects, enjoys the agony just a little more than they ought. Too much.
Still, nice work, the opening story, Notes to My Biographer, about a schizophrenic father on a manic high was especially compelling and wrenching. The Beginnings of Grief was a horrifying study in where the numbing effects of loss and despair can strand a person. Devotion, about a brother and sister and the man they both loved and the secrets and lies between them is beautifully wrought, its construction my favorite in the collection and it contained my favorite passage, this;
He won their games of hide-and-go-seek because he never closed his eyes completely, and could see which way she ran. He could still remember the peculiar anger and frustration he used to feel after he followed her to her hiding place and tapped her on the head.
That’s a perfect evocation of what goes on between a brother and sister, the summing up of a relationship in which one’s own misdeeds being allowed are a source of anger. He cheats. He is angry because she has accepted and forgiven it. There is every indication she knows, early hinting of which is finally revealed to be true. He needs not to lose more than she needs to win, a flaw in him to which she acquiesces, which infuriates him. That’s some glorious imagery there.
But, the story by which I was most moved was Reunion. A fellow has contracted AIDS, is dying, and the emotional and physical peregrinations through which he chooses to contort as he moves toward his end, the letters through which he shares this with his father, a devastating telling.
Why did I order this book from the library? I wish I could recall where first I heard about it, who recently wrote about it, which website or Twitter-Literati recommended it, but, I didn’t share decades with Gary Indiana and David Bowie and not suffer some brain-cell loss in the process.
However it came to me, I am grateful. A collection of nine short stories dealing with disturbing degrees of alienation from the world, from others, from the self, this is a well-written though hardly easy read. I devoured all the stories in a two-day binge and that was not, I think, the ideal way to appreciate this work. One should space these stories out, as having them all too quickly follow one another is akin to spending too much time with that friend whose life is one after another tragedy and trauma and who, one suspects, enjoys the agony just a little more than they ought. Too much.
Still, nice work, the opening story, Notes to My Biographer, about a schizophrenic father on a manic high was especially compelling and wrenching. The Beginnings of Grief was a horrifying study in where the numbing effects of loss and despair can strand a person. Devotion, about a brother and sister and the man they both loved and the secrets and lies between them is beautifully wrought, its construction my favorite in the collection and it contained my favorite passage, this;
He won their games of hide-and-go-seek because he never closed his eyes completely, and could see which way she ran. He could still remember the peculiar anger and frustration he used to feel after he followed her to her hiding place and tapped her on the head.
That’s a perfect evocation of what goes on between a brother and sister, the summing up of a relationship in which one’s own misdeeds being allowed are a source of anger. He cheats. He is angry because she has accepted and forgiven it. There is every indication she knows, early hinting of which is finally revealed to be true. He needs not to lose more than she needs to win, a flaw in him to which she acquiesces, which infuriates him. That’s some glorious imagery there.
But, the story by which I was most moved was Reunion. A fellow has contracted AIDS, is dying, and the emotional and physical peregrinations through which he chooses to contort as he moves toward his end, the letters through which he shares this with his father, a devastating telling.
A handful of beautifully written stories; others that flopped.
dark
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
What a gift it is to be able to write with such empathy about such complex issues. I absolutely loved this collection of short stories, exploring themes of grief, loss and mental health. It's a heavy collection, and every story demands attention.
My favourite by far is Devotion, though I loved Notes to my Biographer and really liked The Volunteer as well. One of the book's strengths is how easy it is to empathise with the characters; Haslett has a talent for writing about the mentally ill. There is no romanticisation of mental health, but neither is there a sense of pity, or of hopelessness. His characters are the driving force in their own story, not whatever issue they are struggling with. They have autonomy, even if they behave in imperfect or even harmful ways.
What I will take from this book is how powerful it is to be able to share our grief, however heavy or depressing it may be. Hard times do not make us stronger. But the human connections we form, do.
My favourite by far is Devotion, though I loved Notes to my Biographer and really liked The Volunteer as well. One of the book's strengths is how easy it is to empathise with the characters; Haslett has a talent for writing about the mentally ill. There is no romanticisation of mental health, but neither is there a sense of pity, or of hopelessness. His characters are the driving force in their own story, not whatever issue they are struggling with. They have autonomy, even if they behave in imperfect or even harmful ways.
What I will take from this book is how powerful it is to be able to share our grief, however heavy or depressing it may be. Hard times do not make us stronger. But the human connections we form, do.
I don't usually read short stories, but a friend recommended this, and I'm glad I picked it up. Compelling reading.
The stories collected in You Are Not a Stranger Here are striking, often tragic, but never melodramatic. Haslett addresses mental illness with a sensitivity and honesty that is truly impressive. His characters may be morally suspect, or simply conflicted, as many humans are, but the world they inhabit is the one we all experience. The fantastic is contextualized within the vastness and complexity of the human experience. He experiments with form and tailors his writing to his speaker, but manages to keep his even, consistent pace whenever necessary, allowing himself a poetic turn of phrase at the appropriate moments. A thoroughly impressive collection.
1.5/5
When you're queer and insane like me, there's not a lot on the market for you to choose from when it comes to that nebulous liberal concept known as "representation" and all the goodwill, kumbaya, we're-all-in-this-together platitudes saddled with it. Most of those who would have written for me have long been strung out on barbed wire fences by high school prom kings and shot down by 911 medical health emergency "responders," and those who are left have become all too good at acting the part to believe they'll get away with any sort of portrayal that diverges from the beleaguered unfortunates. So, while Haslett's mental health status is really no business of mine, I can't help but notice how easily he strips the communities, the socioeconomics, the histories from his dearly doomed characters, consigning them to an endless floating that is willing to tell stories on both sides of the Atlantic from the latter stages of the AIDS pandemic to the burgeoning force of the computer age, but not to ground them in any sort of hope that doesn't spring from a stable middle to upper middle class WASP habitus. Sure, it's all very sad in many a way, but behind every 'there but for the grace of' presented by each of the stories, there lies a subtle 'poor dears, but they really brought it upon themselves' by loving the wrong person, distrusting the wrong abusive medical establishment, grasping at the wrong chance of self-actualization, and not being rich enough to absolve any and all of it. Cathartic, I imagine, to the average cishet and/or neurotypical, but a lot has changed since whatever it was that persuaded me to add this book to the TBR in the first place, and now I say, if you're going to delve into the life of someone like me, you better be prepared to acknowledge the existence of every emotional overtone of hilarity, pride, and joy wrapped up in many of the hushed horrors, else all you're really doing is creating another Hallmark card to comfort the already comfortable and disturb the already disturbed.
Out of this lot of stories, 'The Beginnings of Grief' rang the most true for me, as much as due to my favorable memories of Siken's [b:Crush|96259|Crush|Richard Siken|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1613741198l/96259._SX50_.jpg|92779] as to my own experiences with regaining the ability to feel, one of the main counters to suicidal ideation, by any means necessary. Most of the rest came off as somber dream quests that were supposed to come off as sad, but due to the manner in which they were artificially isolated from the rest of the realities of their respective worlds as I described above, that same pitch of tragic pathos echoed through out came off as more and more tinny with every reiteration. It certainly doesn't help that I read the far more fleshed out, far less maudlin, and in a sense far less cowardly [b:The Motion of Light in Water|353325|The Motion of Light in Water Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village|Samuel R. Delany|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388551356l/353325._SY75_.jpg|343536], a magnificent exploration of queerness and every so often neuroatypicality and mental health, alongside this, but even that wouldn't have saved this selection from my dislike for works that confine readers to an emotional pitfall and encourages them to misinterpret emotional bludgeoning for quality writing, much as an overwhelming soundtrack can often make whatever's visually happening on screen seem greater than it actually is. Sure, it's sad that certain people have a hard time existing beyond the scope of a death wish. To portray it over and over without acknowledging the broad spectrum realities of systematic dehumanization in the name of "mental health" and exploitive brutality in the name of capitalism puts all the emphasis on the back of an individual, and eventually, there is a limit of sympathy a reader can have for such fictional martyrs when there are plenty of real ones forced to embrace death once life exacts too high a cost.
To forbid literature the potential quality of escapism strips it of much of the value it holds for human beings, but if you draw up a number of portraits uniform in their enforced solipsism and sense of inevitable doom and show it to someone as their inescapable fate, don't be surprised when you get a handful of smirks and sneers amongst all the heartfelt glorifications in response. Haslett has a good sense of phrase and a workable sense of rise and fall of plot and theme, but would his reception be as chockfull of 'finalist' and 'best book' and 'selection' and 'winner' were he to move away from a rote storyline that takes the Blackness of the 'tragic mulatto' trope and substitutes queerhood and mental health in its place? In other words, if he wasn't so uniform in portraying me and my community as cursed wandering outcasts whose value lies largely in dying for the status quo's sins, would he so successfully mine that chord in the mind of the public that sees the truth Omelas but is not willing to walk away? I suppose we'd find out if the author were willing to go beyond that in his bibliography, but from the looks of it, that hasn't happened yet, and I have no particular interest in pursuing narratives of manic depressiveness, major depressiveness, and schizophrenia that only center the voice when it has nowhere left to become human.
When you're queer and insane like me, there's not a lot on the market for you to choose from when it comes to that nebulous liberal concept known as "representation" and all the goodwill, kumbaya, we're-all-in-this-together platitudes saddled with it. Most of those who would have written for me have long been strung out on barbed wire fences by high school prom kings and shot down by 911 medical health emergency "responders," and those who are left have become all too good at acting the part to believe they'll get away with any sort of portrayal that diverges from the beleaguered unfortunates. So, while Haslett's mental health status is really no business of mine, I can't help but notice how easily he strips the communities, the socioeconomics, the histories from his dearly doomed characters, consigning them to an endless floating that is willing to tell stories on both sides of the Atlantic from the latter stages of the AIDS pandemic to the burgeoning force of the computer age, but not to ground them in any sort of hope that doesn't spring from a stable middle to upper middle class WASP habitus. Sure, it's all very sad in many a way, but behind every 'there but for the grace of' presented by each of the stories, there lies a subtle 'poor dears, but they really brought it upon themselves' by loving the wrong person, distrusting the wrong abusive medical establishment, grasping at the wrong chance of self-actualization, and not being rich enough to absolve any and all of it. Cathartic, I imagine, to the average cishet and/or neurotypical, but a lot has changed since whatever it was that persuaded me to add this book to the TBR in the first place, and now I say, if you're going to delve into the life of someone like me, you better be prepared to acknowledge the existence of every emotional overtone of hilarity, pride, and joy wrapped up in many of the hushed horrors, else all you're really doing is creating another Hallmark card to comfort the already comfortable and disturb the already disturbed.
Out of this lot of stories, 'The Beginnings of Grief' rang the most true for me, as much as due to my favorable memories of Siken's [b:Crush|96259|Crush|Richard Siken|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1613741198l/96259._SX50_.jpg|92779] as to my own experiences with regaining the ability to feel, one of the main counters to suicidal ideation, by any means necessary. Most of the rest came off as somber dream quests that were supposed to come off as sad, but due to the manner in which they were artificially isolated from the rest of the realities of their respective worlds as I described above, that same pitch of tragic pathos echoed through out came off as more and more tinny with every reiteration. It certainly doesn't help that I read the far more fleshed out, far less maudlin, and in a sense far less cowardly [b:The Motion of Light in Water|353325|The Motion of Light in Water Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village|Samuel R. Delany|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388551356l/353325._SY75_.jpg|343536], a magnificent exploration of queerness and every so often neuroatypicality and mental health, alongside this, but even that wouldn't have saved this selection from my dislike for works that confine readers to an emotional pitfall and encourages them to misinterpret emotional bludgeoning for quality writing, much as an overwhelming soundtrack can often make whatever's visually happening on screen seem greater than it actually is. Sure, it's sad that certain people have a hard time existing beyond the scope of a death wish. To portray it over and over without acknowledging the broad spectrum realities of systematic dehumanization in the name of "mental health" and exploitive brutality in the name of capitalism puts all the emphasis on the back of an individual, and eventually, there is a limit of sympathy a reader can have for such fictional martyrs when there are plenty of real ones forced to embrace death once life exacts too high a cost.
To forbid literature the potential quality of escapism strips it of much of the value it holds for human beings, but if you draw up a number of portraits uniform in their enforced solipsism and sense of inevitable doom and show it to someone as their inescapable fate, don't be surprised when you get a handful of smirks and sneers amongst all the heartfelt glorifications in response. Haslett has a good sense of phrase and a workable sense of rise and fall of plot and theme, but would his reception be as chockfull of 'finalist' and 'best book' and 'selection' and 'winner' were he to move away from a rote storyline that takes the Blackness of the 'tragic mulatto' trope and substitutes queerhood and mental health in its place? In other words, if he wasn't so uniform in portraying me and my community as cursed wandering outcasts whose value lies largely in dying for the status quo's sins, would he so successfully mine that chord in the mind of the public that sees the truth Omelas but is not willing to walk away? I suppose we'd find out if the author were willing to go beyond that in his bibliography, but from the looks of it, that hasn't happened yet, and I have no particular interest in pursuing narratives of manic depressiveness, major depressiveness, and schizophrenia that only center the voice when it has nowhere left to become human.
I don't think I've ever used the phrase "beautifully tragic" before...ever...but I can think of no other phrase. Each story, mere pages long, is overwhelming with the amount of complexity, relationship, psychological challenge, and tragedy. It's hard for me to even form coherent thoughts on this book. I wish I could just show you my face (an equal mix of heartbroken and compassionate) and have you hear the sound I let out at the close of each story (a sad "ughhhh....").
The characters are somehow fully developed through these brief snapshots. His characters are sympathetic, flawed, and everything is not necessarily going to be okay. Correction: absolutely, everything is not okay. In fact, things are awful for his characters. And yet, they survive.
I found myself also feeling a lot of compassion for Haslett himself. The stories he constructs full of identity crisis, lost love of family or lovers, mental illness, and death are raw.
Anyway, read if you love short stories but just be prepared for your heart to hurt. Big time.
The characters are somehow fully developed through these brief snapshots. His characters are sympathetic, flawed, and everything is not necessarily going to be okay. Correction: absolutely, everything is not okay. In fact, things are awful for his characters. And yet, they survive.
I found myself also feeling a lot of compassion for Haslett himself. The stories he constructs full of identity crisis, lost love of family or lovers, mental illness, and death are raw.
Anyway, read if you love short stories but just be prepared for your heart to hurt. Big time.
Probably not finishing this one. I made it through all buth the last, but the fact that I haven't picked it up in three weeks is telling. It's an up and down collection, and the downs--which plumb the depths of mental illness and depression--don't do much for me. The first story in this collection is pretty fantastic, but just a few weeks removed from my reading I'm hard pressed to recall another that I liked.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No