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georgina_bawden's review against another edition
3.0
The writing is very good, but this is still a book I'd only recommend to people who find white guys with first world problems super compelling. Some seriously weird attitudes to women on display here which was off-putting, mostly because of the frequency they appeared throughout the different stories.
ronanmcd's review against another edition
2.0
Woah. A tactful editor should have divided this book in two halves. The first is a collection of stories that break the heart; little dramas of daily life, childcare, unemployment and other difficulties. So convincing are these stories they are difficult to read as the author conveys characters we can readily identify with.
But then...
Things get weird. Suddenly out of nowhere stories become proto-scif-fi, they become nonsensical playing with form, understanding, comprehension and stretching the possibilities and limits of narrative. Synaesthetic meandering thoughts spin in and out of each other and loop in rhythm until, nah screw it, it's too hard and gives too little back.
I had read some Ben Marcus before and hoped for better. The first half destroyed me, the second was destroyed before it got to me.
But then...
Things get weird. Suddenly out of nowhere stories become proto-scif-fi, they become nonsensical playing with form, understanding, comprehension and stretching the possibilities and limits of narrative. Synaesthetic meandering thoughts spin in and out of each other and loop in rhythm until, nah screw it, it's too hard and gives too little back.
I had read some Ben Marcus before and hoped for better. The first half destroyed me, the second was destroyed before it got to me.
mariavdl's review
dark
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
1.5
Pretty great language, but throughout the book, the stories become increasingly absurd and tedious.
Content Warnings
Minor: Suicidal thoughts, Cursing, Infidelity, and Death of parent
lola425's review against another edition
3.0
There can be no argument that Marcus is a great writer. His stories are well-crafted. They're just not for everyone. Short story collections always trouble me because invariably there are stories that I like and stories that just don't appeal to me, and this book was no exception. I had to skip the more science-fictiony ones. I get what he's doing, but I don't enjoy it. Also, so many of his narrators were the same type of sad-sack loser-men that I had a hard time summoning any sympathy past Rollingwood, which was one of my favorites of the collection. I also loved Leaving the Sea, not so much for content (sad-sack again) but for watching how Marcus used language and single-sentence structure to set the tone. Unfortunately, I don't read just to admire form, or even funtion, I read for joy and I didn't glean much joy from this collection.
gohawks's review against another edition
2.0
Dear Ben Marcus,
You did it to me again. I can't believe I let you. Fool me twice... I can just imagine your agent on this book. " Ya know, how about a couple of good New Yorker lite stories to starrt the book. Reel 'em in." You: "Yeah and then I can get to the real heart of my stuff - those Beckett-like dystopian tone poems!" Blech. I should have known after reading part of the Flame Alphabet. In love with your ideas, but your characters are made out of dust and pencil shavings. No fire, just alphabetical acrobatics. A five page story of two sentences? Congrats, you did it! Gimme back my ten minutes. You seem to want to write Kafka's stories with Joyce's pen. I have a hard enough time reading those two sometimes. And you are neither. I give you one more star than you deserve for fooling me. Again. Damn you and the punctuation you rode in on and on and on.
You did it to me again. I can't believe I let you. Fool me twice... I can just imagine your agent on this book. " Ya know, how about a couple of good New Yorker lite stories to starrt the book. Reel 'em in." You: "Yeah and then I can get to the real heart of my stuff - those Beckett-like dystopian tone poems!" Blech. I should have known after reading part of the Flame Alphabet. In love with your ideas, but your characters are made out of dust and pencil shavings. No fire, just alphabetical acrobatics. A five page story of two sentences? Congrats, you did it! Gimme back my ten minutes. You seem to want to write Kafka's stories with Joyce's pen. I have a hard enough time reading those two sometimes. And you are neither. I give you one more star than you deserve for fooling me. Again. Damn you and the punctuation you rode in on and on and on.
joshvet's review against another edition
2.0
Just because there's intelligence, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Marcus's glimpses of brilliance don't make up for the barely readable stories. I'll stick with authors who can marry intelligence with stories that are even marginally entertaining, like the first two sections of this collection.
margaret_adams's review against another edition
Great collection - my first time reading anything by Ben Marcus.
Favorites: What Have You Done?; The Dark Arts; First Love; Origins of the Family.
Quotes:
In some American dialects, the word family means “scatter.” Having a family increases the number of targets, cuts down on the father’s risk. With more people for the sniper to shoot at, the father has a better chance of getting out alive. His wife and children function as his bodyguards. This is also probably why relationships are referred to as “bulletproof vests.”
-First Love, by Ben Marcus
When they discuss children, they are trying to discover if they can creat a new set of bones together. Their difficulties are architectural: can the house support the bones, or will structural changes be required? They submit sketches across the table, editing each other’s ideas about the new person. When they rehearse the names they might call it, and illustrate their visions of its ultimate shape and color, each of them listens privately for a vibration in their bones, pressing their fingers into their flesh to determine what they might feel.
-Origins of the Family, by Ben Marcus
Favorites: What Have You Done?; The Dark Arts; First Love; Origins of the Family.
Quotes:
In some American dialects, the word family means “scatter.” Having a family increases the number of targets, cuts down on the father’s risk. With more people for the sniper to shoot at, the father has a better chance of getting out alive. His wife and children function as his bodyguards. This is also probably why relationships are referred to as “bulletproof vests.”
-First Love, by Ben Marcus
When they discuss children, they are trying to discover if they can creat a new set of bones together. Their difficulties are architectural: can the house support the bones, or will structural changes be required? They submit sketches across the table, editing each other’s ideas about the new person. When they rehearse the names they might call it, and illustrate their visions of its ultimate shape and color, each of them listens privately for a vibration in their bones, pressing their fingers into their flesh to determine what they might feel.
-Origins of the Family, by Ben Marcus
jennyshank's review against another edition
3.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20140117-book-review-leaving-the-sea-by-ben-marcus.ece
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News, 17 January 2014
The stories in Ben Marcus’ new collection are sometimes riveting and sometimes tedious — such as the title story that is six pages and one sentence long. The stories sometimes are realistic, sometimes dip a toe in the fantastic and sometimes venture so far into another world that the characters aren’t recognizably human.
Marcus established himself as an innovative fictioneer through three acclaimed books, including 2012’s The Flame Alphabet. As I read this collection, I’d enjoy a string of stories and then hit upon one that baffled me, such as “My Views on the Darkness,” written in the form of a Q&A, set during some ominous event known as “the hardship.”
A reader’s views on Leaving the Sea might shift story by story or even page by page. Marcus told Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, that when he looked back at his recent stories and planned this collection, “I realized how many other kinds of stories I wanted to write. I saw huge holes and limitations in what I’d done.”
If Marcus’ goal was to make each of these 15 stories completely different in style, length, tone and position on the realism spectrum, he’s accomplished his mission. But for a reader, it can be a bumpy ride. These stories are by turns entertaining, difficult, hilarious, puzzling, sweet and sad.
Those that gripped me most usually fell on the more realistic or funnier side of Marcus’ oeuvre. In “What Have You Done?” a former sad-sack named Paul flies home to Cleveland for a family reunion. He has a good job, a wife and a baby, but his parents don’t know this, and when he mentions them, they don’t believe him because he’s lied so often in the past. Bitter Paul notices that his family has erased all signs of him from his former room, which now looks like “a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking.” The genius of this story is that everyone reacts to Paul as if he once did something unspeakably horrible, but except for a few hints, we never learn what exactly this was. He’s seared in his extended family’s memory as a volatile screw-up.
In “The Dark Arts,” a young man suffering from an autoimmune disorder is in Germany undergoing experimental therapies that he can’t afford while staying in a creepy hostel and waiting for his girlfriend to show up as promised. In “Rollingwood,” a divorced father does his best to fend for his asthmatic son but can’t catch a break from his ex-wife, co-workers, boss or the world. “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” is the touching and loopy story of a grown son who watches PBS with his elderly mother and interweaves his tangled anxieties and thoughts about life with her amusing analysis of the shows. All of these stories are sad, mysterious and beautiful.
One of my favorites, the hilarious “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” is about a writer forced to teach a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. When he sees the ship’s welcome packet in his room, he thinks, “More people, for sure, read this welcome packet than had ever read any of [my] books or stories.” Marcus captures the agony of teaching such a class, as the teacher tries to draw students into participation, fend off the overfriendly ones and balance the critiques of “the miniaturists,” the “your story starts here people” and the cop-out guy who insists that “this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it.”
Which I would never, ever, stoop to saying except in this paragraph that I’m writing right now. Puzzlers that I will refrain from evaluating include “On Not Growing Up,” about a 71-year-old child, and “The Father Costume,” in which a character speaks “a language called Forecast” consisting of sounds “barked into a stippled leather box.” Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections, and the meaning of the seven stories in the second and fifth sections was beyond me, though I did appreciate their inventive language.
Then, Marcus won me back with the final story, “The Moors,” 40 pages of the thoughts that run through the head of an oddball named Thomas as he approaches a co-worker at the beverage cart at work, and then hilariously bursts some kind of a mental gasket and utters a few sentences of baby talk at her. It works — trust me. Or don’t trust me. Maybe you will prefer the stories in section five.
Perhaps for Marcus’ next story, he should write about a convention for readers of Leaving the Sea, who huddle in groups according to which stories they favor, the section one people on one side, the section five people on the other. It’s a little far-fetched, but as Leaving the Sea proves, Marcus can handle it.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News, 17 January 2014
The stories in Ben Marcus’ new collection are sometimes riveting and sometimes tedious — such as the title story that is six pages and one sentence long. The stories sometimes are realistic, sometimes dip a toe in the fantastic and sometimes venture so far into another world that the characters aren’t recognizably human.
Marcus established himself as an innovative fictioneer through three acclaimed books, including 2012’s The Flame Alphabet. As I read this collection, I’d enjoy a string of stories and then hit upon one that baffled me, such as “My Views on the Darkness,” written in the form of a Q&A, set during some ominous event known as “the hardship.”
A reader’s views on Leaving the Sea might shift story by story or even page by page. Marcus told Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, that when he looked back at his recent stories and planned this collection, “I realized how many other kinds of stories I wanted to write. I saw huge holes and limitations in what I’d done.”
If Marcus’ goal was to make each of these 15 stories completely different in style, length, tone and position on the realism spectrum, he’s accomplished his mission. But for a reader, it can be a bumpy ride. These stories are by turns entertaining, difficult, hilarious, puzzling, sweet and sad.
Those that gripped me most usually fell on the more realistic or funnier side of Marcus’ oeuvre. In “What Have You Done?” a former sad-sack named Paul flies home to Cleveland for a family reunion. He has a good job, a wife and a baby, but his parents don’t know this, and when he mentions them, they don’t believe him because he’s lied so often in the past. Bitter Paul notices that his family has erased all signs of him from his former room, which now looks like “a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking.” The genius of this story is that everyone reacts to Paul as if he once did something unspeakably horrible, but except for a few hints, we never learn what exactly this was. He’s seared in his extended family’s memory as a volatile screw-up.
In “The Dark Arts,” a young man suffering from an autoimmune disorder is in Germany undergoing experimental therapies that he can’t afford while staying in a creepy hostel and waiting for his girlfriend to show up as promised. In “Rollingwood,” a divorced father does his best to fend for his asthmatic son but can’t catch a break from his ex-wife, co-workers, boss or the world. “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” is the touching and loopy story of a grown son who watches PBS with his elderly mother and interweaves his tangled anxieties and thoughts about life with her amusing analysis of the shows. All of these stories are sad, mysterious and beautiful.
One of my favorites, the hilarious “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” is about a writer forced to teach a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. When he sees the ship’s welcome packet in his room, he thinks, “More people, for sure, read this welcome packet than had ever read any of [my] books or stories.” Marcus captures the agony of teaching such a class, as the teacher tries to draw students into participation, fend off the overfriendly ones and balance the critiques of “the miniaturists,” the “your story starts here people” and the cop-out guy who insists that “this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it.”
Which I would never, ever, stoop to saying except in this paragraph that I’m writing right now. Puzzlers that I will refrain from evaluating include “On Not Growing Up,” about a 71-year-old child, and “The Father Costume,” in which a character speaks “a language called Forecast” consisting of sounds “barked into a stippled leather box.” Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections, and the meaning of the seven stories in the second and fifth sections was beyond me, though I did appreciate their inventive language.
Then, Marcus won me back with the final story, “The Moors,” 40 pages of the thoughts that run through the head of an oddball named Thomas as he approaches a co-worker at the beverage cart at work, and then hilariously bursts some kind of a mental gasket and utters a few sentences of baby talk at her. It works — trust me. Or don’t trust me. Maybe you will prefer the stories in section five.
Perhaps for Marcus’ next story, he should write about a convention for readers of Leaving the Sea, who huddle in groups according to which stories they favor, the section one people on one side, the section five people on the other. It’s a little far-fetched, but as Leaving the Sea proves, Marcus can handle it.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
sam8834's review against another edition
4.0
Over the years, I've become bored with a lot of contemporary fiction, but Ben Marcus has always been an exception. He creates work that's mainstream accessible, but isn't altogether easy to get through. The Flame Alphabet took me longer than normal to read, but not because I didn't like it or because it was difficult - Marcus's writing just demands a slower-paced kind of attention, somehow, and when you reach the end, you feel it was worth it.
Leaving the Sea is, stylistically, a diverse collection (which is another thing one doesn't often see in contemporary story collections), beginning with very straightforward narratives and venturing into more experimental fiction. It's a transition that works, because while you may feel you're frequently reading about the same narrator (middle-aged, down-and-out, male hot mess type), the style and writing changes in each section so you don't feel so disenchanted with the work as a whole.
Certain stories also show Marcus's strength in carrying out his bizarre ideas, that he doesn't just take stylistic chances merely for the sake of experimentation. The title story, just one sentence long over several pages, is breathtaking, both in its narrative arc and execution. The Moors puts an almost post-apocalyptic, epic lens on a man's arduous trek from his cubicle to the office coffee cart. Personally, I enjoy these risk-taking efforts more than the traditional stories that open the book, but this is overall a strong collection from Marcus.
Leaving the Sea is, stylistically, a diverse collection (which is another thing one doesn't often see in contemporary story collections), beginning with very straightforward narratives and venturing into more experimental fiction. It's a transition that works, because while you may feel you're frequently reading about the same narrator (middle-aged, down-and-out, male hot mess type), the style and writing changes in each section so you don't feel so disenchanted with the work as a whole.
Certain stories also show Marcus's strength in carrying out his bizarre ideas, that he doesn't just take stylistic chances merely for the sake of experimentation. The title story, just one sentence long over several pages, is breathtaking, both in its narrative arc and execution. The Moors puts an almost post-apocalyptic, epic lens on a man's arduous trek from his cubicle to the office coffee cart. Personally, I enjoy these risk-taking efforts more than the traditional stories that open the book, but this is overall a strong collection from Marcus.