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frazzle 's review for:
Saunders takes the back off the clock that is fiction and shows us its cogs and springs. He uses seven 19th century Russian short stories as exemplars - why do they move us? why do we want to know what happens? why do they *work*? He weaves in insights from his own (dazzling) career as a writer of fiction. It reads as a guidebook for the budding author but was equally interesting for someone just into fiction.
Saunders has a knack of coming across as pretty damn likeable. Self-effacing but genuine, very funny without being smarmy, and super passionate about his craft. The final chapter 'We end' is about as good a defence of fiction as I've read (all the more so because it was not pretentious) - fiction shakes us out of our certainties, situates us on the spectrum of human experience in an increasingly individualised world, takes us places we'd never go left to our own mental devices. But he also demurs from treating literature as a kind of 'salvation', and the troublesome expectations this can entail.
My small reservation is that he's a touch reductive at times ('that's all poetry/writing is!') and there's a bit of a lack of appreciation of the breadth of good literature (i.e. how writing can defy his advice but be brilliant nonetheless). He also goes the whole 400 pages without quoting a word of Russian. This is definitely intentional and intentioned well, but as someone interested in translation in general and Russian in particular, this left me a little cold.
Undeniably a brilliant book. Recommend to any readers who want to learn why they read.
Saunders has a knack of coming across as pretty damn likeable. Self-effacing but genuine, very funny without being smarmy, and super passionate about his craft. The final chapter 'We end' is about as good a defence of fiction as I've read (all the more so because it was not pretentious) - fiction shakes us out of our certainties, situates us on the spectrum of human experience in an increasingly individualised world, takes us places we'd never go left to our own mental devices. But he also demurs from treating literature as a kind of 'salvation', and the troublesome expectations this can entail.
My small reservation is that he's a touch reductive at times ('that's all poetry/writing is!') and there's a bit of a lack of appreciation of the breadth of good literature (i.e. how writing can defy his advice but be brilliant nonetheless). He also goes the whole 400 pages without quoting a word of Russian. This is definitely intentional and intentioned well, but as someone interested in translation in general and Russian in particular, this left me a little cold.
Undeniably a brilliant book. Recommend to any readers who want to learn why they read.