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A review by gulshanbatra
The World Doesn't Work That Way, But It Could, Volume 1: Stories by Yxta Maya Murray
3.0
This collection of short stories is as current and relevant as it can get, short of reading the news (!).
The author does a fine job of bringing out the circumstances that the current political and socioeconomic situation is making everyone go through. The writing is at a clipped pace, the narrative fairly fast though not quite smooth. The ideas covered are wide ranging.
That last part is primarily where I felt the book fell short. In trying to cover such a wide variety of situations, each story is reduced to about as much content as a news blurb, literally torn from the headlines! While that makes for some white-knuckle reading (not for the thrill, but for the anger and frustration), it also makes for some really dissatisfying reading. All this has been reported ad nauseam by the mainstream - and fringe (!) - media, and literally everyone around the world is aware of the transgressions the current US administration is accused of. While many of those may be true and all that, reading them in fiction form should have provided an opportunity for personalizing and adding some nuances to the situation. As readers, we could have identified with the characters more and easier. While there are obvious attempts at personalizing the events, and the repeated use of the first person to narrate the stories does add a sense of personalization and urgency, what is lacks is - something new. A new perspective, a new voice, a new fact (or factoid!) or even a new (more malicious or "out-there") situation.
Reading these stories kept taking me back to all the analyses articles I'd read in the Times, the TIME, the Post, the Journal, the Vox, the Yorker, the Jones, the Atlantic... Other than fictionalizing all those narratives, and adding names to the mix, while overtly referencing to - and in fact, inserting - facts into the pages, there is precious little I could find new with the book.
However, having said that, I must warn the book is not a pleasant read, and it makes for a very difficult reading session, for the almost sheer barbaric honesty with which the author sometimes chooses to expose her truths.
While it is heartening to read what the stories reveal about us as a Nation and as a people, anyone who has been following the media s***storm these past three years would have read them already in the headlines and opinion pages and Editorials.
Thanks to NetGalley and Univ. of Nevada Press for an ARC to provide my honest opinion.
The author does a fine job of bringing out the circumstances that the current political and socioeconomic situation is making everyone go through. The writing is at a clipped pace, the narrative fairly fast though not quite smooth. The ideas covered are wide ranging.
That last part is primarily where I felt the book fell short. In trying to cover such a wide variety of situations, each story is reduced to about as much content as a news blurb, literally torn from the headlines! While that makes for some white-knuckle reading (not for the thrill, but for the anger and frustration), it also makes for some really dissatisfying reading. All this has been reported ad nauseam by the mainstream - and fringe (!) - media, and literally everyone around the world is aware of the transgressions the current US administration is accused of. While many of those may be true and all that, reading them in fiction form should have provided an opportunity for personalizing and adding some nuances to the situation. As readers, we could have identified with the characters more and easier. While there are obvious attempts at personalizing the events, and the repeated use of the first person to narrate the stories does add a sense of personalization and urgency, what is lacks is - something new. A new perspective, a new voice, a new fact (or factoid!) or even a new (more malicious or "out-there") situation.
Reading these stories kept taking me back to all the analyses articles I'd read in the Times, the TIME, the Post, the Journal, the Vox, the Yorker, the Jones, the Atlantic... Other than fictionalizing all those narratives, and adding names to the mix, while overtly referencing to - and in fact, inserting - facts into the pages, there is precious little I could find new with the book.
However, having said that, I must warn the book is not a pleasant read, and it makes for a very difficult reading session, for the almost sheer barbaric honesty with which the author sometimes chooses to expose her truths.
While it is heartening to read what the stories reveal about us as a Nation and as a people, anyone who has been following the media s***storm these past three years would have read them already in the headlines and opinion pages and Editorials.
Thanks to NetGalley and Univ. of Nevada Press for an ARC to provide my honest opinion.