Category: Authors

Sunday Story Society: “Atlantic City”

19th August 2012 / / 18 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or visit us on Facebook.

Welcome to the Sunday Story Society discussion of Kevin Barry’s “Atlantic City“. If you’ve not seen one of these before, I always start with a round-up of some online commentary, before opening the comments up to you.

As far as I’ve seen, responses to “Atlantic City” have been overwhelmingly positive – like this one, from Daragh Reddin in Metro:

In…’Atlantic City’ – the languid atmosphere of a sultry summer night in a non-descript midlands town is perfectly evoked. Barry’s dialogue here is suitably sure-footed and he demonstrates a deft hand in capturing the unrealised aspirations of his characters.

Peter McClean praised the story’s sense of place:

[“Atlantic City”] captures the very essence of its location; it portrays the characters in a vivid reality; it uses the real language of the people involved.

For Rob Burdock, Barry turned the ordinary into something more:

The main ‘star’ of this story is James, a lad who would be considered unremarkable in almost any other setting. Yet in this ramshackle arcade – which in itself can be best described as ordinary and plain – James stands on a pedestal as a god among men (and women), and Barry exalts him magnificently.

There are also further positive write-ups of “Atlantic City” and its collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, from Mel u; Andrew of Slightly Read; Elaine Chiew for The Short Review; Rozz Lewis; and Marc Goldin for Laura Hird’s New Review.

So, how did you find “Atlantic City”?

Book notes: Manu Joseph and J.R. Crook

18th August 2012 / / 2 Comments

Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012)

In 1990s Madras, journalist Ousep Chacko spends his days trying to find out what caused his teenage son Unni to commit suicide three years ago.

All Ousep has to work with are a few of Unni’s comics (Unni having been a talented cartoonist), and the possibility of talking to Somen Pillai, an elusive former school friend of Unni’s. Elsewhere in Ousep’s life, his wife Mariamma is losing her grip on reality and sometimes wishes him dead; and his younger son Thoma is developing a crush on a neighbouring girl. Piecing what happened to Unni might be the only thing that could bring the family back together – that is, if it doesn’t pull them apart.
The plot of Manu Joesph’s second novel runs in ever increasing circles, revisiting old points to reveal a little more each time. We’re aware early on that Unni was at times disruptive at school; but the complete picture of how and why only emerges later, casting a different light on what we knew. Likewise, Unni’s worldview comes into focus only gradually, a tense and intriguing process. Added to this are some striking observations; for example: “From their dark windows and doorways people stand and gaze, looking bored, expecting a greater boredom to reach them; it is as if they know that the extraordinary does not exist.” The Illicit Happiness of Other People is an engaging read that leaves readers with plenty to think about afterwards.
(This review also appears at We Love This Book.)
J.R. Crook, Sleeping Patterns (2012)

Jamie Crook is the latest recipient of the Luke Bitmead Bursary for unpublished writers, which leads to a publishing contract with Legend Press; so here’s his winning novel, Sleeping Patterns. It’s presented as a set of story-fragments sent by a character named ‘Jamie Crook’ (deceased in the book’s present) to Annelie Strandli. The fragments tell of how Jamie and Annelie came to know each other as students, as well as a third student named Berry Walker. Annelie found herself drawn to Berry, an aspiring writer; but finding a hidden manuscript of his made her reconsider what she thought she knew.

Sleeping Patterns is a novel of piecing together the truth, on several levels. Just as Annelie constructs an image of Berry from the pieces of his manuscript, so the reader has to construct what happens in Crook’s novel from the textual fragments presented out of chronological order. There are hints in each layer of narrative that what we’re reading has been shaped for some other purpose, and secrets to uncover to the very end. That mystery keeps one reading, but Sleeping Patterns also gives cause to reflect on how far we can really know people, no matter how well we think we do. This is an intriguing start to Crook’s career, and it’ll be interesting to see what he writes next.

Liz Jensen, The Uninvited (2012)

13th August 2012 / / 3 Comments

Liz Jensen’s The Rapture was one of my favourite reads a couple of years back; now she has returned with what could be seen very much as a companion piece. The Uninvited also sees a scientist investigating unusual human phenomena which turn out to herald apocalypse, and also shares a focus on the personal side of events.

Jensen’s protagonist this time around is Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist investigating corporate scandals. Hesketh’s latest assignment takes a bizarre turn when Sunny Chen, the whistle-blower from a Taiwanese timber company, throws himself into a pulping machine. That’s only the first of several similar incidents worldwide; at the same time, children begin to kill their families violently. Hesketh, a pattern-spotter by both profession and inclination, searches for a connection – even when his experiences lead him down a path that goes against all his rational instincts.

Again as with The Rapture, Jensen’s protagonist comes under pressure in the areas of life where he feels it most acutely. Hesketh’s ability to analyse and find patterns was where he felt most secure, and of course now that’s now being undermined by the apparently irrational crisis. However, he’s also feeling tested in the area of relationships: his Asperger’s Syndrome has made them difficult enough already, such that Hesketh has had to leave his partner Kaitlin. But at least he’s always felt that he knows how to communicate with his stepson Freddy – and this area of stability is now also being challenged.

Jensen handles the characterisation of Hesketh well. His personal quirks (such as a fascination with origami, and an instinctive knowledge of the Dulux colour chart) come across not as gimmicks but as anchor-points in his life (symbolically so when he folds origami models from the pages of a medical report that he’d rather not face). Hesketh is not characterised simply as someone who is great with data but inept with people – Jensen is subtler than that. The protagonist does have his difficulties with relating with people, but for the most part, he gets by. There are a couple of conversations where we realise (and Hesketh doesn’t) that he’s saying the wrong thing; but the effect is jarring – they stand out because they’re so infrequent.

The character who, for me, most brings home the emotional impact of The Uninvited’s catastrophe is not Hesketh, but his boss, Ashok Sharma. In some ways, Sharma is the opposite of Hesketh: he comes across as a smooth operator who knows what to say to everyone. But, when the plight affecting the world’s children knocks on Sharma’s door, he can’t stay that way, and becomes a deeper character. That two such different individuals as Hesketh and Sharma are so strongly affected is a way of showing just how far-reaching The Univited’s crisis is.

In its later sections, The Uninvited focuses more strongly on its disaster-novel aspect, and I don’t think it works quite so well – but I must acknowledge that this could just be because find the actual nature of what’s happening in Jensen’s novel is less interesting to me than exploring the characters’ reactions to it. The Uninvited seems to me to be less about human response to catastrophe than response to the threat of catastrophe, and the great emotional challenge that entails. The challenge for Hesketh Lock is to see how – or even if – he can deal with extreme emotional situations. What Jensen does so well in The Uninvited is to explore a global problem through the microcosm of one person’s life.

Elsewhere
Liz Jensen’s website
Arc Quarterly video interview with Jensen
Some other reviews of The Uninvited: Thirteen O’Clock; Curiosity Killed the Bookworm; Pamreader; Justine Jordan for The Guardian.

Book notes: William Wharton and P.Y. Betts

10th August 2012 / / 2 Comments

William Wharton, Birdy (1978)

Al and Birdy were both scarred by their experiences in the Second World War. For Al, the damage was largely physical – he now has a jaw made of glass – but for, Birdy, it was mental. Now in a psychiatric hospital, Birdy is living up to his name and acting like a bird. Al has been brought in to try to get through to his old friend; he recounts to Birdy stories of their younger years in Philadelphia. Alternating chapters chronicle Birdy’s developing fascination with birds as a child.

Birdy has recently been republished in the UK by The Friday Project (along with Shrapnel, a previously unpublished war memoir of William Wharton’s). As a first-time reader of Wharton, this is a powerful book, because of the way it depicts such a vivid character as Birdy becoming lost in his own mind. Al’s engaging reminiscences show how enterprising and resourceful he and Birdy were; in Birdy’s chapters, these qualities are applied to the keeping of birds. Wharton portrays Birdy’s slide from this to a too-close association with birds convincingly, which gives Al’s later attempts to reach Birdy all the more force.

Some other reviews of Birdy: The Bookbag; Read with Style; an appreciation of Willam Wharton at Eleventh Stack.

P.Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye (1989)

In the 1930s, Phyllis Betts wrote several short stories, contributions to Graham Greene’s magazine Night and Day, and one novel (French Polish)… then she wasn’t heard of again for another fifty years, until Christopher Hawtree tracked her down to a Welsh smallholding; she was eventually persuaded to write this memoir, which I’m reading in a lovely hardback edition from Slightly Foxed.

People Who Say Goodbye is a joy to read, principally because Betts is so engaging, both as a writer and character. She has a knack for identifying the telling details that bring the people from her childhood to life; such as Dr Biggs, who pronounced ‘bowels’ as two syllables, and who treated all ills with a swift examination by stethoscope, followed by a prescription of brown cough mixture and red tonic. The young Phyllis and her mother also had a robust, no-nonsense attitude to life (‘What happens to all those dead people who are put into graves?’ asks Phyllis. ‘They rot,’ her mother repies).

But that quotation points also to the undercurrent of darkness in the book. Living through the First World War – and especially with a hospital down the road – the reality of death was never far from Phyllis’s life. As Betts puts it, the people who say goodbye don’t come back. It’s the careful balance of moods that makes this memoir such a rewarding read.

Some other reviews of People Who Say Goodbye: Stuck in a Book; 20th Century Vox; I Prefer Reading.

This book fulfils the Biography category of the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012.

Book notes: collections by Jon Gower and Tim Maughan

8th August 2012 / / 1 Comment

Jon Gower, Too Cold for Snow (2012)

There are funny stories in Too Cold for Snow; dark stories; poignant ones, too – but all are built on a base of ordinary Welsh life, which Jon Gower then transforms in some way. In the title story, we meet Boz, a jingle-composer who answered a job ad and is now in Siberia, working on a documentary about a reindeer-herding people. Gower creates an effective contrast between Boz’ and the herders’ lifestyles, and shows how the gap between them starts to be bridged.

‘The Pit’ is the tale of a miner who became trapped in a collapsed pit, and had to take extreme measures to survive. A borderline-supernatural twist makes this piece a genuine chiller. ‘TV Land’ is a satirical treatment of celebrity culture, in which a burger van proprietor who uses rather… unusual ingredients is invited on a local chat show and his secrets exposed. Gower’s story is absurd, but only just, and has significant bite because of that.

‘White Out’ is a beautifully written piece in which an avalanche has covered north Wales; a sheep farmer explores the ruined landscape, encountering no one but a mysterious young girl. The closing revelation is especially moving, in one of the highlights of a varied and textured collection.

Tim Maughan, Paintwork (2011)

Paintwork is a collection of three stories set in a near future where the online space has become thoroughly integrated with individuals’ sensorial. Tim Maughan’s tales explore issues of control and authenticity in that world.

The story ‘Paintwork’ itself concerns 3Cube, a guerrilla artist whose speciality is replacing QR codes on billboards with his own, to give people artistic vistas rather than commercial messages. But the artist finds that his latest work is being vandalised, faster than should be possible. Subsequent events 3Cube to question whether he’s behind the times, with his romanticism and insistence on old-fashioned methods (such as hand-cut stencils) – and to question how much he’s in charge of his own work.

Similar considerations emerge in ‘Havana Augmented’, whose young protagonists have created an augmented-reality version of a popular fighting game. Business, government, and a major gaming clan all take an interest, and a game on the streets of Havana becomes a fight for something deeper. Perhaps this story isn’t as complex as ‘Paintwork’ in its examination of issues, but it is engaging nonetheless.

The structural similarities of Paintwork’s stories can make individual aspects of them less satisfactory – the beginning of ‘Paparazzi’ (a piece in which a journalist is sent into an MMORPG to investigate a prominent gamer) is a little heavy on exposition in comparison to the other two, though the sting-in-the-tale ending may be the best in the book. But the overall impression left by Maughan’s collection impresses most – the strong sense of tackling issues of a kind that might face us just around the corner.

Sunday Story Society: “Bombay’s Republic”

5th August 2012 / / 6 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or like us on Facebook.

It’s time to start our second discussion; this time, we’re focusing on “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde, which you can read here. As winner of the Caine Prize, there’s been a substantial amount of commentary on this story, not least because Aaron Bady of The New Inquiry organised a mass blogging of the shortlist earlier in the year. As with last time, I won’t pretend to have covered everything here.

Aishwarya Subramanian saw “Bombay’s Republic” as ‘a story about stories and how they are told, and the relationship between stories and the world’.  Stories and storytelling were recurring themes in the commentary:  Ndinda described Babatunde’s tale as ‘a story that simply ridicules stories of war.’ Peter Day noted that ‘Bombay begins the story as a reader like us, practically anonymous, nameless, pulled from the “droves” of unknown men…[and] becomes the writer, that perverse egomaniacal hermit.’

The Oncoming Hope felt that Bombay’s period as a ‘writer’ came to a bad end: ‘Unfortunately for Bombay, he had the opportunity to create his own story, but went home instead and trapped himself in delusions’. In contrast, Matthew Cheney considered that Bombay ‘liberates himself through stories, and the stories become true, and he becomes a story.’

Aaron Bady’s own response examined how truth in the story is malleable, and can be exploited: ‘the entire course of [Bombay’s] experience in Burma is marked by the repeated discovery not of what the world really is like, but of the extent to which people will believe totally crazy things. For City of Lions, “Bombay’s Republic” parodies ‘the idea that storytelling is a kind of heroic calling. And the destabilizing shifts in style are part of that, because they play against the individualistic notion of author-as-brand.’

Soulfool reflected on the story’s theme of possibility:

Possibilities peddle themselves with sour faces and sharp swords of obloquy. They demand that something must be done with them. And yet what is it that one is to do with possibility? What is one to do with the obscenity of knowledge? Bombay is obnoxious to the possibilities of possibility.

Richard M. Oduor explored the representational aspects of the story:

Bombay’s Republic is a metonym for white-black relations during the World War, mapped on the dichotomy of good and evil, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. It should be celebrated by Africans as a great lamp post lighting the path for continued de-authorization of colonialist literature. Dotted with unending tints of dark humour, Bombay’s Republic forces us to see ourselves as we need to see us, not otherwise.

Olumide Abimbola also touched on this:

Even though he does not repeat the Burma returnee cliché Bombay is still recognisable. He is a Big Man who spins wealth out of political power, and whose political sovereignty and legitimacy is fully acknowledged only by himself. In that sense, one can read Bombay’s inhabitation of a jailhouse as a metaphor for the alienation that high political office sometimes imposes on office holders, especially those whose legitimacy is questionable.

Stephen Derwent Partington felt that “Bombay’s Republic” tailed off in its final third:

And so, a story with great start, and which performs an important recuperation (for the western reader) of a Burmese campaign that s/he might not be fully aware of. If this section could somehow have been maintained without the awkward later shift into hard-and-fast, uncompromising allegory, this would have been, for me, a brilliant story rather than a very good one.

(But see also his comment on Bady’s post.)

I’ll also highlight positive views from Adjoa Ofoe; Saratu; Bookshy; Jayaprakash; Klara du Plessis; Mel u; Alan Bowden; Jeffrey Z.; Nana Freuda-Agyeman; and (positive with reservations) Ikhide.

And now, the floor is yours.

Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (1970)

1st August 2012 / / 5 Comments

When first we meet Lise, she’s out shopping for a brightly coloured new dress; but she takes exception to the sales assistant highlighting that the dress is made of stain-resistant fabric (‘Do you think I spill things on my clothes? […] Do I look as if I don’t eat properly?’ [p. 8]). She eventually buys a dress (equally colourful, but not stain-resistant) in another shop, teaming it with a coat that clashes. Immediately we’re wondering what sort of person this is, who would buy such a conspicuous outfit and seemingly wouldn’t mind if it got dirty.

A few clues – and more mysteries – emerge presently. Lise is secretive: the furniture in her apartment is hidden away behind wall panels, to be taken out when necessary. She’s dedicated: she has booked a holiday from work, but is remarkably reluctant to take time off to pack, even though her manager encourages her to. Perhaps most of all, though, she is doomed: Spark reveals early on that Lise will be murdered on her holiday; we read the rest of The Driver’s Seat trying to anticipate how that will happen, and who will do the deed.

There’s no shortage of characters who might turn out to be Lise’s murderer. Take Bill, the macrobiotic diet enthusiast who sits next to her on the plane, and invites her to catch up later at their destination. Take Carlo, the garage owner who offers to take Lise back to her hotel after she’s caught up in a student demonstration, but would actually rather take her somewhere else. But the thing is that Lise seems actively to be courting some men; goes on about them being (or not being) her ‘type’; and changes her story at will. She doesn’t seem the passive kind.

So, as its title suggests, a key issue in The Driver’s Seat is control. How does a woman apparently so in command of her destiny lose that command so dramatically? In answering that question, Spark’s short novel reveals the product of a dark psyche, but refuses to explain it – which makes The Driver’s Seat one of the most unsettling pieces of fiction I have read in quite some time. An uncertainty over place (neither Lise’s home city nor her holiday destination are identified) and dialogue which often sees characters talking at right angles, only enhance that feeling.

Simon from Stuck in a Book and Harriet Devine hosted a Muriel Spark Reading Week in April; I was unable to take part in that, which is one reason I wanted to read something by Spark now. I wish I had been able to participate, because The Driver’s Seat made such an impression on me that I want to explore and discuss Spark’s work further.

Book notes: Xiaolu Guo and Benjamin Wood

29th July 2012 / / 5 Comments

Xiaolu Guo, UFO in Her Eyes (2009)

Silver Hill was an unremarkable village in Hunan, long since neglected by the Chinese government; until a peasant woman named Kwok Yun saw a ‘flying metal plate’ in the sky. The National Security and Intelligence Agency soon sends men to investigate; the results of this are chronicled in the documents which comprise the text of UFO in Her Eyes, as are the changes through which Silver Hill went in subsequent years. Shortly after seeing the UFO, Yun found and helped an injured Westerner – which inspired the latter to make a hefty donation to the village.

To my mind, the title of UFO in Her Eyes doesn’t just refer to Yun’s metal plate. It also makes me think of the glint in the village chief’s eye as she contemplates what could be done with the money from the Westerner, and the possibilities for further developing Silver Hill on the back of the UFO sighting. Xiaolu Guo’s satire is sharp as she depicts the urbanisation of Silver Hill, a process which merrily robs several villagers of their livelihoods even as it supposedly paves the way for good fortune. And it’s only too clear that Silver Hill’s development is probably based on nothing more than a mirage.

Elsewhere
Xiaolu Guo’s website
Video interview with Guo
Some other reviews of UFO in Her Eyes: Niall Harrison at Torque Control; Richard Larson and Karen Burnham for Strange Horizons.

Benjamin Wood, The Bellwether Revivals (2012)

Oscar Lowe wanted to go beyond the narrow horizons of his working-class upbringing in Watford; but the job he’s ended up in – care assistant at a Cambridge nursing home – isn’t all that different from the future his parents had in mind. But a random visit to a recital in King’s College chapel, and meeting the lovely Iris Bellwether there, brings him into contact with a more privileged world. Iris’s brother Eden is a brilliant but eccentric organist who believes he’s found a means of healing sickness through music – and there’s a chance he might be right.

Benjamin Wood keeps the tension up all the way through his debut novel: we know from the first page that tragedy is on the way, but how that comes about can still surprise. Wood also manages very well the game of revealing whether or not Eden’s theories are true. Underpinning this is the theme of free will, which plays into Oscar’s reflections on whether he can really become his own person. After The Bellwether Revivals, I’ll surely be keeping an eye out for Wood’s work in the future.

Elsewhere
Benjamin Wood’s website
Video interview with Wood
Some other reviews of The Bellwether Revivals: Three Guys One Book (and conclusion); Malcolm Forbes for The National; Broken Penguins.

Katie Kitamura, The Longshot (2009)

27th July 2012 / / 5 Comments

Katie Kitamura’s debut is one of those novels whose form neatly mirrors its subject. The Longshot is about mixed martial arts (MMA), and it’s as sharp and focused as a fighter on top form. Our protagonists are Riley, an MMA trainer; and Cal, his protégé of ten years. We join them as they arrive in Tijuana, where Cal is due for a rematch against the legendary Rivera, who beat him four years previously. Both Cal and Riley appreciate how significant this fight is going to be.

The Longshot is a short book, and its prose terse to match – but that doesn’t mean it’s undescriptive. Kitamura captures superbly the physicality of the fighting about which she writes, its combination of violence and extreme control. However, what stands out even more for me – and there’s a nice  tension between this and the novel’s brevity – is the emphasis on observation. Riley and Cal pore obsessively over videos of Rivera’s old bouts, in search of the key that will enable Cal to gain the upper hand: a little weakness or habit or pattern that could be exploited in Cal’s game plan. That relentless need to notice spills over into other areas of life, as when the two men can’t help observing how each other eats breakfast. But it’s presented most vividly when Cal is finally in the ring against Rivera:

His head was light. His body was light. It was the detail that was doing it. Everywhere there was detail. He placed his hands on the ropes. The grain of the rope, each individual piece of ribbing – just the touch was enough to burn him. His toe brushed against the canvas, and he felt the give of the floor against the tug of the nail (pp. 171-2).

So, Kitamura presents MMA as an all-consuming sport, one that demands the full focus of its practitioners’ bodies and minds. That’s something else brought home by The Longshot’s tight focus; we learn hardly anything about Cal’s and Riley’s backgrounds (save that Cal was a kid going nowhere in life when Riley spotted his talent). If these men have lives and relationships outside of MMA, we don’t see them – and the sport is so important to them that it hardly makes any difference.

There’s a clear sense that Cal and Riley depend on each other, and wouldn’t really know how to function if anything undermine their relationship. That’s why they’re ambivalent about the impending fight with Rivera; it could destroy Cal’s career as easily as revitalise it. Both protagonists have their moments of doubt: Riley visits Rivera’s training gym in San Diego; seeing the talented new kids there makes him feel hopelessly behind the curve. For Cal, a similar moment comes when he sees posters for the match in the streets of Tijuana; his instinct is just to run, to escape. He’s had to become so self-absorbed for his training that being reminded of the reality of the fight in the outside world is almost too much to bear. But both Riley and Cal must go on, because of all there is to gain – and, perhaps, because they’re simply unable to do otherwise.

The Longshot is a portrait of two men pushed to extremes, whether extremes of physical exertion, concentration, or desperation. It’s very well achieved indeed, and puts Katie Kitamura’s imminent second novel, Gone to the Forest, straight on my to-read list.

Elsewhere
Katie Kitamura’s website
Some other reviews of The Longshot: Dovegreyreader Scribbles; Books, Time, and Silence; Methvenite; Pursewarden.

Sunday Story Society: “Black Box”

22nd July 2012 / / 27 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or like us on Facebook.

So, it’s time for our first discussion. The story – Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” – is available to read here at the New Yorker website, if you haven’t yet seen it. For the rest of this post, I’m going to round up some of the comment there’s already been on the story. There has been rather a lot, so I won’t pretend to have captured it all here.

Perhaps inevitably, a good number of the responses focus on Egan’s story in its Twitter form. Dan Holmes found that the Twitter form influenced his reading: “Many of the sentences have an aphoristic power that can be appreciated when taken alone, independent of the larger text.” (Holmes goes on to explore how the tweeting of Egan’s story could be seen as performance art).

Bruce Stone’s essay at Numéro Cinq (well worth reading in full) reflects on literature in digital media, and finds “Black Box” pertinent to that subject:

Egan’s work speaks most powerfully and palpably to…the vexed core of the media wars: tensions between the old and new; the technological and the organic; the self and the other; the word, the body and the data processor…the tale’s cool, lyrical irony reveals a deep skepticism for the very technological apparatus that it presumes to embrace and exploit.

Joe Winkler reviewed “Black Box” in sentences of 140 characters or fewer:

Ultimately, the story itself embraces the idea of attention, of what to think about, what to view, what to choose, and how to perceive life.

In many ways, Egan’s story is less about a nebulous women spying on a nebulous man that it is about general musings on perception, projection, persona and controlling the images we make, create and intake.

Show, don’t tell.

Sara Walker’s response was more negative:

Women are not disposable, and I’m not enamoured with a world where they would be treated as such. I’m sure this was a choice to add social commentary to the science fiction, but it devalued the story for me. Likewise the theme that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive.

For Martin Ott, the story brought to mind instructional poetry. Trevor from The Mookse and the Gripes found “Black Box” stronger in print form. Further positive write-ups come from Paul Debraski; Rosabel Tan; Aaron Riccio; J Chance; and Catie Disabato.

A couple of this blog’s regular readers have also posted their thoughts. Alan Bowden liked the story very much:

The narrative drive Egan attains in each sentence, often by allusion alone, is wonderful and is combined with unexpectedly poetic moments, all of which are deployed in the instrumental manner of the training manual.

Maureen Kincaid Speller (in another extended response, again recommended in its entirety) was less complimentary:

The brevity of the format naturally eschews detailed explanation of setting and motivation, although Egan seems able to include it when she feels like it. However, this leaves the reader having to try to figure out what is going on while providing an escape clause for the author if things don’t quite make sense. There is a difference between the narrator not making sense and the story not making sense; my own feeling here is that the story in and of itself somehow lacks clarity, in part because Egan is too taken up with the format and transmission of the story to fully consider its implications.

I’ll also point out a New Yorker interview with Egan about the story (to which Maureen refers).

With that, it’s over to you. What did you make of “Black Box”?

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑