753C
Active Member
Tenth of December - George Saunders 
1/2
I forgot about this one that I slipped in a few weeks ago....
Tenth of December is a collection of ten dark, sometimes dystopian, always tragi-comic short stories. If there is an underlying thread that draws these stories together, I might guess at something about individual human goodness struggling against the tragedy that is life. Or something like that.
But that is neither here nor there. I am thankful for the availability of half stars on Book and Reader. I award the half star here for Saunders amazingly inventive use of language and his use of it to instantaneously create empathy for his bitter, dissatisfied, tragically funny characters. He is a talented writer in this regard, and the pages turn quickly. Some authors need an entire volume to make the reader feel all of the major emotions. Saunders can do it in a few pages. I haven't laughed as much reading a book in a while, but it was guilty laughter. I laughed it in the face of the morbid and the tragic. I don't recall ever finishing a book and immediately thinking : "I need a drink."
Notable selections (in my opinion):
Escape from Spiderhead follows a young man convicted of a crime who has been sentenced to imprisonment in a mind altering pharmaceutical testing facility. He and his fellow inmates are given a wide variety of drugs that instantly alter their mental states, while lab techs evaluate the results. Craziness ensues.
My Chivalric Fiasco (my favorite), recounts the lamentations of a man who, while working in a Middle Ages themed amusement park is given a promotion after it is discovered that he knows his boss raped one of the employees. The "characters" at the amusement park are given drugs to make them act in the manner of the people they are portraying. He is playing a chivalrous knight, and after the drug takes affect he can't quite control his conscience regarding what his boss has done. Hilarity ensues. Tragic hilarity.
Tenth of December, the title story, involves an imaginative, overweight young boy out playing in the woods, who discovers a man trying to pull the old Eskimo suicide. Stricken with brain cancer, the man has wandered out into the frigid woods to die, and thus spare his family the ordeal of changing his diapers, cleaning, him, watching him fade, etc. The story take a sharp turn when the boy winds up in danger, and the man must make a decision that will profoundly affect what little life he has left.
If you are a fan of Kurt Vonnegut I suspect you will seriously enjoy this collection. It absolutely reeks of him. In a good way though.
1/2I forgot about this one that I slipped in a few weeks ago....
Tenth of December is a collection of ten dark, sometimes dystopian, always tragi-comic short stories. If there is an underlying thread that draws these stories together, I might guess at something about individual human goodness struggling against the tragedy that is life. Or something like that.
But that is neither here nor there. I am thankful for the availability of half stars on Book and Reader. I award the half star here for Saunders amazingly inventive use of language and his use of it to instantaneously create empathy for his bitter, dissatisfied, tragically funny characters. He is a talented writer in this regard, and the pages turn quickly. Some authors need an entire volume to make the reader feel all of the major emotions. Saunders can do it in a few pages. I haven't laughed as much reading a book in a while, but it was guilty laughter. I laughed it in the face of the morbid and the tragic. I don't recall ever finishing a book and immediately thinking : "I need a drink."
Notable selections (in my opinion):
Escape from Spiderhead follows a young man convicted of a crime who has been sentenced to imprisonment in a mind altering pharmaceutical testing facility. He and his fellow inmates are given a wide variety of drugs that instantly alter their mental states, while lab techs evaluate the results. Craziness ensues.
My Chivalric Fiasco (my favorite), recounts the lamentations of a man who, while working in a Middle Ages themed amusement park is given a promotion after it is discovered that he knows his boss raped one of the employees. The "characters" at the amusement park are given drugs to make them act in the manner of the people they are portraying. He is playing a chivalrous knight, and after the drug takes affect he can't quite control his conscience regarding what his boss has done. Hilarity ensues. Tragic hilarity.
Tenth of December, the title story, involves an imaginative, overweight young boy out playing in the woods, who discovers a man trying to pull the old Eskimo suicide. Stricken with brain cancer, the man has wandered out into the frigid woods to die, and thus spare his family the ordeal of changing his diapers, cleaning, him, watching him fade, etc. The story take a sharp turn when the boy winds up in danger, and the man must make a decision that will profoundly affect what little life he has left.
If you are a fan of Kurt Vonnegut I suspect you will seriously enjoy this collection. It absolutely reeks of him. In a good way though.