Carbon Black Cicada

This book (available as a free download from that link) by David Brookes is a remarkably diverse and powerful collection of short stories. He was an extremely talented writer, with a knack for delicate phrases that lend surgical accuracy to his descriptions of situations and feelings, and a keen eye for human nature in all its variety, from the odd and unique to the universal and predictable.

   I will give a potted summary of each story in the book. We open with Sugar Cube, in which a father & daughter acclimatise to life in a new, strange, remote place. Next we have the titular Carbon Black Cicada - a snapshot biography of an aging sailor told through his tattoos. Head Under Water sees a man trying to set the world record for holding one's breath while wrestling with unrequited love, In Hellas is an exploration of the little frictions between a newlywed couple after the wife suffers an injury, and Vanilla is a close dissection of a guy's protective jealousy over his girlfriend's "friend". In Follow the Sun Underground a wealthy Mexican emigré returns home to quarrel with nature and spirituality, in Identifier a fisherman reminisces about his friend Jack after his trawler dredges up Jack's corpse from the Channel seafloor, and A Good Match is Hard to Find gives an account of a weird experience in the tricky modern dating scene. A Dictionary of Our Time in the Wild, probably my favourite piece from the whole book, is an alphabetical collection of memories of a spiky but deeply meaningful relationship with a nature lover. The Destination Before Next sees a film location scout investigate an Istanbul dockyard, then in Silverfish we remember the story told by a boy's sister about her three-day disappearance when they were seven. Precious Targets tells the story of a wildlife officer who gets roped into security detail for a rare orchid discovered in a park, in Pass, Pass an insomniac struggles to fully engage with a normal social life, and In Your Arms is an anecdote in which a diver off the Cornish coast gets detained by an octopus. Finally in The Only Lasting Beauty we are treated to reflections on the lessons about love taught by a deceased alcoholic mother.

   I don't read many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I reckon anyone with a healthy appreciation of humanly sensitive and invigoratingly originally-voiced fiction will too. You may also be interested to check out David's poetry, which is also of a superlative quality.

For the Emperor

This book is the first of three in the first* omnibus collection of Ciaphas Cain stories by Sandy Mitchell - I'm reviewing each novel in the omnibus in a separate post as that only seems fair (and boosts my numbers for blog purposes).  As I do with all series, I'll do brief posts for the first couple and then a longer more reflective post once I've finished this introductory trilogy.

   Alongside the titular novel is a prelude short story called Fight or Flight, in which we are first introduced to Cain (a commissar whose dazzlingly heroic reputation is very much at odds with the reality of his character as a cunning coward who just wants a quiet life with as little mortal danger as possible - however life in the Imperial Guard never seems to quite grant him this - an amusing subversion of the genuinely heroic nature of most other famous commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 universe**) as he is introduced to his new placement with the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery, assigned a smelly aide called Jurgen, and narrowly avoids being consumed by a tyranid incursion.

   The novel itself picks up a few years later, as Cain is newly placed as commissar to the amalgamated mixed-gender regiment of the Valhallan 597th and sent to the remote backwater world Gravalax where Imperial citizens have been trading, heretically, with the Tau Empire. War over such an insignificant planet is not deemed worthwhile by the Guard so this mission is, at first at least, primarily diplomatic; wanting the humans to stop, or at minimum reduce, their problematic relations with the alien races, in such a way as to avoid violence (all of which is very much fine by Cain) - a goal set straight from the Inquisition itself. However events conspire as to raise the stakes, and Cain finds himself at the heart of a shambolic mess of risk-whichever-way-you-turn, only for things to get less confusing but even worse safety-wise when a genestealer cult is discovered who have manipulating developments from underground (quite literally - the second half of this novel largely takes place in a tunnel complex). The resolution is more of matter of muddled luck than anything authentically courageous or clever, which I suspect is par for the course in this particular commissar's career. I look forward to the next instalment.

* At time of writing there are ten Ciaphas Cain novels and many short stories out, and while I have no doubt I would enjoy reading them they're very low down my priority list given how much else I have to read - within the same universe I'm going back to my focus on the Horus Heresy.

** Looking specifically at you, Ibram Gaunt. And I suppose Yarrick.

the Island of the Immortals

This short story (available from that link online) by Ursula K. Le Guin goes hard. In it, a traveller visits an island where, it is claimed, there are immortal people living after thousands of years of uninterrupted life. Only immortality might not be all it's cracked up to be - simply not dying doesn't guarantee anything about bodily integrity or quality of life. I won't spoil it - just go and read the thing, it's pretty short, and is a startling and disturbing angle on the theme.

Tales of Earthsea

This book by Ursula K. Le Guin is the fifth in the Earthsea series, so it technically comes before The Other Wind, but I've already read and blogged that one, so this post culminates the series and therefore I'll be making my reflections here.

   This book comprises five short stories and an essay - I will deal with each in turn.

• First up we have The Finder, in which a young sorcerer called Medra (also known as Otter or Tern at points in his life) grows in power and wisdom and ends up founding the wizard school on Roke. This longish short story is a brilliant view into the dim hazy past of the world Le Guin has created, and lends a potent depth to the reader's understanding of the interrelations between magic and wisdom necessary to be a good wizard.
• Next is Darkrose and Diamond, in which a young sorcerer called Diamond falls in love with a young witch called Rose, and forgoes life as a wizard to pursue this romance. This is a delicate, lovely little story.
• Then we move onto The Bones of the Earth, in which a young Ogion (the sorcerer who initially trained Ged in the first book) teams up with his tutor in the hope of preventing a catastrophic earthquake. Strong themes of trust and humility.
• Next we have On the High Marsh, in which we are treated to a glimpse of Ged at the height of his career as Archmage - only he isn't doing grand world-saving stuff, he's on a remote island curing cattle. Again, strong themes of humility, as well as kindness, and power.
• Finally, Dragonfly - in which Irian (who you may remember from the sixth book) visits the school of wizards on Roke to provocatively question the masters of magic why such learning is forbidden to women and girls. This story provides a perfect stepping stone into the final book in the series.

   Finally, the essay at the end of the book goes into elucidatory detail about the peoples, languages, history and magic system of Earthsea - for me it didn't really add a huge amount of insight into the books, as I've read all six so closely together and so had much of the lore in my medium-term memory pretty well already, but for people reading the books more spaced out it would be a really helpful appendix. Not to mention it simply shows a masterclass in thoughtful worldbuilding, much like Tolkien's appendices.

   All five stories in the book are moving, thought-provoking, immersive, deceptively simple, and immaculately well-written. If you have read any of the other Earthsea books and enjoyed them this is an addition you can't leave out - in fact, just read the whole series. Speaking of the six as a whole, I think anyone who appreciates good fantasy will absolutely love them - I do in actual fact think these books seriously rival The Lord of the Rings as my favourite fantasy literature now, though it's hard to compare as the writing styles are so different and thematically and in scope the works are trying to achieve very different things. Good job I don't have to pick favourites on this blog.

   I said I'd be making reflections on the series as a whole - the fact is I don't have much to say. I just loved the experience of reading these superb stories, and know I will definitely be revisiting them for a re-read in the future, probably many times. The characters are well-drawn enough to be believable and lovable or hateable as the plot intends and each realised with psychological complexities of their own; the themes are deep to the point of profundity and are perfectly entwined and expressed through character and plot; the world is obviously immensely well-developed and lived-in; and the overall story arc across these six books is hugely satisfying while never feeling like an ultimate solution - the story ends on a note of potential and promise rather than a statically final resolution. If J.R.R. Tolkien can make you dream wistfully of being a hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin will show you dizzying visions of being a dragon.

Stories of God

This book by Rainer M. Rilke is a collection of thirteen inter-related short stories, framed through the device of an unnamed narrator telling these stories to various elderly or disabled friends. It was written in 1899 after Rilke visited rural Russia where he met many spiritually inspiring peasants - the text has probably been translated into English a few times, but I used the Shambhala 2003 version.

   Anyway. Whatever God these are stories of, it is not the Abrahamic one. Rilke's God is vaguely easy to like as a character but very hard to imagine one seriously worshipping as a deity. 'God' comes across as benevolent, yes - but also impotent, neurotic, infantile at times; the stories may have poignant poetic overtones but they are rather devoid of any meaningful insight into God's character as understood by orthodox tradition, or even mystics - it reads like the excited scribblings of someone who has found themselves suddenly entranced by mysticism & wants to dabble in it despite having minimal understanding of spiritual or theological frameworks underlying all said authentic mysticisms. Which, knowing Rilke's biography, is probably a fairly astute judgement.

   The human characters in these stories too are quite boringly sketched; they seem to have one personality between them and that largely a mere mechanism for delivering authorial ponderings (except in the last chapter, where they behave more like actual characters) . This collection of stories may be titillating to the heart & provocative to the mind but they have virtually nothing to offer the soul. Which I for one found disappointing for a book of such a title. Sharpish prose & dullish ideas; interesting & entertaining, but not particularly helpful for any real, deep explorations in faith. A few of them are fairly edifying, but chapter eleven, about the artists' association, is in my opinion the closest any of them come to making an original potent point.

   I would maybe recommend this if you'd be interested in well-written curious little folk fairy-tales with 'God' as the core character - but if you're looking for profound, challenging, spiritually-insightful fiction, this probably isn't it.

Easy Esperanto Reader

This book by Myrtis Smith and Thomas Alexander is a collection of five* short stories with Esperanto and Spanish translations included alongside. The stories themselves are of a shockingly diverse range in genre and tone, and were mildly entertaining, though I can't say I would have ever been prone to read them had they not been offering the opportunities to deepen my grasp on a pair of languages I'm trying to learn. Their uses of vocabulary and grammar are simple enough that a halfway competent student of Spanish or Esperanto can dig up a fair amount of new intuitions as to words and rules through reading these closely with regular comparison to the English translation, for which purpose I did find this a useful little book. And it's very cheap on Kindle, which is what prompted my buying of it. I do think though that I'm going to try to finish the Duolingo Esperanto course before I try to read any more actual fiction written in the language as then my confidence and comprehension will be greater. But as a halfway testing point for learners this was pretty solid.

* There is a sixth story included though this lacks translation, and was thus of much lesser utility in learning any new vocabulary.

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

This book by James Finn Garner is as you would expect off the tin - cleverly rewritten classic fairy tales to skewer the "political correctness" prevalent at time of publication (in this editions, the mid 1990's, which is fun, isn't it? I was a toddler then, so I was obviously well plugged in to such cultural sensitivities.)

   No, I jest - I got this book in my Christmas stocking from Ma & Pa, so I was obliged to read it - and it was actually pretty funny. Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel - and more; there's a bunch of classic fairy tales who get redrawn in "politically-correct" fashion. It is vaguely amusing, but I'm still not entirely sure why my parents thought I would be that keen about this notion. Isn't the whole point of older stories that they are less "woke"? That's how one observes cultural evolution over literary time, isn't it?

   I don't even know if or what I'm joking about any more.

Ghostmaker

This book is the second book in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series, and it's a little different to all the rest. Instead of a singular self-contained novel, this contains one big novella at the end (which I won't spoil as it's devastatingly fun) set on Monthax - and then seven or eight shortish stories, each focusing on a particularly interesting character from the regiment. Major Rawne, sniper Larkin, sergeant Varl, colonel Corbec, heavy-weapons operator Bragg, trooper Caffran, regimental mascot & piper Milo, scout-sergeant Mkoll... oh man, I love these feth-heads like they were people I know. Abnett as an author has a horrible habit of sketching people so realistically that you get to anticipate them, empathise wise them, and then see them die in ghastly, unpredictable ways. But more on that as the series progresses.

Magos

This book is the fourth instalment of Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn saga, comprising a novel and several short stories; I already did a fairly recent post about it but yeh I'm re-reading all his stuff. No regrets.

Tales from the Perilous Realm

This book is a collection of short fantastical stories* and poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien, master of the modern myth; as such they read like faerie tales. I will briefly describe each component in turn before a bit of reflection about the book as a whole.

• Farmer Giles of Ham: a farmer, named Giles, from a place called Ham, gets into a bit of a pickle with a giant, but after defeating it ends up becoming a seasoned blunderbuss-wielding adventurer even capable of overcoming a problematic dragon. Oh, and he has a dog that Tolkien is very keen to make sure all readers know is a cowardly idiot.
• The Adventures of Tom Bombadil: the collection of poems - ranging very little in style, but that doesn't matter because it's a nice familiar style. Most of them are about the life and attitudes towards nature of the eponymous Bombadil - remember he was that kind of pointless character from The Fellowship of the Ring - but several are more narrative and adventurous.
• Leaf by Niggle: an artist, Niggle, wants to paint a tree, but is so dedicated to his craft that after years of work he has only painted a single leaf despite the grandiose vision of his finished project in his head. Eventually he dies and sees "his tree" realised to its fullest in heaven.
• Smith of Wootton Major: a magical star gets baked into a cake, and a dude called Smith accidentally eats this star - which gives him the ability, unique among humans, to travel to and through the lands of Faery - you'd have thought he'd just shit it out or summat.

   So, there you have it. There are strong thematic elements that clearly spread out over all four "tales" included in the book, but no plot or character overlaps - which makes this collection a perfect bitesize way of experiencing Tolkien's unique style. And I know he hated allegory, so I will do him the justice of not trying to read any overarching metaphors into these tales - but in terms of applicability, which was a concern of his with regard to writing, there is a lot to take away from these stories. From Tom Bombadil's almost symbiotic relationship with the forest, to Niggle's dutiful perfectionism, to Smith's willingness to step into the unknown, to Farmer Giles's bravery - there's a lot going on here in terms of morals and messages.

   I would recommend this book to any Tolkien fan who has not yet read it - as herein you will find something perhaps more akin stylistically to The Hobbit but unconnected to Middle-Earth - which makes for a refreshing new taste of the great myth-maker's craft. Even if you haven't read any Tolkien at all, I'd recommend this book as something from which you can read to children, as I'm quite sure they were written with that "faerie tale" purpose in mind.

* Four of these - but the first one included in the book available from that link, Roverandom, is for some reason not included in the edition of the book that I have and read, hence why I'm only discussing three.

The Magos

This book is the fourth instalment in the epic sci-fi thriller Eisenhorn series by Dan Abnett - as well as the newest novel in the series, this includes eight or so short stories that flesh out the world and side characters to our eponymous Inquisitor quite brilliantly. As ever with Abnett's writing, the pacing is punchy and gripping, the horror element pitch-perfect (you can hear the warp itself screaming with glee at some of the sentences herein) and for my money I think in terms of dialogue the characterisation has never been better. It helps having Gregor as a third-person figure rather than the narrator as in the first three books - not that his narrations wasn't great, but having him as more of an outside figure to the readers helps maintain his elementary mystique that makes for such a killer read. Don't read this without also having read all of the first two trilogies... Though that said, maybe stay away even if you have. Warp taint, innit.

Emil and the Sneaky Rat

This book by Astrid Lindgren is a hearty romp that will amuse the children just as much as the adults reading this to them - think what if Just William was Swedish, only with a far more elusive tone to the narration that lends an almost mythically folklorish bent to many of these tales; in which Emil, a young boy always getting into distinctly Emilian mischief, shocks and delights many people in his hometown and the surrounding villages. I highly commend this book for readers between five and eight as a rough bracket.

The Opposite of Loneliness

This book is a compilation of fictional and nonfictional works which I borrowed off my housemate ages ago and have been reading very slowly (sorry Jack, fortunately I know you don't read this).

   It's by Marina Keegan, an aspiring (and starting to be successful for proper) writer and Yale student who tragically died shortly after her graduation. The introduction, by Anne Fadiman, a teacher, mentor and friend of Marina's, sketches her vibrant personality and ambitious talent, and the narrative of her cut-short life in context of her work. It's heartbreaking. We feel we are getting to know this wonderful person, post-mortem; and this feeling only deepens once you start reading through her actual writings, which (short stories and essays both) swell to almost bursting with the marks of an incredible human soul. A powerful intellect, a penetrating emotional insight, a myriad unexpected nuances of attitude or relationship expressed in her arguments and characters, a deep undercurrent of optimism and hope and above all a joyous youthful sense of delight in possibility: even though most of the works here range from quite to extremely sad, Marina Keegan's bubbling positivity and brilliance as a writer keep them from sinking the reader. The effect of each individual short story or essay is gutwrenching and heartwarming, often at several points throughout, sometimes simultaneously. She has a subtle sense of humour that doesn't evoke laughter but rather a forced intensive burst of empathy.

   What can I say? These short stories and essays are so diverse in tone, content and voice that the collection stands as a remarkable achievement, a testament to the sheer skill and specialness of their author. Without the neat page-partition between fiction and nonfiction I'm not entirely sure I could've stated which was what, so overlapping in style and themes are these works. The fictions cover such different stories and genres as the final days of people trapped on a broken-down submarine, a man's fleeting doubts about proposing to his girlfriend while reclaiming baggage, a housing developer facing worsening conditions in Baghdad (written in form an email chain); several others are more grounded in typical young-westerner-life-experience - and while I enjoyed these latter type more, all are immaculately crafted and poignant pieces. Cold Pastoral, the first short story in the book (also, don't tell the publisher but it's here online for free), is by far the most memorable and moving, though I also enjoyed The Ingenue above the rest. Same for her nonfiction: memoirs about the nostalgic value of clutter in a teenager's car, a sympathetic portrait of an exterminator who loves his job but is wounded that nobody else does, a reflection upon coeliac disease and maternal perfectionism. Similar to the short stories most closely about young westerners, it is those few other essays that are less topic-oriented and more openly reflective and exploratory of one's place in the world that truly shine: Putting the "Fun" Back in Eschatology and Song for the Special read one after the other are awe-inspiringly idealistic, Even Artichokes Have Doubts (my personal favourite, a rallying cry of 'is this really what we want?' having surveyed the bleak corporate landscape of graduate prospects, check it out) an interesting train of thought, and definitely, the titular and introductory essay, The Opposite of Loneliness (also online), which emulates in almost pure form the frozen-in-time sense of what Marina Keegan felt like to be a privileged smart happy twenty-two year-old.

   Even though each particular essay and short story is brilliant, I found myself growing mournful as I neared the end of the book, as each chapter adds another layer to the delicate mental-origami-sculpture of Marina Keegan's personality that readers can't help but construct, so well do these works seem to introduce us to a real human sensitivity and wit, and knowing the actual fate of the author set against these varyingly-polished but consistently beautiful gems that she's written, well, it's saddening, and yet somehow invigorating. That she should be dead when her work is so tangibly brimming with life. It stings. I dunno. You should probably read this book.

For Esmé - with Love and Squalor [and other stories]

This book, a collection of nine short stories by the late, lovable and enigmatic recluse of 20th-century American literature, J.D. Salinger, is just as (if not more) rewarding on this, my third reading of it. I decided to reread it because a particular adult cartoon, in its typical straddling of the fine line between genius and madness, decided to feature J. D. Salinger as a 'hahaha-I'm-not-dead-after-all-but-work-in-a-bike-shop-and-aspire-to-make-reality-TV' kind of character, and, with my having reread another of his amazing works earlier this year, the reminder stuck.
   Note - many of my overall reflections on the essense, spirit, and specialness of Salinger's writings are much the same, and I already went over a fair few of them in the post on Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction, and also, having now begun to indulge my biblio-nostalgic cravings in this general direction and finding myself halfway through his published works again, so with only another two more to reread I will probably do so in the near future, and thus further extents of my thoughts on what makes Salinger's books so damn beautiful will have plenty opportunity to be aired. In light of this, I'll keep things to a rudimentary description of the stories here and fit my reflections surrounding them in later posts (despite my reasonable intention to keep this post shortish, any familiar reader will know this to be a farce).
   Anyway, these nine short stories. To outline their content as I will vaguely do so here is effectually pointless; for Salinger, style and substance are inseparable, and describing what are the actually-not-that-interesting events comprising these (and most of his) writings absurd, as the whole point of reading them at all is not to observe the events plotwise, like some cheap written-down Hollywood, but to glimpse the insights of human character and transcendent meaning in the way the explanations of these events unfold. Nonetheless, given the format and conventions of this blog, I feel you are owed at least a perfunctory synopsis of each:

• A Perfect Day for Bananafish: a woman reassures her mother over the phone from her hotel suite that the impromptu 'second honeymoon' her husband had taken them on was going well, and that despite her parents' continued concerns as to his mental stability, her husband was indeed functioning well and enjoying life. Meanwhile, on the nearby beach, her husband, none other than Seymour Glass (this is the family's first appearance), has a playful conversation with a child, returns to the suite, and ends the short story in an entirely unexpected manner.
• Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut: two old college roommates reconnect in a haphazard visit that becomes prolonged due to bad weather; amidst pleasant and witty conversation, the host's daughter has a bizarre crisis with imaginary friends, and the host is upset by discussing her light-hearted old flame (Walt Glass) who died in the war.
• Just Before the War with the Eskimos: a teenage girl follows her friend home to conclude a dispute over owed taxi-fares accrued following their tennis lessons. While the debtor goes to find her mother to get the money, the temporary guest is startled by the shambolic emergence of her eccentric elder brother, with whom she is subjected to a rather baffling but horizon-broadening (in the "well that was weird" sense) conversation.
• The Laughing Man: our narrator reminisces on his childhood baseball teacher, 'Chief', particularly stories he used to tell about a super-powerful Chinese criminal called the Laughing Man who could talk to animals. Despite both Chief and Laughing Man being pillars of inspiration to the young boys, circumstances that the listeners don't understand dampen the Chief's spirits, and he ends the stories quite unwholesomely.
• Down at the Dinghy: after a short conversation with her housekeeper and a visiting acquaintance reassuring them of her son's wellbeing and known whereabouts, Boo Boo Tannenbaum (nee Glass) ventures down to a small jetty on a nearby lake, where her young son is trying to escape home (again) in a rubber boat of which he has declared himself captain, and she tries to negotiate his return.
• For Esmé - with Love and Squalor: our narrator, who remains anonymous, wanders into a British town near where he is stationed during the war; he visits a local choir, then retreats to a café, where later one of the choirgirls and her family enter. Recognising him as an American soldier, she approaches, introduces herself as Esmé (and her recalcitrant younger brother as Charles) and tries to make intelligent conversation, including requesting he someday write something about squalor when she learns he's also a writer. They part ways. In the second part of the story, our narrator, in the wake of the war ending around him, struggles with post-traumatic stress and the squalor of victory in Bavaria; he then receives a many-times-lost-in-the-post letter from Esmé, which in its delicate sincerity is enough to propel this broken man back into recovery of all his faculties.
• Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes: late at night, a man is subjected to a lengthy phonecall from a friend who has worked himself into a drunken panic about his wife (who is late home again), whose subtle shades of disrespect for him have prompted suspicions as to her fidelity; in an impeccable work of mollifying, the phonecall-receiver calms down his friend enough for the whole thing to blow over nicely.
• De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period: a pretentious but skilled aspiring artist blags his way into a tutorship at an independent Toronto art academy, where he quickly finds himself growing bored and pessimistic about the point of such a job when all of the students whose art he is to provide critical feedback on seem to be incorrigibly awful - all but for one young nun, whose paintings strike him with a beauty self-evident enough that he seeks to himself contact her and urge her on, though his efforts are hindered and he grows only further dispirited.
• Teddy: the eponymous child, on a cruise liner with his aggressively leisure-oriented family returning from Europe (where he has been meeting with philosophers and professors to discuss religion and truth), wanders briefly around the ship, updates his journal, then is talked to by a young man, who is rightly baffled, as most readers probably are, by Teddy's decisive obfuscations of most clear ideas about life and death and such.

   Each story has an imponderable mysterious character of its own, and yet each have the same indefinable mingled tinges of awestruck sadness, shrewd curiousity, love and loneliness, sarcastic wit. Generally neurotic but pure at heart. I will try to discuss these elements of Salinger's writing in upcoming posts, whenever I get round to rereading Franny & Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, which will hopefully be soon. In the meantime, I exhort you to follow me in reading these stories, and with them the other three books published by J. D. Salinger in his lifetime.

Praying Drunk

This book by Kyle Minor is probably the most tragic and beautiful work of fiction I've read since last summer. I can't actually remember where I heard of it, but it's been sat on my shelf since February waiting for me to plough through it, which is exactly what I did in the last four days. Buckle yourself in for a long post, as I have a lot to say about this book.

   It's by no means an easy read. Apparently it's partly autobiographical, but the disparate patches of story and question and conversation and sorrow that comprise the book work so powerfully as a whole collection that that almost doesn't matter; it's written so well that be it based-on-truth or not Kyle Minor leaves the reader emotionally wrecked and ponderously adrift, not in a cruel cheap way but in a deep, thoughtful, and ultimately sad way. He prefaces the book with a note reminding the reader that though the book is not a novel and is composed of shorter parts, he has put these into a particular order for a very good reason, and therefore one should read straight through rather than skipping around. The rationale behind this order is, at least on my interpretation, a rough meta-narrative tracing the trajectory of some of the stories' shared themes - which I'll discuss later. His fragments of story are revealed in a variety of mediums; some collections of letters, some memoirs, some dialogue, some Q & A with an anonymous despondent quasi-angelic figure, a fifty-page novella, and several more typical-style short stories. They all seem to take place on the same broad stage as well, sometimes touching on the same events or characters or memories, from different angles and in different tones, connected by loose-stitched threads that show either an incredibly deep commitment to leaving parts of pictures unshown or that they are in fact biographical. It matters little to me.
   So, to the contents themselves.

• First, an account of an uncle's suicide, with questions of its causality leading further backwards into abstraction, a deterministic account of the narrator's uncle's life in universal perspective, the initial blame for the ultimately tragic end of his uncle's life, and by implication all of human suffering, lies at the feet of the supposedly benevolent omnipotent God.
• Second, a young boy endures torture at the hands of his high school bully only by clinging to the words of an old Jewish joyous song; later as a grown man, in times of great upset, he finds this victimisation internalised and that he cannot leave it behind, not even able to look beyond it to the Christian faith which he has long since lost.
• Third, a mother leaves her husband and child, who slip into a depressed and depraved lifestyle full of bitterness and anger, leading to horrific fallout, which even within vaguely miraculous elements of the story go to demonstrate how ultimately in control of our lives and our meaningless suffering we as human beings aren't.
• Fourth, several conversations occur between a passive but inquisitive young agnostic man and the charismatic enigmatic Christian woman he is trying to understand and to woo, revealing in many interesting angles the nature of faith as a mysterious crutch.
• Fifth, seven short anecdotes from a missionary in Haiti about a gregarious but untrustworthy acquaintance of his called Sebastian, which display the impotence of knowledge-based faith in inspiring works of love, and the emotional turmoil that results in actively persisting with such contradictions realised in oneself.
• Sixth, a hypothetical reader and an ethereal entity exchange Q & A about the uses of fiction and narrative in making our sensations of life somewhat more tolerable.
• Seventh, at the funeral of a young man who killed himself, the preacher tries to explain God's plan's involvement of suffering using the analogy of making sweet biscuits out of bitter ingredients.
• Eighth, the narrator accounts the disorderly trawl through life of his older brother, through rock bands and sweaty desk jobs and grudges and addictions and bereavements, and asks: how do we keep it together, how do we as people cope with this madness, what do we cling to in the face of our world's sheer insubstantial unreliable shifting sands of cause and effect?
• Ninth, we glimpse the inchoate misery of our bodily existence, especially as we age, as a young man ponders dependence and dignity while attempting to correct his dying grandfather's false teeth.
• Tenth, in the longest short story, comprised of a series of letters (all from different people and in different voices), we see criss-crossing lines across America and over to the distant country of Haiti of loneliness and desperation and selfish appropriations of relationships; a missionary in Haiti falls in love with a student visiting on a volunteer trip, and secretly arranges to marry her, much to the disapproval of her family and his fellow mission team; we see the pastoral and social consequences of this decision bloom all manner of emotional mess in the lives of the poor and beset-upon Christians on each side of this wreck, only accelerating once a violent uprising bursts out in Haiti, and friends and family back in America have their concerns reoriented by other developments. I think ultimately what we see from the story is the deep-rooted need for human companionship of some form, and that in the mess of a world of selfish people, even selfish Christians, this takes many surprising forms, but that all of them are something like clutching at straw; we can never keep or protect properly those we love or those whose love we adopt, and even within faith in a loving powerful God, we let ourselves slip away also.
• Eleventh, another Q & A, our ethereal answerer tells us how truly empty and meaningless and dull heaven is, therefore how faith as a crutch for the empty and meaningless and dull misery of earthly life is likewise but clutching at straw.
• Twelth, the ill-fated attempt of a boy to overcome his bully, and reflections on the hereditary misfortune of violent tendencies, a further meaningless inheritance to human suffering.
• Thirteenth and finally, a countryside-dwelling artist ponders his family and all the tragedy and darkness that has unfolded throughout his life, and how all he can do to keep his soul from crumpling under its weight is to focus on the people present, the work at hand, the pleasures available, the acceptance of misery as part of the way the universe is and a stoic dedication to living with and through it.

   Each component is immaculately written, with the pace and poise of Minor's prose flowing perfectly to suit the tone and point of each part, and with the varying voices of his narrators having their own life and weight. I've heard him described in some reviews as a 'writer's writer', given his inventive playfulness and abundant reflections on the purposes of his writings even within them themselves. In terms of telling a collection of stories well, and provoking a poignant series of thoughtful responses therein, I don't think Minor could have done better. Anyone who enjoys top-notch fiction, especially sad stuff, the weighty kind that every few pages makes you stop short and breathe in blinking back stunned eyewaters at the sheer distressing honesty of his words; read this book.

   However, in a much more personal (and yet much more objective) sense I found the book problematic and upsetting. Minor's characters are largely Christian, and of course, looming throughout the themes and tones and currents of his stories is God; though this god that he writes of is not good. He writes of a powerless, distant, uncaring, unknowable, even cruel god; the humans populating his stories struggle with and lose their faith in myriad sadnesses of circumstance and confusion precisely because this is the kind of god they believe in. I think this is indicative of the damage nominal faith can do; these people largely don't have living personal relationships with God, they are simply brought up into a conservative unquestioned set of doctrinal truths that have never endured trial or test, and so when these difficulties do arise, the grounding of what they think to be true dissolves, plunging them via their suffering into further misery and darkness. It's pretty bleak. The meta-narrative that I mentioned I thought spanned across his collection is one of an individual, who has grown up amid Christianity, seeking meaning and truth and goodness in a broken world. As you'll see by reading back through the descriptions of each piece, we start off by clinging to faith in hope of some abstract redemption, amid brutality and suffering, and unsettled by a vague awareness that God must know what's going on - why is he allowing this? This insecurity and mistrust and feeling of betrayal and absence is built up in leaps and spurts across the following stories, with layers of cynicism and loss further separating the narrator from the god they thought they could trust, before we reach the end, and question whether even if that god is really there and everything I believed about them were true, would it make a difference to me now? And the answer given is a plaintive "not really", leaving us with nothing to do but grin and bear it by ignoring the disjoints, like the artist in the closing story.

   This is, I think, sadly the reality of faith for many nominal christians, especially in America (which is where Praying Drunk's complaints and qualms occur), and it breaks my heart to think that many people may have had internal trajectories in their relationship with God similar to the ones expressed so accurately here. A proper understanding of God's character and the doctrine of the Fall would together remedy so much of these characters' inner turmoil, and could save the faith of many real persons whose lives bear resemblance to the stories. I'm lucky to have grown up in a church environment that is much more open to dealing with the hypocrisy and failure of Christians than in trying to deny or forget them, and also one with a far firmer grasp of the theology underpinning how we can stand in trusting God amid the wreck of this world. But worldwide, certain Christian socio-cultural tendencies will emerge, and so I do recognise with an uncomfortable familiarity a great deal of the internal ruins that seem particularly to plague those living in the Bible Belt, the more conservative types who can't quite reconcile their love-filled faith of fear and judgment against a broken world of human wrong and unanswered questions.

   Fortunately, I ended up reading this book alongside 3-2-1 (an excellent theologically and philosophically sound overview of Christianity), so was reminded persistently while I read onwards that the darkness and hopelessness of Minor's stories is not fully true to the God I know. Christian readers, I'd recommend doing something similar as an antidote to the pervasive persuasive negativity of the short stories. It reminded me of Gilead, the last fiction book I read narrated by a Christian, albeit one with much better-grounded reflective passages and thus a more substantial and encouraging output of its worldview and conclusions.

   Anyway, I've expended all my main points, if I were to start going into the smaller ones then this post may well be my first to exceed 2000 words. Ridiculous. I put so much time into writing these things, only to have no idea if there's a readership at all, but if there is, I hope you enjoy my ramblings, and I hope you enjoy Kyle Minor's stories - because there's no way you'll have read a post this long about a book that you're not planning on reading.