Collected Miscellany

Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson

Publishers Weekly:

National Book Award-finalist Thompson (for Who Do You Love) delivers a deeply affecting collection that elevates the quotidian to the sublime. In the title story, Julia, a young woman “embarrassed” for “people [who] talked about guardian angels or spirit guides,” visits a psychic after her boyfriend dies. Faced with the ability to access the world beyond, she recoils sharply. The collection goes on to explore a bewildering array of experience, from a young wife denying her husband’s white-collar crimes in “Liberty Tax” to the concerned neighbor of “Little Brown Bird” who is powerless to help a little girl being molested by her father. In “Escape,” a man who has suffered a stroke finds himself at the mercy of his increasingly abusive wife. Determined to get away from her, he’s pleasantly shocked when she solves his problem in a way he never counted on. Thompson immerses readers in details and emotions so consuming and convincing that the inane vagaries of modern life can take on near mythic importance. This collection shows the confidence and power of a writer in her prime.

*Fixed typo in title.  Sad that I didn’t see it nor did anyone mention it.

Ever have the feeling that you are simply not qualified to offer an opinion on a book you have read?  For a book blogger I have this feeling more often than I would like.  But I feel particularly that way about Maxim Biller’s Love Today: Stories.

I am not that knowledgeable about short stories – not my favorite from – and I knew nothing about Biller to coming across this particular collection (his first in English).  I am also not all that plugged into the themes and or subject BIller focuses on: Germany, being Jewish, sex/relationships, etc.

So I thought it might be interesting to offer some quotes from the wildly differing reviews the book has received so far.

First up, Joshua Cohen he no like:

Though he’ll never be as famous here as he is in Germany, the following should be said: Maxim Biller is a bad writer. One wonders which is more incompetent, his prose or his soul. Blurb that on the billboards. Broadcast at will.

And that is just the first paragraph!  He goes on:

When one is a budget Raymond Carver, it’s probably better to slip from the bed at midnight and leave minimalism behind. Biller has cuckolded Carver’s stripped prose, as well as his subject — the impossibility of men and women getting along — and has mixed two other ingredients into this lightest of cocktails (Biller mixes metaphors, too, when he doesn’t altogether forget them): exaggerated Jewish pride, which comes from living in a Germany so rapidly changed, and the culture of “emo,” which can be defined as a wounded but willed innocence, whether lazy or scared, and is too often a capitulation to counterforce, a refusal to recognize the difficulties of love.

Francine Prose had a different take:

Set mainly in Germany and the Czech Republic, with side trips to Tel Aviv, France, and New York, these wry, elliptical narratives chart the passions and the discontents of men and women who vanish from each other’s lives and reappear without notice, and whom Biller often catches at the moment of confronting the mystery of what keeps them together, or what has driven them apart … Deceptively transparent, Biller’s brief, gossamer fictions may remind you of narrative poems in their ability to simultaneously elude and haunt you.

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