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Summary: the best American short story writer writing today
Review: George Saunders is a wizard of language, a humanistic cynic with a sardonic eye always cast on American culture, a howlingly absurd humorist, a frighteningly visionary futurist, and the best read around, for someone who wants all their synapses challenged. Why he hasn't been on the cover of Time magazine baffles me, but then, like you see reflected in his work, these are strange strange times.
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Summary: a seminal contemporary writer
Review: George Saunders is changing the shape of contemporary literature as we speak. If you look at literary magazines and their submissions, you'd be surprised (or not) to find so many young writers imitating this man's voice. But none of them writes with a manic, but heartfelt panache of Saunders. In this collection of stories, Saunders shows his maturation from his debut collection, "CivilWarLand in a Bad Decline" He varies his voice better. Whereas "CivilWarLand" was primarily told through the first person-present narrative, you see Saunders experimenting with his narration in "Pastoralia". His prose is more labyrinthine and supple in "Pastoralia" as well, where "CivilWarLand" prose, although very fine, tended to be a bit too curt and laconic. And the subject matter, you'll be hard-pressed to find another American writer writing with more conviction and love about his characters than Saunders. In "Pastoralia" there are characters who come back from the dead to live the life they could not live, and everyday losers who come face to face with a moment of ultimate heroism. No one really wins, and no one attains happiness in his stories, but there's an incorrigible hope that all these characters live for and yearn, and it's this hope that Saunders treasures. By the end of reading this volume, so did I. A very impressive collection of stories. Can't wait for his long works.
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Summary: Compassionately cruel
Review: George Saunders is weird and then some. The America in his short stories is light years away from the picture postcard vision of sun-drenched cornfields swaying in the wind. In the short story that gives the book its title, Pastoralia is the sort of theme park that would give Disney executives a heart attack. Visitors see people as they lived in past epochs, such as the couple who play Neanderthal cave dwellers, daubing prehistoric paintings on walls, making unintelligible grunting noises and roasting goats. But, there are few visitors to the park and the "cavewoman" Janet is cracking up under the pressure of mounting debts and a drug-addicted son. She downs a bottle of Jack Daniels bourbon and starts using the sort of expletives no Neanderthal man would know. In the best and funniest story, Sea Oak, a down-at-heel, bickering family tries to make ends meet in a housing estate that gives new meaning to the term concrete jungle. They spend most of their time mindlessly watching television. The stations have run out of Worst Accidents or When Animals Attack videos and have to resort to The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never happened but theoretically could. A child hit by a train is catapulted into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts off his hand chopping wood and while staggering screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher. Sea Oak is a modern parable. The family's dead granny comes back from the grave to tell them to get their act together but, unlike the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, she just won't go away, but sits putrefying in her favourite armchair. "In the morning she's still there, shaking and swearing. " 'Take the blanket off!' she screams. 'It's time to get this show on the road.' "I take the blanket off. The smell is not good. One ear is now in her lap. She keeps absentmindedly sticking it back on her head." Sea Oak is like one long-running sick joke, where you know you shouldn't laugh, but can't help yourself. Saunders sees humour in misfortune, loneliness and deformity, but it is a cruel humour laced with compassion and that makes his stories not just palatable, but at times moving and wickedly funny. The misfits he describes are not outcasts to him. The sky may be a different colour on their planet, but the space they inhabit is as real to them as the lives so-called normal people lead. Not all the stories are consistently good. I read The End of FIRPO In The World three times and still haven't the faintest idea what it's about. But at his best, the arrows that he fires at the alienating culture of urban America hit their mark.
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Summary: Funnier than real life
Review: I agree with the other reviewer regarding the story "Sea Oak". This has to be one of the wittiest, slickest stories to ever come down the pike. As a writer myself I can truly appreciate the imagination that goes into a work like this, the shaping and forming of words and images necessary in turning a project from plain old spaghetti into something spicier that they might serve in say, Palermo. George Saunders has taken the English language and given it a fabulously tacky pop (t)art flavor, reminding me of "A Clockwork Orange" in its use of linguistic nuance. Bloody good show Mr. Saunders.
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Summary: A Quick, Hilarious, and Sometimes Heart-warming Read
Review: I can imagine that some wouldn't like the fiction of George Saunders. It's bizarre at times in its pulling situations from left field and making them central to the world of its characters. It's even more bizarre, though, in its ability to invest these scenarios with legitimate feeling. For me, that's what makes Saunders' "Pastoralia" such an interesting, hilarious, and--at times--even heart-warming read: the mixture of the almost inhumanly bizarre on the one hand, and the totally human sentiment on the other. The stories are constructed so that the reader spends the first couple of pages trying to squint at the new world we've been thrown into. There are things that look familiar--self-help mantras, frustration, common corporate names--but what on earth is with the roast goat? The pilot-themed male strippers? The barber's fantasies of love-making in a hacienda? Slowly, as we work at it, it all comes into focus, and then it's even funnier. Saunders times this increased clarity (this readerly struggle for clarity) so that it generates an increasing identification with the emotional situation of the protagonists, who are frustrated, limited by their own decisions and by the obligations imposed on them by their loved ones, and doing their best to cope in a civil and civilized way. Saunders is merciless in his parodic cultural contacts: corporate culture, self-help culture, the overly-picky standards of the American male, Jerry Springer culture, the self-consciousness and self-doubt of aging academics, all of them get lampooned to no end. The collection is well-constructed, though, as most of the pessimism is weighted toward the beginning. What comes through in the end, then, in the later stories in the collection, is the rare and satisfying moment at which we rise above the ridiculous, at which our humanity trumps our absurdity. The final story is the best example of this; lost in reveries and longing for a chance at real heroism, a strolling academic is presented with a real, in-process life-or-death situation on the banks of a river. He can run away, or he can help. The fate of our worth--of the worth of humanity in general--rests in his hands, and he just might do us proud. "Pastoralia" tells both sides of the story. As a collection, though, it builds nicely towards its defining moment. Saunders leaves us perched there, painfully aware of our failures but with the highest of hopes for what we might still do. It's a quick read, and a great collection of stories, and I highly recommend it.
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Summary: One Of The Best Books I've Read This Year
Review: I finished this book last night and have to say this is one the best books I've read this year. The stories are all about lower-middle-class people with real problems, so real in fact that much of the book is very, very sad, but also very beautiful. Because ultimately what the author is trying to say about these people and these situations is Hey, wake up, look around you, see what's happening, and realize that the world around us has to change. The stories are funny, and true, and many of them are not only excellent stories beautifully written, but are obviously metaphorical and applicable to our real lives, no matter how absurd they may seem on the surface. I would highly recommend this book. If it gives you any indication, Saunders is on equal footing with other current gifted writers such as David Foster Wallace, Thom Jones, and T.C. Boyle.
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Summary: this is a great and wonderful book
Review: I found this collection almost physically disabling it was so good. I finshed "Sea Oak" and walked around bumping into doorways and shaking my head and laughing and muttering out loud. I don't think stories get any better than "Sea Oak." That story will stand the test of time and should be anthologized widely, although it will take a brave editor to include it. Saunders insists on making his characters think and question. This collection is ruled, always, by a heartfelt cry for decency in a world that seems to have misplaced that trait somewhere. The stories shape themselves around decency. You finish them and you are a better person, and that is as good a definition of high art as any I know. Not only that, Saunders is the most original writer to come along since Cormac McCarthy; it's a voice that can be instantly marked and identified. These stories are filled with a horrific beauty.
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Summary: Strange, thoughtfull
Review: I love Saunders' writing style. His prose reads easily and vividly. Very enjoyable, sometimes disturbing, Saunders' stories point out the comic tragedy behind several American social institutions: the theme park, the self-improvement Guru, the dirty old man with a good heart, etc, etc; I highly recommend this book. It is the most entertaining thing I have read in a while. I will be acquiring more if not all of Saunders' work soon!
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Summary: blech
Review: I read two pages of glowing reviews here before I wrote this, and they were all written by men. I am not a man, and I did not like this miserable book. I wouldn't give this to any of my female friends, but I think my husband will like it. This book was full of negative energy and that's just not enjoyable. The reviews on the back of the book called it funny more than once, I found nothing funny. I like dark and in fact I love Bukowski, but this book.... blech.
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Summary: Quirky, often funny, well written... and oddly unengaging...
Review: I really wanted to like this book. A close friend who shares a lot of my taste in writing (Borges, TC Boyle, ZZ Packer, Lester Bangs, etc.) recommended it as great contemporary short fiction, and since I trust his taste I'll chalk it up to a difference in opinion, but I just couldn't get into "Pastoralia." I read the book back-to-front, mainly because the last short story, "The Falls," was also the shortest, and I thought a quick read would give me a sense of what Saunders is all about. As it turns out, this was one of my favorite stories in this collection. Saunders effortlessly moves between two very distinct worldviews and creates in Morse a convincing narrator who's paralyzed by his own indecisiveness and self-doubt. The ending left me a little flat, but as a raw writing exercise it was really excellent and left me optimistic about the rest of the book. On the whole, though, I was really let down. My two biggest criticisms are: 1) Saunders uses the same rambling, stream-of-consciousness style throughout every story. He has a distinct voice and at first I enjoyed getting inside his (neurotic, typically pathetic) character's heads, but after awhile I found the long, run-on sentences and terse writing style (there's almost a complete abscence of anything but the most basic description) to be very tedius. His narrators are all so similar in their overanalysis and cynical worldview that after awhile I couldn't truly distinguish one character for another. I've got to agree with whoever said that Saunders is better at creating caricatures than characters. 2) Saunders stories really lack any emotional heft to them. I've read that his stories are very dark and bleak (agreed) but also that there's a real pathos to his writing, and I fail to see it. His characters are ALL paralyzed by the same trite meaningless of the modern world, and reading about their various neurosis and quirks without any greater understanding of what makes them tick or any attempt to transcend their pathetic existance was about as engaging to me as reading the nutritional information of a McDonald's happy meal. I don't know people like this, I'm glad that I don't, and after 2 or 3 rounds of essentially the same character I found that I cared less and less what happened to them. I give it two stars because from a completely stylistic point of view, there's some redeeming merit here. Saunders obviously writes well and his best stories, like "The Falls," are a blueprint for subtly moving between points of view. "Winky" was another highlight for me for the same reason. But without any real core theme other than "modern life is trite, meaningless and stupid" (not much of an original thought) this just reads to me like very well-written hyper-realism by somebody who doesn't have much to say. I've seen Saunders compared to TC Boyle, but for my money Boyle is the much better writer; he creates characters who are flawed and trapped in their own mileau, but characters who are also believable and close enough to reality that their challenges ring true and made me care about the outcome. Saunders reminds me an awful lot more of Frederick Barthelme, another skilled writer who manages to document modern life without ever really making the reader care about it.
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