Review: Down to a Sunless Sea by Mathias B. Freese

According to his bio, "Mathias B. Freese brings the weight of his twenty-five years of experience as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist into play as he demonstrates a vivid understand of - and compassion toward - the deviant and the damaged." I've read since that he wrote about half of these stories before he began his career, but the stories are flavored with his interest in psychology.

The book has some real bright spots. My favorite story was "Little Errands": the narrator has a compulsive disorder and the story is basically 4 pages of panic. Did she mail the letters, did they make it from the mail tray into the mail box, will the mailman pick them up, were there stamps on them...it made my skin crawl a little as I tried to imagine every little errand turning into this sort of enormous production. (I found it interesting, on a personal level, that I assumed the narrator to be a woman; looking back, the story doesn't indicate a name or gender.) I also found "I'll Make It, I Think" and "Herbie" very moving. The first is a story about a handicapped man and how he has dealt with his disabilities, naming his uncooperative body parts and dealing with his bitterness. I found "Herbie" terribly sad, a son being crushed by his father, even as his father tries to toughen him up.

The book also has dim spots. It's small - barely 100 pages - and many of the stories felt condensed and abbreviated. I found the language and phrases awkward and unattractive. I would find myself re-reading passages trying to parse their meaning. Even the stories I found moving were not truly pleasant reading; I was too often brought up short by a convoluted passage that conveyed its meaning with great difficulty, if at all.

I have The i Tetralaogy on my shelf, a gift from a generous blogger, and I am curious to see what Mr. Freese does in a longer format. My copy of Down to a Sunless Sea was an ARC; purchase your copy at Amazon.com.

months and seasons by Christopher Meeks

I've been reading a lot of short story collections lately, not my usual fare, but short stories are a good way to get a sense of a writer, seeing how he or she handles a number of different plotlines, looking at the way stories develop, the way characters are presented and the patterns that emerge over the course of the book. months and seasons is very different from the recent collections I reviewed by Jhumpa Lahiri and Sana Krasikov. His characters are quirky and unpredictable and the stories are refreshingly modern. From Halloween parties in LA to a summer camp in northern Minnesota, his characters never seemed to do the expected thing.

In perhaps my favorite of the stories, "Breaking Water," a former fashion model finds her life making several dramatic shifts. She is recovering from open heart surgery when her husband announces he wants a divorce, their marriage weakened by infertility and infidelity. In the aftermath, she goes to art school, hoping to find some new path for herself. She expects a new lover to be horrified by her scar, but he finds it "the coolest scarification" he's ever seen; she has to remind him that it isn't body art. Her actions and his reponses are unexpected but authentic - people often don't do what you expect them to.

Along similar lines, the characters in "The Sun is a Billiard Ball" don't react to their health crisis in typical ways. Albert has seen the telltale signs, but even though his father died from prostate cancer, Albert has refused to see the doctor, pretending the symptoms will go away. Waking up from a one night stand with Jazz, Wade gets a nasty shock. Still, weeks later, he seeks Jazz out and not only stands by her but wants to continue their relationship.

In "A Shoe Falls", a man wakes up and decides he wants out of his marriage. He's tired of his wife and her shoe fetish and their bickering. He finds his efforts thwarted when his wife is suddenly agreeable...and that just makes him grumpier.

The book is fairly short and some of the stories are only a page or two in length, but the book is still an enjoyable read. Christopher Meeks is a writing teacher and playwright, and has previously published another book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea. You can purchase months and seasons at Amazon.com.

One More Year by Sana Krasikov

This is the second book of short stories I have reviewed recently, and certainly the one I enjoyed the most. This is Sana Krasikov's first effort, and while it has its problems, it is a very promising beginning.

Krasikov is a Russian writer and this collection of short stories is all about immigrants and their families and struggles. Some are set in the US, some in Russia, but it's all about parents and children, husbands and wives, the new country and the old country. It reminded me a lot of Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri - also stories about immigrants - but happier and more hopeful. Instead of seeming powerless against their misery, Krasikov's characters make choices, change directions, and make the best of bad situations.

One of my favorite stories in the collection is "Better Half": Anya marries Ryan too soon in their relationship, to get her green card more quickly, and when the marriage sours, she finds it hard to let go of him. I felt Krasikov did a great job of capturing all the conflicting feelings of the end of a relationship - the longing to stay together, the drive to be apart, the anger and the fondness and the familiarity. I also enjoyed "Debt", a story about a couple that has made a happy, prosperous life here in the US, but is struggling with their family ties. The way the couple values what they have together and makes a difficult choice, knowing the consequences, was really touching.

The only thing that keeps this from being a really stellar work is the focus on infidelity. It seems that the women in every story are either having affairs with married men, or their husbands are having affairs, or their husband has a second wife somewhere. The only saving grace is that in at least some cases, the women are able to break out of these bad relationships and change their course.

My copy was an Advanced Reader Copy; you can pre-order your copy here.

after the quake, by Haruki Murakami

I often get book recommendations from friends - we all do, I suppose. You generally know whose taste in books is in line with your own and you sort the recs out that way. In the case of Haruki Murakami, my reading friends are at different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, a friend with excellent taste (but no great love for Japanese culture) hates him. On the other, a well-read friend whose taste usually runs pretty parallel to mine not only loves him but has given me one of his other novels to read. The only option here was to dig in and see for myself.

I'm afraid I have added this to the abandoned book pile. The writing is top-notch - Murakami does a fabulous job of creating strange, surreal atmospheres for these stories. The problem was the formula. In "UFO in Kushiro", you have a damaged person (Komura's wife has left him), in a weird situation (sent to a strange city by a coworker to deliver a package, entertained by the coworker's weird sister and her weirder friend) who has a revelation (there is nothing inside him). The End. In "Landscape with Flatiron" you have two damaged people (Junko, a runaway, and Miyake, an artist, both estranged from their families), in a strange situation (watching Miyake obsess over building the perfect bonfire on the beach), who have a revelation (Junko decides she is empty inside, Miyake tells her they can die together). The End. Story after story seemed to develop the same way until I had no interest in the next one.

I will still give the novel a try - a different format, a different formula, and I could see his work being a very interesting read - but this particular set of stories was not for me.