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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
Elizabeth McCracken's stories are magical. And I mean this in the best way. There is nothing better than finishing a book and then holding it to your chest because your heart is so full. The characters in these nine stories are so human that it almost hurts to come into their lives but impossible not to. You will be tender when you put this book down.
I am sad that I did not enjoy this book more. Although I dislike short stories generally, I have always really enjoyed McCracken's work. While the final story did not disappoint, the same cannot be said for the rest of the collection.
Definitely like the darkness running through these stories. Favorites: "Juliet" & "Thunderstruck"
"Happiness was a narrow tank..."
"Happiness was a narrow tank..."
incredible writing, the stories break your heart but they are so beautiful that you can't imagine not reading the next one.
This is the first book I've finished in such a long time -- a testament more to my schedule than the quality of anything I've picked up recently. Some of the early stories in this collection are killer, and overall I enjoyed the author's weird worlds and the characters who inhabit them.
Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck & Other Stories was long listed for this year’s Folio Prize, which is how I came to read it. Say what you want about prizes, or the sheer proliferation of them, but they do bring books to my attention that might otherwise pass me by.
There are nine stories in this collection and while it’s hard to pinpoint a unifying thread between them all, I’d say it’s probably loss: these are largely tales about people who suffer some kind of trauma — there’s quite a lot of death and grief here — or go missing.
I read the book on my tube journey into work — one story a day — and thought it was a fairly uneven collection. Ask me to summarise each of the nine and I’d be hard pressed to do so: but three definitely stand out.
To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.
There are nine stories in this collection and while it’s hard to pinpoint a unifying thread between them all, I’d say it’s probably loss: these are largely tales about people who suffer some kind of trauma — there’s quite a lot of death and grief here — or go missing.
I read the book on my tube journey into work — one story a day — and thought it was a fairly uneven collection. Ask me to summarise each of the nine and I’d be hard pressed to do so: but three definitely stand out.
To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.
Sadly this was not as engrossing and brilliant as I had expected it to be, though a I did enjoy the stories. After the genius of The Giant's House, though, I had hoped a repetition of her magic storytelling.
The original review can be read in its entirety on my blog, here: http://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/reading-thunderstruck-and-other-stories-by-elizabeth-mccracken/
I confess it: I am in love with Elizabeth McCracken.
Not my usual sort of love that results in flowers and candy and stalking and restraining orders; but the kind of love that is born of recognizing a like heart, a soul of such intense and exquisite grace and goodness that I cannot help but be awestruck and admiring, the kind of love that makes me want to be a better person so as to be worthy of the object of my affection.
I read the first eight pieces in Elizabeth McCracken's nonet, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, in a bacchanalian daze of literary ecstasy, transported to rapture by their divine coalescence of intense emotion and inspired prose. These creations composed of universal truths writ simply and singular beauties born of the tragedy found all too often in those simple truths are mis-labeled; they are something beyond "stories" - I dub them "Exaltations."
I stopped before the ninth. Weeks ago. Three reasons.
1) I did not want it to end. As long as I did not begin the title exaltation, then I would still have it to look forward to.
2) Being a book blogger would require that I write about the collection once I had finished reading it and I felt myself neither skilled nor hubristic enough to think I ought to write about an author as accomplished and gifted as Elizabeth McCracken.
3) I follow (well, honestly, stalk) Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter and when I was of late suffering another of my periodic extreme dysthymic lows, within moments of my public lament, Ms. McCracken voiced concern and support. Such kindness and connection should probably preclude my writing about her work. However, I am not remunerated for my discussions of books. I write about literature only because I love it and only when I am moved.
So, today, I put on my Jane Bowles "indeed I am a writer even if I'm not writing" pantaloons, planted myself in a coffee shop on the theory that I'd be less likely to make a spectacle of myself, keening at my loss as I read the final of Elizabeth McCracken's lovingly honed sentences alone in a caffeinated crowd of strangers, and I read the final and title story in Thunderstruck.
I loved it. And, I am moved. Oh my, so very, very moved.
And so I began to write this recounting of my experience with the book; I don't call what I do "reviewing" because it isn't. It is appreciation. It is sharing my gratitude and thanks for inspired and inspiring and provoking and delighting creations. As I tried to find words to describe how Elizabeth McCracken had managed to capture how it felt to lose someone - all its sadness and never-ending-ness - and yet done so without being maudlin or mawkish or lachrymose, into my Twitter feed came an outpouring of loss and sorrow and grief; Robin Williams is dead. A suicide.
Somehow, you see, this all connects - personally - to me. Because this collection is all about loss and absence and how those left behind deal with both, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live (to quote Ms. Didion) -- and it was my speaking of self-harm, of creating an absence where I stand and Tweet that prompted kindness from Ms. McCracken, who has known such loss, much loss, terrible loss of her own and thus, was kind to me, and I read her, I follow her, and chose today to finish Thunderstruck, and today was the day that Robin Williams chose not to go on saying "Yes, I will keep trying." A choice I understand, a choice I have to determine whether or not - every day - to make, every day when the choice to keep going ought to feel like a victory but so often feels like a failure, a loss.
This collection, Thunderstruck and Other Stories, understands that choice, and all the other choices in line with it. It is about going on in the face of seemingly insurmountable sorrows and absence; filling in the gaps. These are the stories of those gaps, or, rather, the exaltations.
I choose the word with some care; in its archaic use in alchemy, exaltation meant a purification and intensification through distillation, a refinement, and too, a state of extreme spiritual elevation, euphoria, approaching unity with the divine. Elizabeth McCracken distills the quotidian through seemingly casual observation; but there is nothing casual about it. Her vision is laser-like, her delineation of detail surgical in its precision. She limns the dimensions of sorrow and loss in breathtakingly moving prose, sentences of such musicality, sung through with a vulnerability that leaves the reader feeling almost an intruder, except, of course, in those instances where the indisputable, immutable honesty of the sorrow cuts to one's own soul, an echo of one's own loss, and re-opens wounds, wakens scars one carries.
I read this book and was taken back - again and again - to my own losses, my father, my aunt, and most recently, my sister. I was moved to write to Ms. McCracken mid-way through my first reading to say:
The paragraph on page 131 that begins with "A liar and a thief..." has more beauty depth emotion force content truth than most entire published novels. Your grasp of the solitude & eternal immediacy of loss is brilliant, heartbreaking, insightful, healing. Thank you a million times. Though we've never met, these stories strike me as if a dear friend had lived in my heart and told its story. Thank you. Thank you. Much admiration, respect, love even.
Here is that paragraph:
A liar and a thief, poor kid, thought the Hi-Lo manager, and not very clever at either. No way was this little kid seventeen. Twelve, tops. The Hi-Lo manager himself was forty-four years old, bald, and pink, with a head dented like the cans in his store and an ex-wife he still loved, who still loved him, though she had remarried and had a baby. When the baby grew up, he thought, she'd divorce her husband, the fake husband, the shadow husband, and remarry him. It was the only thing that kept him in this town, where she lived; it was the only thing that kept him on this earth. She'd been his first and only girlfriend. If I'm not married when I'm forty, he'd told himself at twenty-seven, before he'd met her, I'll kill myself. As it turned out, he wasn't married at forty but he had been. Some days he wondered if he were breaking a vow with himself. At the Hi-Lo he wore a short-sleeve shirt and a red knot necktie and an engraved name tag that said VAL.
Those few hundred words tell a life story; many life stories. Every detail Elizabeth McCracken chooses to expose to the light seems like a whispered piece of gossip that would end up in a tabloid after the fellow kidnapped his ex and held her in his basement. It speaks to his delusion, it speaks to his sorrow, it speaks to the piece of soul in each of us that mourns the loss of love, opportunity, might have been, might have gone, and hangs on to any rationale for those failures of self and spirit. How many of us have not loved again, or loved as fully as we might because we carry the delusion of a lost love that should be, will be, could be, is, somehow even though it is not and never will be?
That's an immutable, incontrovertible, universal truth and experience and Elizabeth McCracken captures it. That is her genius. This book (and all of her work) is filled with just this sort of insight and near-psychic grasp of the lives we all lead, day to day.
She is a literary alchemist, distilling the experiences of our lives into melodies of truth, told with great rhythm and beauty, resulting for the reader in the euphoria of recognition of ourselves; "Yes, I have felt that, that is what I am feeling, THANK YOU for telling our stories."
Yes, thank you Elizabeth McCracken for telling our stories, your stories, with such grace, painting those places where we all unite with that intangible, untouchable, unknowable else with such divinity.
Do yourself a favor, read this book. You will be unable to resist then reading Elizabeth McCracken's backlist, and, following her on Twitter where she has one of the most amusing and fascinating feeds.
Goodnight and bless you my dears. Hug someone, please.
I bought Thunderstruck & Other Stories at my favorite independent bookstore, THE CURIOUS IGUANA (click HERE) and SO SHOULD YOU!
I confess it: I am in love with Elizabeth McCracken.
Not my usual sort of love that results in flowers and candy and stalking and restraining orders; but the kind of love that is born of recognizing a like heart, a soul of such intense and exquisite grace and goodness that I cannot help but be awestruck and admiring, the kind of love that makes me want to be a better person so as to be worthy of the object of my affection.
I read the first eight pieces in Elizabeth McCracken's nonet, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, in a bacchanalian daze of literary ecstasy, transported to rapture by their divine coalescence of intense emotion and inspired prose. These creations composed of universal truths writ simply and singular beauties born of the tragedy found all too often in those simple truths are mis-labeled; they are something beyond "stories" - I dub them "Exaltations."
I stopped before the ninth. Weeks ago. Three reasons.
1) I did not want it to end. As long as I did not begin the title exaltation, then I would still have it to look forward to.
2) Being a book blogger would require that I write about the collection once I had finished reading it and I felt myself neither skilled nor hubristic enough to think I ought to write about an author as accomplished and gifted as Elizabeth McCracken.
3) I follow (well, honestly, stalk) Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter and when I was of late suffering another of my periodic extreme dysthymic lows, within moments of my public lament, Ms. McCracken voiced concern and support. Such kindness and connection should probably preclude my writing about her work. However, I am not remunerated for my discussions of books. I write about literature only because I love it and only when I am moved.
So, today, I put on my Jane Bowles "indeed I am a writer even if I'm not writing" pantaloons, planted myself in a coffee shop on the theory that I'd be less likely to make a spectacle of myself, keening at my loss as I read the final of Elizabeth McCracken's lovingly honed sentences alone in a caffeinated crowd of strangers, and I read the final and title story in Thunderstruck.
I loved it. And, I am moved. Oh my, so very, very moved.
And so I began to write this recounting of my experience with the book; I don't call what I do "reviewing" because it isn't. It is appreciation. It is sharing my gratitude and thanks for inspired and inspiring and provoking and delighting creations. As I tried to find words to describe how Elizabeth McCracken had managed to capture how it felt to lose someone - all its sadness and never-ending-ness - and yet done so without being maudlin or mawkish or lachrymose, into my Twitter feed came an outpouring of loss and sorrow and grief; Robin Williams is dead. A suicide.
Somehow, you see, this all connects - personally - to me. Because this collection is all about loss and absence and how those left behind deal with both, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live (to quote Ms. Didion) -- and it was my speaking of self-harm, of creating an absence where I stand and Tweet that prompted kindness from Ms. McCracken, who has known such loss, much loss, terrible loss of her own and thus, was kind to me, and I read her, I follow her, and chose today to finish Thunderstruck, and today was the day that Robin Williams chose not to go on saying "Yes, I will keep trying." A choice I understand, a choice I have to determine whether or not - every day - to make, every day when the choice to keep going ought to feel like a victory but so often feels like a failure, a loss.
This collection, Thunderstruck and Other Stories, understands that choice, and all the other choices in line with it. It is about going on in the face of seemingly insurmountable sorrows and absence; filling in the gaps. These are the stories of those gaps, or, rather, the exaltations.
I choose the word with some care; in its archaic use in alchemy, exaltation meant a purification and intensification through distillation, a refinement, and too, a state of extreme spiritual elevation, euphoria, approaching unity with the divine. Elizabeth McCracken distills the quotidian through seemingly casual observation; but there is nothing casual about it. Her vision is laser-like, her delineation of detail surgical in its precision. She limns the dimensions of sorrow and loss in breathtakingly moving prose, sentences of such musicality, sung through with a vulnerability that leaves the reader feeling almost an intruder, except, of course, in those instances where the indisputable, immutable honesty of the sorrow cuts to one's own soul, an echo of one's own loss, and re-opens wounds, wakens scars one carries.
I read this book and was taken back - again and again - to my own losses, my father, my aunt, and most recently, my sister. I was moved to write to Ms. McCracken mid-way through my first reading to say:
The paragraph on page 131 that begins with "A liar and a thief..." has more beauty depth emotion force content truth than most entire published novels. Your grasp of the solitude & eternal immediacy of loss is brilliant, heartbreaking, insightful, healing. Thank you a million times. Though we've never met, these stories strike me as if a dear friend had lived in my heart and told its story. Thank you. Thank you. Much admiration, respect, love even.
Here is that paragraph:
A liar and a thief, poor kid, thought the Hi-Lo manager, and not very clever at either. No way was this little kid seventeen. Twelve, tops. The Hi-Lo manager himself was forty-four years old, bald, and pink, with a head dented like the cans in his store and an ex-wife he still loved, who still loved him, though she had remarried and had a baby. When the baby grew up, he thought, she'd divorce her husband, the fake husband, the shadow husband, and remarry him. It was the only thing that kept him in this town, where she lived; it was the only thing that kept him on this earth. She'd been his first and only girlfriend. If I'm not married when I'm forty, he'd told himself at twenty-seven, before he'd met her, I'll kill myself. As it turned out, he wasn't married at forty but he had been. Some days he wondered if he were breaking a vow with himself. At the Hi-Lo he wore a short-sleeve shirt and a red knot necktie and an engraved name tag that said VAL.
Those few hundred words tell a life story; many life stories. Every detail Elizabeth McCracken chooses to expose to the light seems like a whispered piece of gossip that would end up in a tabloid after the fellow kidnapped his ex and held her in his basement. It speaks to his delusion, it speaks to his sorrow, it speaks to the piece of soul in each of us that mourns the loss of love, opportunity, might have been, might have gone, and hangs on to any rationale for those failures of self and spirit. How many of us have not loved again, or loved as fully as we might because we carry the delusion of a lost love that should be, will be, could be, is, somehow even though it is not and never will be?
That's an immutable, incontrovertible, universal truth and experience and Elizabeth McCracken captures it. That is her genius. This book (and all of her work) is filled with just this sort of insight and near-psychic grasp of the lives we all lead, day to day.
She is a literary alchemist, distilling the experiences of our lives into melodies of truth, told with great rhythm and beauty, resulting for the reader in the euphoria of recognition of ourselves; "Yes, I have felt that, that is what I am feeling, THANK YOU for telling our stories."
Yes, thank you Elizabeth McCracken for telling our stories, your stories, with such grace, painting those places where we all unite with that intangible, untouchable, unknowable else with such divinity.
Do yourself a favor, read this book. You will be unable to resist then reading Elizabeth McCracken's backlist, and, following her on Twitter where she has one of the most amusing and fascinating feeds.
Goodnight and bless you my dears. Hug someone, please.
I bought Thunderstruck & Other Stories at my favorite independent bookstore, THE CURIOUS IGUANA (click HERE) and SO SHOULD YOU!
I would have given this five stars just for the first story alone. So haunting. Luckily, the rest of them are stellar as well. The final story is amazing, with one of the best last paragraphs I've read in a long time. Elizabeth McCracken really can do no wrong; I love her writing and she always just seems like she'd be really cool in real life. Awesome book.