Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Product Information

We could see a man making his way toward a clump of white-walled cottages, his donkey loping along behind him with a load. My Czech family’s house stands on a geopolitical rift: it occupies a place the political storms sweep through, uprooting everything that is settled. He stepped from the pines onto a road paved with oyster shells whose brightness in the morning light made his eyes clench up. But I suppose it's still better than the other phrase I could use: “Whoa-ho-ho, hello, daddy issues! After all, great short stories capture the evanescent moments that all people experience, exalting them to art.

His ordeal had put him in a mawkish bent of mind, and he raised a toast to his pretty surgeon, and to the splendid day, and how much it pleased him that he’d get to see the end of it. The fact that such an emotion came out of me says he accomplished a lot, but that’s not to say that I loved every page.Though not exactly new to the literary scene—his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Harper’s—he has now published his first book, and suitably enough, it forges into the wilder regions of the American character in lucid, vernacular prose. Personally, while it seems rather fashionable to include these open endings in short stories, I find them rather unsatisfying, or at least when everyone bar one in a nine story collection ends like it. S]till you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home. Well, yes, so Wells Tower shows again that you take some guitars and a bass and drums, the same old instruments that they been using since the sixties, and you can still make magic.

I can't remember if I've talked about this on here already, but earlier this year I was watching Mulholland Drive and trying to figure out what was so good about it. Overall, I'm kinda disappointed by this supremely hyped collection, but it's a solid plane ride worth of short stories with laughs of both the belly and nervous variety.There was only one I could have done without (the title story, as it happens, which is just a bit silly). But there's not much else about this book besides its style, which, as always, there's no accounting for taste. usprkos kataklizmičkom naslovu, ova zbirka od devet međusobno nevezanih priča nije ni blizu tako depresivna koliko bi se pretpostavilo iz samog naslova. We been three weeks on the water for nothing, Haakon is maybe gonna die, and you can’t even see your way to splash a little taste around.

The language is uniformly contemporary (even in the title story concerning Viking marauders), with such images as: "They broke their hearts on schedule always in the same indigo half hour of the morning" and "A connoisseur of the chance encounter he would have strived to speak the language of cockatoos if one touched down beside him. This one's the joke that will keep on being funny forever, that works on so many levels, that you make your brothers read. Every time Tower tries to say something profound or moralize, it comes out cloying and insincere, which could cause problems if one were not able to ascribe said moralizing to Tower's characters. it's quite impressive, for one, that wells tower should have waited so long to put out a collection, piling up stories in this and that first-rate magazine seemingly with no hurry whatsoever, giving thus the impression of being after beauty and intensity of narration rather than a book. Life is more like this, wading through the muck of living, acting and reacting without real prior planning.

I went over and clamped one hand over Djarf’s mouth and pinched his nose shut with the other, and after a while he started to cool down. He did a few deep knee bends, got down in front of all of us and ran through some poses, cracking his bones and drawing out the knots in his muscles. Then about a month or two ago, I read some totally underwhelming Wells Tower story in the New Yorker, and so like Mike Reynolds, I was just kind of all, "meh, yeah whatever.