Jah1971 Pastoralia

Genius

Review

This book made me do two things that I don't do very often: laugh out loud, and re-read. Pastoralia is a book of short stories. Or rather, several short stories and a novella. Each and every story is excellent, superb, magnificent, etc.

Saunders' characters in Pastoralia are confined. Sometimes actually confined by their circumstances, sometimes metaphorically confined by a dilemma, or simply by their bizarre mental acrobatics. I find the stories to be at once darkly sardonic and whimsically optimistic. Is that a contradiction? Heck yes, fool! That's why his stories are so dang brilliant! Add to this the fact that many of his stories have a vaguely nightmarish, parallel-universe sort of feeling and you end up with a very tasty stew - just don't ask what's in it. You probably don't want to know.

Saunders is superb at internal dialog. Not the clean, composed, rational dialog that makes one feel ponderous and deeply intellectual, but tortured, corkscrew dialog of struggling, almost defeated personalities. It's at times hilarious, and at times deeply touching, and always genuine.

Seriously. Incredible. Writing.

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