| MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS |
[Sep. 8th, 2005|09:48 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Polka-Dots and Moonbeams" Lester Young | ] |
I know a lot has already been written about this book. It’s been reviewed in the major book review columns and touted from here to Timbuktu. Do I care? Will that stop me from writing about it? Of course not. That’s the whole idea of this journal – for me to gas unremittingly at my discretion or lack there of.
The form of the short story within the literature of the fantastic is, to my mind, very vibrant these days. There’s good stuff out there all over the place – within and beyond the official “genre.” For someone like me, who loves writing and reading short fiction, you couldn’t ask for better. Even more importantly than the fact that there is good stuff, there is also great stuff. The only thing I can liken Kelly Link’s new collection, Magic For Beginners, to is – have you ever had that exceedingly rare occurrence when you buy a CD and every song on it is one you could listen to again and again, the whole disk always seems fresh, something like Bob Marley’s Legend? Magic For Beginners is that, only in book form. I’d read each of the stories contained in this book with great delight as they appeared individually in different venues through recent years. To have them now collected is like a holiday.
Link is one of those writers who makes what she does look so exceedingly easy. This is proven out by the fact that her work has spawned a rasher of half-assed imitations. It’s only to be expected that writers admire these stories and try to imitate them, but it’s also to be expected that in the imitation they will miss the beautiful crafting through concision, or fail to duplicate the wild imagination, or be unable to make the reader laugh, be seriously creeped out, and experience a genuine wave of emotion all at the same time. Each and every one of the stories in Magic For Beginners does all of these things and more.
One aspect of Link’s fiction that I think is missed in a lot of reviews is her humor. She’s got a really wicked, demonic sense of humor. On the surface, the writing seems very straight forward, understated, almost minimal at times, sort of harmless, but underlying this is an intensely ironic sensibility. The tension caused by this effect is powerful. This is not to say that the stories are ever cynical. To me, if I had to sum up what they are about, generally, I’d say they all deal with longing – like in “Lull,” a longing for lost innocence, or in “The Hortlak”, a longing for a place to belong, or in “Stone Animals,” a longing for a re-established family harmony, or in “Some Zombie Contingency Plans,” a longing for safety. By the time you finish one of these pieces that feeling is palpable, and no matter what surreal, absurdist, or structurally unique experience reading the story has been, you come away with the realization that the story was in some way about your own life. And in addition to Link’s humor and her fiction’s resonance to your own experience, she’s got a pin point accuracy in her ability to be creepy. This isn’t blood and gore, and it’s not the cat jumping out of the closet while the mass murderer is in the dorm, this is some seriously subtle use of situation, implication, and mining of those really basic images and nightmares of childhood that cause gooseflesh, not so much on the arms, but on the brain. I’ve written elsewhere about the unique structures of Link’s stories. “Lull” is incredible in this respect as is “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.”
And as a secondary feature of Magic For Beginners, it is a beautiful book. Shelley Jackson, whose wonderful Da Vinci inspired painting adorns the cover, also has done some enchanting interior illustrations – one for each story. I’m not a book collector by any means. I really don’t give a shit about first editions, etc. or how much a book is worth in dollars, but still I sprang for the hardback version of this one for the simple reason that I know I’m going to be reading it a few dozen times.
For fans of Link’s fiction, I can say that I’ve read a few of her most recent stories, ones that have not yet appeared in print, and I can tell you they are equally as daring, creepy, funny and touching, but they also break new ground for this writer. The scariest thing of all is that I think she’s only getting started, that Magic For Beginners and Stranger Things Happen are only an inkling of what’s yet to come. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
14theditch's journal
