Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
|
Bezig met laden... Liberation Day: Storiesdoor George Saunders
   Bezig met laden...
 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. 1   gbill | Apr 11, 2024 |    ) fuzzy_patters | Feb 26, 2024 |  ) therem | Jan 17, 2024 |  ) RachelGMB | Dec 27, 2023 |  ) danielskatz | Dec 26, 2023 |
It will surprise few readers of contemporary fiction to learn that George Saunders’ new collection of short stories, Liberation Day, is very good indeed. At this stage, reviews can only confirm his talent, not reveal it, and should consequently focus on other issues. Once one has established that Liberation Day is as good as one would expect (it is), and that it only strengthens Saunders’ position as a major contemporary writer (it does), one must consider how it intervenes in current debates and what it contributes. It is a compelling, witty book but it is not just entertainment; there is a considerable amount at stake in its inventiveness, its dexterity, and its skillful use of the fantastic. Political in the broad sense, it not only demands that we explore the relationships between individual moral failings and social injustice, but also exposes the acts of evasion, rationalization, complicity, and plain cowardice that enable us to avoid this. One of the most important functions of art is to challenge the comforting illusions we live by, which are too often not only unquestioned but unnoticed. Literature disrupts what we think we know, insisting on complexity, ambiguity, nuance. Liberation Day is a pleasure, but—like all the best books—an unsettling one, denying its readers simple consolations. A decade can change a writer’s work, without the writer changing at all. The world can catch up with what they’ve always been doing, and something like that is happening with George Saunders. In 2013, when he published his last story collection, “Tenth of December,” he was a beloved satirist, poking fun at the peculiarities of corporate-speak, theme parks and suburbia. He was the smirking successor of Vonnegut and Barthelme, a big-idea humorist with some postmodern acrobatics tossed in. The settings and subjects haven’t changed much in his new collection, “Liberation Day,” but Saunders’s career-long strategies have acquired a deeper intensity, focus and bite. He’s always been a moralist, concerned with our obligations to one another; now, an ongoing and intense debate over democracy and its threats has further exposed that.... Saunders has long tended to approach matters of power, ethics and compassion more indirectly and universally, and with better jokes, too. “Liberation Day” is different only in that the humor is a little blacker, the fears of our exploitation more intense.... 2022 has made his precision more meaningful, the stakes higher. In “Ghoul,” a group of diligent workers — laboring underground for unexplained reasons — discovers they’ve been going about their business under false pretenses. They fumble for direction, a reason to do what they do. A character asks of his tribe, much as Saunders asks of us: “We must believe in something, mustn’t we?” Throughout “Liberation Day,” language is never entirely the characters’ own; in their thoughts and speech the inescapable, proliferating jargon of American capitalist monoculture — corporate acronyms and slogans, brand names, marketing lingo, therapy-speak and self-help nostrums — vies with the slang and adages of ordinary American vernacular.... Saunders is no longer so sure about the possibility of transformative heroism or resistance, or what that might even mean. The prevailing mood throughout is much more muted and uncertain, with a concomitant diminution in linguistic vivacity. The language the characters speak and think in is flatter, deader, at once more anodyne and anguished....“Liberation Day” is a spiky, at times difficult collection, seldom providing the reader with much in the way of catharsis. But these are stories worth reading, the best of them as thought-provoking and resonant as a fan of Saunders might expect. Eschewing the speculatively richer, more dramatic question of what happens after the system comes crashing down, Saunders focuses instead on the queasy, knotty consequences of our present dilemma: What if it doesn’t? Saunders’s four previous collections shook the earth a bit harder, but he continues to humanize those whom society has worn down to a nub. Despite the author’s shift to quieter character studies, there’s plenty to satisfy longtime devotees. The nine pieces here are smart and funny, speculative yet at the same time written on a human scale, narratives full of love and loss and longing and the necessity of trying to connect....What Saunders is addressing is not just identity, but also responsibility, to each other and to ourselves. PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
"The 'best short story writer in English' (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. 'Love Letter' is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the not-too-distant future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other. 'Ghoul' is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado, and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his 'reality.' In 'Mother's Day,' two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. And in 'Elliott Spencer,' our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed--his memory 'scraped'--a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances"-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.9)
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2
Liberation Day, which aside from combining some of Saunder’s favorite themes, dystopian technology and man’s inhumanity to man, also offered a history lesson of Custer and his army being wiped out by the Sioux defending themselves at Little Big Horn.
A Think at Work, which enters so well into the heads of three people in an office place and wickedly skewers all of them, the one with a sense of entitlement most of all.
Mother’s Day, which also switches perspectives between two women, satirizing both the past parenting of a grumpy old woman, as well as the behavior of a new age, virtue-signaling neighbor.
Also notable:
Love Letter, an imagined letter of someone writing their grandson years after a fascist government has taken power in America, looking back sadly at its rise amidst complacency, obviously highly relevant to this difficult period we find ourselves in thanks to MAGA.
Ghoul, which features a dystopian amusement park with trapped people as part of the exhibits – this certainly felt like familiar ground for Saunders, and something I kind of wish he broke away from a bit more at this point, and yet, after reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about the revelation, that there is no ascension out of the place, and how symbolic that was.
Quotes:
On Americans, from Love Letter:
“We were spoiled, I think I am trying to say. As were those on the other side: willing to tear it all down because they had been so thoroughly nourished by the vacuous plenty in which we all lived, a bountiful condition that allowed people to thrive and opine and swagger around like kings and queens while remaining ignorant of their own history.”
On the sublime moments in life, from Liberation Day:
“Here is what I wish to say, dearest one, trapped as I am on this desolate, godless hillside, surrounded by demons who wish to destroy me: because I have known such a moment with you (the firelight playing across the walls; the dog asleep against the door; the bed shifting beneath us, as if making approving commentary in its own unique language), I may die now, if I must die, knowing I have truly lived.” (