Men and cartoons - BokDraken

160 sidor

På English

Publicerades 19 december 2004 av Doubleday.

ISBN:: 978-0-385-51216-9
OCLC-nummer:: 55105776

Jonathan Lethem's new collection of stories is a feast for his fans and the perfect introduction for new readers--nine fantastic, amusing, poignant tales written in a dizzying variety of styles, as Lethem samples high and low culture to create fictional worlds that are utterly original. Longtime readers will recognize echoes of Lethem's novels in all these pieces--narrators who can't stop babbling, hapless would-be detectives, people with unusual powers that do them no good, hot-blooded academics, and characters whose clever repartee masks lovelorn desperation as they negotiate both the stumbling path of romance and the bittersweet obligations of friendship.Among them:"The Vision" is a story about drunken neighborhood parlor games, boys who dress up as superheroes, and the perils of snide curiosity."Access Fantasy" is part social satire, part weird detective story. Evoking Lethem's earliest work, it conjures up a world divided between people who have apartments and people trapped in an endless …

Jonathan Lethem's new collection of stories is a feast for his fans and the perfect introduction for new readers--nine fantastic, amusing, poignant tales written in a dizzying variety of styles, as Lethem samples high and low culture to create fictional worlds that are utterly original. Longtime readers will recognize echoes of Lethem's novels in all these pieces--narrators who can't stop babbling, hapless would-be detectives, people with unusual powers that do them no good, hot-blooded academics, and characters whose clever repartee masks lovelorn desperation as they negotiate both the stumbling path of romance and the bittersweet obligations of friendship.Among them:"The Vision" is a story about drunken neighborhood parlor games, boys who dress up as superheroes, and the perils of snide curiosity."Access Fantasy" is part social satire, part weird detective story. Evoking Lethem's earliest work, it conjures up a world divided between people who have apartments and people trapped in an endless traffic jam behind The One-Way Permeable Barrier."The Spray" is a simple story about how people in love deal with their past. A magical spray is involved. "Vivian Relf" is a tour de force about loss. A man meets a woman at a party; they're sure they've met before, but they haven't. As the years progress this strangely haunting encounter comes to define the narrator's life."The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door" is a Borgesian tale that features suicidal sheep. (This story won a Pushcart Prize when first published in Conjunctions.)"Super Goat Man" is a savagely funny expose of the failures of the sixties baby boomers, and of their children.Sparkling with the off-beat humor and subtle insights, Men and Cartoons is a welcome addition to the shelf of the writer "whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among his country's foremost novelists." --Salon

6 utgåvor

Björn recenserade Men and cartoons av Jonathan Lethem

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3 stjärnor

Lethem's second short story collection isn't a bad effort at all, but funnily enough (considering how good an essayist he is), I'm not sure the format suits him. Several of the pieces here feel like outtakes from a longer story, that sacrifice the character and thematic developments of a novel but don't quite pack the punch of a great short story. If you've read Fortress of Solitude (and you should) there's really not much new in stories like The Vision or Planet Big Zero, and sci-fi stories like Access Fantasy may be entertaining but come across as too obviously Vonnegut-meets-Bradbury without the sharp observations of either. That said, The Spray is a brilliant idea done very well (a couple are robbed, the police use a mystical spray to identify what's missing from their apartment, and the couple then turn the spray on each other to see what's unspoken between them...), …

Lethem's second short story collection isn't a bad effort at all, but funnily enough (considering how good an essayist he is), I'm not sure the format suits him. Several of the pieces here feel like outtakes from a longer story, that sacrifice the character and thematic developments of a novel but don't quite pack the punch of a great short story. If you've read Fortress of Solitude (and you should) there's really not much new in stories like The Vision or Planet Big Zero, and sci-fi stories like Access Fantasy may be entertaining but come across as too obviously Vonnegut-meets-Bradbury without the sharp observations of either. That said, The Spray is a brilliant idea done very well (a couple are robbed, the police use a mystical spray to identify what's missing from their apartment, and the couple then turn the spray on each other to see what's unspoken between them...), The Dystopianist, Thinking of his Rival, is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door is not just a great title, and Super Goat Man makes the perhaps best use yet of Lethem's fascination with comic book heroes by featuring a jaded and retired superhero trying to make a living as a college teacher in Nixon's America - and then showing us exactly why heroes retire, and what happens to those who trusted in them; superhero deconstructions are a thirteen per dozen these days, but Super Goat Man is one of the better.

Lethem is never not entertaining, and when he gets it right, that Pynchon-lite walk through an America built as much by Stan Lee as by Abraham Lincoln, populated by people trying to pick up the world their forebears handed them in bright colours promising caped baddies and upstanding heroes that somehow never delivered, works very well in short story form as well. But Men And Cartoons is a little too slight, with one or two stories too many that just fizzle out without going neither SPLAT nor POW.