Beware of God by Shalom Auslander

The rabbi was fed up with his congregation. So, he decided to skip the services on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and instead go play golf. Moses was looking down from heaven and saw the rabbi on the golf course. He naturally reported it to God. Moses suggested God punish the rabbi severely. As he watched, Moses saw the rabbi playing the best game he had ever played! The rabbi got a hole-in-one on the toughest hole on the course. Moses turned to God and asked, "I thought you were going to punish him. Do you call this punishment?!" God replied, "Who can he tell?"

Offended? Puzzled? Then best not to read the rest of this review as Beware of God by Shalom Auslander, a compilation of his short stories, moves you into dark, poignant, bittersweet, mocking stories where God has to kill you in order to keep the books straight, or monkeys suffer suicidal consciousness. In “God is a big Chicken” that what God is and Yankel Morgenstern back from the dead has to tell the truth or live the lie. “Holocaust for the Kids” is a montage of apparent quotes and facts and family comments that show up the horror of the Holocaust.

Some of the common themes are animals with human awareness, God dealing with human dilemmas, humans not understanding how God works (the near death experience is not God saving you but God’s aim being off that day), families struggling and relationships failing. Many of his stories are coloured by his upbringing in a narrow Judaism. As Shalom Auslander says about his highly acclaimed memoir Foreskin Lament, (which if you want to pass my way please feel free).

I was raised in a small ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York; picture a madrasa somewhere in Taliban Town, change the head coverings to yarmulkes, switch the Korans for Old Testaments and that’s pretty much it. The book is about my life under the thumb of an abusive, belligerent God, and the long-term emotionally crippling effects the fundamentalism of my youth has had and continues to have upon me. But funny. I suppose it didn’t help that my father on Earth was as abusive as my Father in Heaven. Good times, good times.

Its this self-depreciating, prick pomposity humour that drives these well written stories. Unlike many collections, this has diversity and surprise so it avoids the sameness of style or theme that weakens so many other collections. This is down to the quality and cadence of the writing as well as its humour as in this story when God goes to an Ad Agency.

They did concept testing of a number of preliminary taglines and position statements. Nobody in the focus groups like “The Original and Still the Best”, they were spilt on “The Porsche of Deities” and “Feeling Odd? Try God” met with consistent disapproval. One elderly woman took personal offence with the latter, as she understood the tagline to be suggesting that if she believed in God, she must be odd; a meaningful discussion nearly ensure, and an emergency plate of doughnuts was hurried in.

Highly recommended, oh and readers in the UK could rush down to their local Works as the HB is on sale for only 99p. Let me leave the last word to Shalom.

For general contact, comments, questions, requests, accusations, rants and tirades, email: Jackie@shalomauslander.com Please note that while I try to read all emails, I am quite busy with writing, whining, self-loathing, reading glowing reviews of the work of people other then me, complaining to my shrink, masturbating and intoxicating myself to be able to respond to every one, but I do appreciate them. The positive ones, anyway.

Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan

Gerard Donovan is that cliché, an Irish writer with a poet’s sensibility. His 2003 debut novel was Schopenhauer's Telescope: trucks arrive with frighten, crying villagers, one man digs a hole, one watches. The result is a stunning and moving discussion that covers everything from the life of Genghis Khan to what exactly, is a hole.

In contrast, his recently published collection of short stories, Country of the Grand, uses musical and witty language to convey the lives of ordinary people in a changing Ireland. Morning swimmers, it’s about the loss of old school friends becoming strangers but it’s also about the compromises we make in marriage to keep the hope of love alive. A theme picked up in How long until when a man driving seeing a Life Assurance advert is prompted to ask, how long would you wait before you slept with someone so revealing marriage fault-lines. In other stories such as Shop lifting in the USA we discover the awful lie that the relationship is founded on or in Archaeologists see a relationship in its dying moments. In the Country of the Grand we follow, the events of one evening in the successful and empty live of a lawyer as he acts on the impulse of trying to find the landscape of his childhood. Many of the stories move from the thoughts and actions of the moment to a reflection of the past or as in Glass looking at the pain of a widow through the eyes of her accusing teenage son.

Gerard Donovan is clearly a writer worth reading if you like poetic prose and imaginative stories based on intelligent thought. But the collection of stories suffer as any collection of short stories does by being a random collection of writing enjoyed in the moment of the train journey but once collected together the signature of the writer becomes that much more obvious so less startling or stimulating.

Gerard Donovan use of language and imagery, hover between poems and prose,an good example of this is By Irish Nights . You circle over Ireland following road travellers over one night including those who won’t return as this extract illustrates.

...But those three children. A small breath of water makes a sea of the lungs and sinks the breath.

They found themselves after in languid palms that rested upright in the still water, and they hadn’t drowned. They found themselves in hands sometimes covered in swans that floated, shaped in rain drops that shook the surface of the sky where it rested in the water, in the hold of a father as he taught them to walk, in a mother’s patience as she fed them from spoons and dressed them for the morning. And then they found themselves at last, carved into the endless hearts that lost them, waking every night to sleep.

Its an interesting paradox of our time that in the panic that we can only cope with flash-card writing, short stories are in long decline as we prefer the narrative depth of novels. However, these facts may not be in contradiction, as short stories as poetry require good writing and good reading (close attention to language and structure) to work. Read this collection and decide if its bad writing or poor reading that shapes its future.

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

Have you ever had one of those Blair moments when after weeks of being nice to everyone you have to finally make a decision which means that enemies are made as they see a must have dismissed? Well this is one of those moments. I have been struggling with Raymond Carver’s “Where I'm Calling From” a collection of thirty-seven stories chosen from several previous collections published over 20 odd years which should therefore be an ideal introduction to his work. And… wait for it… I am going to abandon it unfinished half way despite him being seen As "the American Chekhov or the laureate of the dispossessed”

Let me say up front, that his prose, ear for dialogue and depiction of the ordinariness of every day life masking unexpressed pain and joy is the best. His stories are like photos that capture the moment frozen with no past or future with all the ambiguity that the unknown allows the reader/observer. The opposite of Norman Rockwell homeliness, more akin to the photos of Walker Evans of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But they have no plot, twists, surprises, or surface complexity of character. These are often blue collar workers in small-town or rural settings struggling with jobs, partners, children and booze and it’s the unsaid that reveals more then the fractured words.

The stories reflect his own drink problems and failed jobs and marriage in his 20s so he turned to writing to escape and short stories could get something in quickly to pay the rent and get food on the table. His life did begin to turn around and his work started to get critical alarm in his 40’s before he died of lung cancer. His accessible prose, realistic situations and comprehensible characters are seen as a counter to egghead experimentalism

But for me, I was left all too often thinking yes and what happens next even while the image created hung in my head. I also think that stories ripped from their original magazine context make the stories work harder then they needed to. I would have welcomed an edition that merged the stories with a set of photographs worthy of the writing. However, if you want to dip in and perhaps read a couple a stories a week or if you enjoy short stories then this is a book for you. As you say at the end of a failed relationship its not you it’s me, and lets remain friends. Knowing it’s really about the lack of passion. Yet the spurned has the chance of real love else where…will that be you?

Other points of view:
Isolation and the short stories of Raymond Carver
It snowed today
Alysson’s Weblog
Bryan's Book Blog