Read by George Saunders
5 hours, 40 minutes
Published January 2013 by Random House Publishing Group
Publisher's Summary:
In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.
Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.
Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”
My Thoughts:
I feel like a broken record when I say this, but it seems to be a truism (for me, at least) when I tell you that in this collection of short stories some were stronger than others.
Maybe it's because I listened to it. As much a fan of having authors read their own works as I am, here is was something of a problem for me. Professional readers or actors are able to alter their voices to make the characters from story to story unique. Mr. Saunders either isn't or chose not to do so. Because of that, it was difficult for me to adjust to new stories because it felt very much like I was still listening to the main character from the last story.
Maybe it's just me, because "real" reviewers praise the heck out of this collection. Perhaps I just don't get it; perhaps, once again, it would have made more sense for me to read one story a day and not read straight through. Maybe it's just that my reading mood, my mood in general, was not in a place to take in all of the unrelenting harshness of the stories.
All of that being said, some of these stories really made an impact. In "Victory Lap," I was literally on the edge of my car seat, not going in to work, as the story finished up, terrified by what might happen to the children involved. "Escape from Spiderhead" made me really consider the choices we make and truly what our criminal justice system and science might be capable of doing. So many of the stories (all?) deal with human beings capacity for hope, but also for delusion. No story captures that better than "Al Roosten." The story that really touched me the most was "Tenth of December," where a dying man, set out to commit suicide to avoid a slow, even more humiliating end, wanders out into the cold woods to die. When he sees a young boy fall into a not quite frozen lake, though, he needs to find the strength and determination to save him.
And here I am, in the end, questioning whether or not short stories are for me. Or are the really good stories worth searching for amongst the stories that don't work as well for me?
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