Peruse American Innovations Crafted By Rivka Galchen In Physical Edition

not quite sure what to make of this collection of short stories, Whilst I was reading each one I enjoyed the slightly offcentre nature of the main character but was left somehow unsatisfied at the conclusion.


Each story's protagonist is somehow adrift in their life and I guess that's reflected in the vagueness of the story.


More like a,The likelihood that I will enjoy a writer who writes with a tangible "for some obscure reason" etched into every utterance is slim.
What are we to do with all those connections in our lives that, you know, bind us all together as a people Nothing.
Avoid them. Write in short sentences like these, Characterize them as "all those things I so studiously knew nothing about," which one of Galchen's narrators actually states for the record.


I tend not to read books with sentences like "I tend not to answer calls identified as Unavailable.
" Or ones where anytime the author would wish to say just about anything she must add qualifiers doubting she is really saying it: ".
. . since it is the older people, generally, who have money, and who thus support the younger people, who have youth.
Or something. " This kind of paralyzing selfdoubt expressing even the most mundane thoughts is reflected in Galchen's flat prose so common to American fiction that if you have four thoughts to say you're going to need four sentences to say them.


Fictionwise it is obvious the swerve she makes away from autobiography, "All of this was not long after the publication of my first novel, and I had some money, even a bit of dignity, as the novel had been somewhat successful at least, I'd been given a decent advance and some money from foreign rights, too it was a dream! but I didn't have lots of dignity and I didn't have lots of money, either, just some.
" Hey, that sounds just like Rivka Galchen, the author of Atmospheric Disturbances! But to clarify: "The novel was a love story, between a bird and a whale.
" Oh well gee maybe I guessed my fictional game wrong,

It is suggested there is something metaphysical about Galchen's faction in literature, those who wonder if people aren't in fact simulacra in this technological age manifested in literary circles as "one can never really know who another person is" and so one must console, console, console our words into a binding.
In the great world of politics this is called "waffling", for those who are forever sitting on both sides of an issue for not knowing what to say about the very things you're supposed to care about.
If there was a poll taken for the upcoming election that asks, "Which party will you be voting for, the human race or the forces of the cosmos" Galchen wouldn't know what to answer.
She's an "Undecided".

Every poet recognizes the limits of experience, But the great ones don't go numb by them, They write perfectly crafted poems in gorgeous language rather than jot down references to Heidegger and a slew of "Or somethings".
Galchen recognizes these limitations sort of, maybe, or who knows, and to these she adopts a rhetoric of knownothingness spoken deadpan to address these infinite realms inspired by no sense of direction whatsoever.
We may as well be a hurtling comet, And that scratching on our surface a probe from planet Earth looking for information about us, One of the young narrators even frets about being denied sugared cereal for breakfasts in Wild Berry Blue.
There

are a few times Galchen's narrators say they are not into symbols, But in one story The Lost Order her narrator and her husband are in search of a lost wedding ring.
A book of symptoms rather than observations,

Throughout reading this collection I kept asking myself, "How is it that someone with the world at her feet, a book contract, great respect among literary people, by this, her second book around eight years later, has so little to say about a culture that has embraced her" It is obvious she is looking directly at her life, but has made the mistake of needing to address it through fiction.
Galchen needs to drop the fascination with Kafka someone whose every sentence was rooted in multiple cultures, an ability Galchen doesn't have and go ahead and write that memoir everyone who has noticed her wishes to read, shredding that last vestige of postmodernism she is clinging onto like an obligation does to an audience.
Get rid of them. This is thest century not theth, Those kinds of games are over, standard rivka galchen, which is to say: brilliant, funny, offkilter, a little lost, a lot of the book flirts with themes explored in atmospheric disturbances, the author's novel debut: identity conflation, directionless, parents, otherness and anxiety, hilarious and completely literary wordplay.
a lot of folks seem taken with "wild berry blue," which i might call the least galchenesque and most straightforward story of the lot.
my personal favorite is probably "sticker shock," a laughoutloud funny and highly original look at the perennial issues of contention: money and family.
definite shades of lydia davis' "break it down," at least to my mind, the whole thing is a great read and well worth your time, This story collection is wonderfully witty and melancholy, or more melancholy than witty, filled with innuendoes that at times I couldnt understand, being originally not from America, but sensed on some other level.
On a universal level. On a level of connection with words and images that stayed with me like bright flashes of every day strangeness.
Simple strangeness of existence. Things we do to fill our lives, to think we know where were going, when in fact we have no clue.


There are two levels to these stories, The humor glaze upon the soft tender inner something that is sad and wondrous and lonely and lost sometimes.
Most of the stories are told from the point of view of a young woman, sometimes a writer, going about her life, meeting people, thinking, ruminating.
Perhaps the funniest and my favorite story was Sticker Shock, on affair of a family told through numbers, house cost numbers, insurance numbers, year numbers.
Its fantastic how underneath it all there was so much feeling, and so much irony, it made me laugh out loud.
In another story, a young woman witnesses her furniture escape her apartment, like it made up its mind and decided to leave her.
In another she gets tangled into a relationship with two men, one of whom is the son of the other from the future.
And through all of them, like a nerve, is strung some kind of a longing, for being, for togetherness, for love, and yet there is never an answer.
Just like in real life,

All in all, a delicious collection, Beautifully written. Of periwinkle blues and Kantian sublime and wit, .