Last week BarnesAndNoble.com made available some audiobook excerpts from a few short story collections. Each download covered one full short story, except for a complete narration of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Since these were free, I couldn’t say no
. No link, however. You had to move quickly because the download links no longer work.
The first I listened to is Ysrael
by Junot Díaz from his short story collection Drown, narrated by Jonathan Davis. Short recap: younger boy idolizes older brother, older brother is a trouble-causing punk, neighbor boy has facial disfigurement so he wears a mask, older brother decides to get the mask off.
I wasn’t too impressed with the story. Do bad things and feel sick about it is a theme well-explored by writers. Become enamored with bad older boy is also well-trod. I didn’t feel like the story’s language or anything else really set it apart from a whole host of other stories. It wasn’t bad either. All the kids rang true to life. Díaz did a fine job of establishing the setting for non-residents of the Dominican Republic. Just not stand-out.
Of course, it might work wonderfully as one of numerous linked stories, as it does in Drown. (It first appeared in Story magazine, however.)
U SUK
hes not just writing about a kid that likes being mean to ugly people. Diaz is a pulitzer prize winning professor at MIT. Give him a little more credit. The story is a psychoanlaytical commentary on “the symbolic order’s” trodding of the “Id” and “ego’s” pursuit of pleasure. The return of the repressed, it’s a simulacrum of the eruption of “the real” when it is made to traumatically acknowledge the materiality of its own existence. But you wouldn’t know that without a small background in psych. But, yes, without examination, the story IS about a kid that likes to “do bad things and feel sick about it.”