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Title: I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek ISBN: 0-374-17407-5 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 15 November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Amazing use of language
Comment: The review below posted by Reggieroy captures my thoughts on this book exactly. The writing was beautiful, the characters so real I felt I knew them. I especially liked the stories of young Perry with his brother and his friends. I think my favorites were of the prom date he took to the junkyard and the one near the end about Perry and his Babushka.
Rating: 4
Summary: Its Inventiveness and Spirit are Undeniable
Comment: Stuart Dybek's I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN arrives more than a decade after his previous book, a short story collection titled THE COAST OF CHICAGO. While it's neither a blockbuster nor a doorstop tome like Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited MIDDLESEX or Donna Tartt's years-in-the-making THE LITTLE FRIEND, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN is definitely worth the wait, serving as a reintroduction to a writer who captures his old Chicago neighborhood with documentary detail and raconteur flourish.
Despite its billing as a novel, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN is actually a series of short stories that have locales and characters in common. All feature a teenage narrator named Perry and all are set in the Little Village community of Chicago during the early 1960s. Dybek lovingly and often humorously evokes this time and place through telling observations.
Poor families use old bed sheets for curtains and veterans order shots for friends who didn't come back from the war. It's a dangerous, often discouraging neighborhood, and in strong, unfussy prose Dybek describes "the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars."
Fortunately, Dybek lets his lively characters --- including a junior high writing prodigy named Camille Estrada and a slob hitman named Joe Ditto --- run wild in this setting. Rather than engineering plots and scenes for them, Dybek simply lets them tell their own stories, a rare talent that gives the book a personal, unrehearsed quality. Plus, it makes for some truly weird goings-on. As a coming-of-age story, I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN eschews any predictability in favor of a dreamlike flow of events and characters, many of which are supersaturated with local color.
There is, for instance, the Chickenman, who walks around town with a chicken perching on his head and pecking corn off his tongue. And there's Little Village's unofficial child saint, Ralphie Poskozim, who was born with blue skin: "The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he'd been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother's mascara. Even his lips looked cold."
All of these strange characters are filtered through Perry's perspective, and as the novel progresses, he grows up and his concerns become more adult. Fortunately, as Perry gains more freedom, the stories don't lose their charm or their sense of wonder.
Memory works in flashes, not in fluid narratives, and it allows for exaggeration of facts. In the end these chapters cohere into something larger than a short-story collection, but the book is not like a proper novel. This is certainly not a criticism: the form of I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN may be unclassifiable, but its inventiveness and spirit are undeniable.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
Rating: 5
Summary: Word Lover
Comment: A fan of Dybek's work for years, I looked forward to the publication of his third book. As I sit at my computer to write this bit, my new kitten, Gus aka Pooky, follows with deftness and alertness each letter as it appears on the screen. Right now she's affixed upon the little AOL symbol in the upper right hand corner that rotates and fades and reappears while I'm online. Gus/Pooky notices with enthusiasm the nuances in life and language, and honors them. She is smart and charming and not only does not disappoint, she makes living all the better. Same with Dybek and his stories. He's crafty as a magician, and has the heart of a lover of words, of the world. His writing is at once a gift and a friend, and I'm always happy to have it around.
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Title: The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek ISBN: 0312422822 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories by Stuart Dybek ISBN: 0226176584 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Old School by TOBIAS WOLFF ISBN: 0375401466 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter ISBN: 0375410295 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Early Stories : 1953-1975 by JOHN UPDIKE ISBN: 1400040728 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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