Pastoralia - George Saunders

My second George Saunders book this year, I bought this one based on how much I liked CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Pastoralia is similar - a collection of short stories, all about sad sacks trying to survive in a world that has it in for them, a world where things go from terrible to even worse that you could have imagined.  In the first story, a man with a very sick boy has a job as a caveman in a history theme park, but his desire to do a good job is thwarted by his partner's tendency to speak English and act uncave-like when visitors come by.  The best one in the collection is Sea Oak, about a male stripper trying to support his extended family by working in a nautical-themed club. His grandmother dies during a break-in at their squalid apartment complex, but the cheap coffin they buried her in can't hold her and she comes back to tell them to start improving their lot and not wasting their life.  Her advice crumbles along with her corpse, leaving the narrator in the same place as when he started, except this time haunted by the bleak future before him.



 

Interview with George Saunders: Steer Towards The Rapids

Best advice on writing fiction I've read in a while:  “Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey"


From the good people at BOMblog

George Saunders Interview Part One


George Saunders Interview Part Two

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - George Saunders

The only problem I had with this book is that it took me so long to discover George Saunders. He had been on my literary radar for a while, a distant blip, and I'm glad to have zeroed in on him. The 400-pound CEO is the best, about an morbidly obese loser who gains control of a raccoon-killing company after giving his boss a lethal bear hug and the novella, Bounty, reads like a movie that should have been made 10 years ago.  The world Saunders creates is 20 minutes into the future of our own, where things have fallen apart a little more than they have now. The endings, especially of the title piece, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - takes us to unexpected places that are entertaining.