I can confidently say that George Saunders is to me what Lydia Davis was to Nick. I want my time back.
After three hundred rhetorical questions, six hundred "maybe" situations, and god-only-knows how many tangential scenes, I wish I hadn't picked up "The Barber's Unhappiness" in the first place.
I'm sure there's a point to the flitty, distracted, immature voice who "ogles at passerby" and is obsessed with this Egyptian-looking lady in the driving school. Maybe his constant references to his "wienie" were supposed to say something about the character. Maybe the narrator's unrealistic fantasies about sex were important too. Maybe I just didn't get it. Maybe there isn't an answer to these questions because 75% of this story was prefaced by "maybe."
I should find something admirable about these stories-- I know there's more in here that I'm missing and that they're in the collection and the curriculum for a reason. Right now, though, that reason is evading me. Having only read them once, I'm more than ready to forget them.
I CAN SPEAK was hilarious. This was easily one of my favorite stories this year. Saunders is witty and kind of dark too. I really love the whole premise of this letter and the fact that it's a letter in general. Working as a letter from a struggling employee to a disgruntled consumer, I CAN SPEAK is a mostly humorous story that satires odd baby toys that parents sometimes force on their kids; however, the I CAN SPEAK is especially odd considering you strap it onto your child's face and the mask then speaks. At first I didn't realize how the toy worked, but as I read on I soon saw the genius. "Last weekend my supervisor, Mr. Ted Ames, stopped by ... and boy did we all crack up laughing when Billy began rubbing his face very rapidly across the carpet in order to make his ICS2100 shout, "FRICTION IS A COMMON AND USEFUL SOURCE OF HEAT!"—wow. I love the visual of this baby struggling to get this thing off their face while it's shouting and parents are looking on in awe and laughter. Of course I could use a little more humor in my stories, but I think Saunders gave me the idea to make my stories in different formats. I think writing a story through the medium of a letter would be a great exercise for me. I think Saunders did an amazing job of throwing so many significant details in, setting scenes, and telling a great story in general through this letter.
I have to say that I'm going to side more with Alex on this one. While I don't think that Saunders was at the same level of distaste that I had for Lydia Davis, this isn't far behind. I found "The Barber's Unhappiness" to be more difficult to read than I CAN SPEAK, and got through the second okay, able to find the humor in it and read it as it was. "The Barber's Unhappiness" was a different story.
I still don't think I can say I am entirely sure what happened there. He was talking about living with his mother and taking classes at this driving school and going to a get together with those people but the story itself was a rapid fire stream of fantasies that this guy has as he looks at nearly every woman he comes across. He goes on for pages upon pages about the crying woman on the street who he morphs into some kind of Miss Hacienda that doesn't even exist. It was hard for me to follow this and I found my mind running in circles trying to keep up.
The value in this, I suppose, is learning to write in different formats and trying different styles like Saunders does with the letter. Writing a story in the form of a letter could be very interesting, and is a project worth thinking about, as for the content of this story, I have to say it was lost on me.
I don't understand how anyone can dislike George Saunders. I felt like the ways he told his stories were clever, and funny. Each story had something beautiful and funny on each page. The plot of "The barber's unhappiness" was somewhat basic, but the way it was told made it interesting. I felt by the end I knew the barber like a good friend. It is a good example of a story being character driven. I took not of the fact that even though we have an outside narrator, he knows everything in the barber's mind. It is a good perspective to write a story in. I should try it. I enjoyed all the things that went on in the barber's mind, and the way they were phrased were funny. "Next to the white-haired woman was a pretty girl. A very pretty girl. Wow. One of the prettiest girls the barber had ever seen. Boy was she pretty." Lines like this are just funny. I felt I was able to see into the barber's head. One other thing I can take away from Saunders is the fact that there is stuff under the surface that the characters aren't aware of, and are never acctually said directally in the story. They are only inplied, but the reader is fully aware of it. Like in "I can speak" it is obvious that the "I can speak" is a rediculous product, but the salsemen is fully believes that it is good. We can also see how totally rediculous the salsemen is being, even though it is from his point of view. That, and just Saunder's unique style in general are all things taht I will take away.
If there’s one thing about these pieces by George Saunders that sticks out, it is his ability to populate his stories with characters that inspire both pity and disgust at the same time. It is not enough to see them, of course; Saunders does an excellent job of keeping the reader’s perspective centered on the strangest character of the lot. In “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” for instance, the third-person perspective is so close and intimate with the barber that it might as well be first-person story. “I CAN SPEAK!” is similar in that it IS a first-person story, albeit written in a non-story form; the letter from customer service is a very imaginative, not to mention useful, technique that allows Saunders to write from a first-person perspective at the same time that it warns readers to distrust the speaker within the first sentence or two (who among us, after all, would actually trust a customer service representative about the true goodness of his or her company, especially if that representative is waxing poetic over a product that had just been returned for a refund?). The stream-of-consciousness approach to writing that Saunders takes with “The Barber’s Unhappiness” is muted in “I CAN SPEAK!” due to the format, which is itself a form of writing that requires thought and deliberation—the reader can assume, based on what the speaker writes, that the stream of consciousness behind the letter is very strange, but the letter itself is formatted to be as simple and easily-read as possible (as all business letters should be). While the format tips the reader off to the speaker’s unreliability, then, it also makes it more difficult to display the speaker’s strangeness (relative to the ease with which the reader is put into the barber’s head in the first section of “The Barber’s Unhappiness”). In spite of this disadvantage, Saunders manages not only to characterize the speaker through the anecdotes he writes in the letter (as well as the rather frightening nature of the company he works for), but also manages to give us a smidgen of characterization for the letter’s recipient, both through the speaker’s direct responses to certain points in her fictional rejection letter, as well as the very fact that she purchased an I CAN TALK! for her son in the first place.
On a somewhat-related note, I found it very disconcerting when the speaker rebukes the recipient of his letter about her high assumptions with, “Did you, we often wonder, not look at the cover of the box?”—and the reader, who must have figured out by this time that the speaker is at least a little crazy, is forced to agree with him.
(It might be obvious based on this review, but I found "I CAN SPEAK" to be much more entertaining than "A Barber's Unhappiness.")
I find Saunders' "the Barber's Unhappiness" to be a very inspiring story, in terms of its form. It is a short story, but it is a full 20 pages long and is broken into short chapter-like segments. This actually felt more like novella than a short story. I think I can really take the form away from this piece, because it shows me that one can make a lengthy story, and perfect it without the vast amount of time required to write a novel.
The voice of this story also stuck out to me. I can tell from Saunders' picture that he is white, but as I was reading, I couldn't help but feel the narrator was African-American. The way the dialogue was written, as well as the narration were not what I would expect. I feel as though most stories I write, and I am assuming this is somewhat true for many writers, my protagonist(s) as of the same or similar ethnicity as myself. It would be interesting to try writing in some different ethnic dialogue.
I am with Alex on this one, I want to find something in these stories that was really interesting and meaningful but I'm really struggling. "I Can Speak!tm" is definitely a social commentary that reminded me of "Brave New World" and was interesting on that level, but to be perfectly honest it didn't blow my mind.
The P.O.V. was interesting in "A Barbers Unhappiness" but that's about all. I think if I want to write a close 3rd person I may use this as an example. Besides his expert use of P.O.V. there wasn't much else that the story did for me. I asked myself at the end of the story who had changed, and I don't think anyone did, now I see why that is kind of a rule in fiction.
I had a terrible time reading "The Barber's Unhappiness." It took me the better part of two hours, with numerous breaks to finish that story. It did nothing to hold my interest because I felt as though Saunders was not invested in the piece himself. His thoughts were all over the place and made it difficult to have a concrete feel of the piece. I would have to 100% agree with Alex's sentiment of wishing I could have that time back. On the other hand, I found 'I CAN SPEAK!' hilarious. I love his satirical commentary on the current baby product industry and of how much our consumerism rules our lives. This piece literally made me laugh out loud (yes I got a few strange looks). On the second page the product number suddenly changed from ICS2000 to ICS2100 and I had to go back and double check it (oh subliminal messages and marketing). The guilt trip that is the last paragraph had to be my absolute favorite however. This entire piece is so stereotypical of how our society operates, and when you did think about it seriously it can be quite scary but Saunders presents in a way that makes the reader laugh. That is something I really admire in a write and hope to be able to bring it into my own.
I found George Saunders very hard to read due to the random streams of consciousness and images that were very hard for me to understand. Yet I think if I read them again, I think I would like the stories better. The stories were very interesting as they used humor in very serious situations but the way he wrote them doesn’t sit well with me. I felt like I was reading one of those dry philosophical textbooks that would put anyone to sleep. I don’t know to describe it but something in his technique isn’t right. Out of the two stories I like “The Barber’s Happiness” the best because I understood what was going on and I liked how Saunders described the character of the barber as a lonely man with deformed toes, which makes me wonder how he is able to walk without the special shoes. The story “I CAN SPEAK” was funny yet at the same time I didn’t really understand what the product was except that it was a mask that made toddlers or infants talk. I don’t know if that is even correct because there was so much going on and some of the words Saunders used didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me.
If I had to choose between George Saunders and Lydia Davis, I would chose George Saunders because he isn’t really too experimental and really the only problem I have with him is the different details and word choice that he uses. Lydia Davis was too out there to even make any sense to me and although I admire her stories, I don’t really take anything from her. With Saunders, I would take his technique of characterizing a character through his thoughts. The stream consciousness of the barber fit the character so well that it brought him alive. In the story “I CAN SPEAK,” the little nuances and details that the narrator writes characterizes himself to the point where the reader questions whether he is a moral person or not for using this product. In my family tree George Saunders is a distant uncle but not as distant as Lydia Davis.
What amazes me about George Saunders is that he kept me interested in these characters, who I didn't even really like that much. Sure, once you've stuck with the barber for 20 pages, you feel sort of close to him, but I felt what Gary said he felt- a mixture of pity and disgust? In "I CAN SPEAK!" I didn't feel as much disgust, but pity was definitely involved. I agree with someone else's comment that the salesman's guilt trip at the end of the letter is easily one of the more funny elements of the story, and it's completely and totally necessary for it not to become just weird and forgettable.
I agree with others that it was difficult to get through"The Barber's Unhappiness" and that it took many breaks to accomplish, but I don't think it made me angry enough to want my time back. It really just made me curious about George Saunders' imagination and particular way of seeing the world. I want to know if all or most of his stories are done in this style or if these two stories are outliers. I don't know if I'd pick him up to read on a regular basis, but I think I would enjoy him in the same way I did today- in smaller doses.
I'm with almost everyone else that I found "I CAN SPEAK!" to be more enjoyable than "The Barber's Unhappiness." It was just hard to get through, and it just seemed like every sentence I had to go back and reread to make sure that I was reading it right. I did feel bad for the character, so George Saunders did that well, but overall, I just didn't want to finish the story. The barber was bringing his unhappiness upon him in many scenarios, so while I did feel bad about him having no toes and everything, I also just wanted him to man up and not look for the flaws in every girl that he met. In "I CAN SPEAK!" I found the humor to be more prevalent, and I could definitely see the social commentary in it, about the ridiculous baby toys that are being developed. I thought it was a funnier story, but still wasn't really what I would choose to read. I did like that it was in a letter format, and to take something from Saunders, would be his experimentation with form and POV, as some of my classmates have said.
I can confidently say that George Saunders is to me what Lydia Davis was to Nick. I want my time back.
ReplyDeleteAfter three hundred rhetorical questions, six hundred "maybe" situations, and god-only-knows how many tangential scenes, I wish I hadn't picked up "The Barber's Unhappiness" in the first place.
I'm sure there's a point to the flitty, distracted, immature voice who "ogles at passerby" and is obsessed with this Egyptian-looking lady in the driving school. Maybe his constant references to his "wienie" were supposed to say something about the character. Maybe the narrator's unrealistic fantasies about sex were important too. Maybe I just didn't get it. Maybe there isn't an answer to these questions because 75% of this story was prefaced by "maybe."
I should find something admirable about these stories-- I know there's more in here that I'm missing and that they're in the collection and the curriculum for a reason. Right now, though, that reason is evading me. Having only read them once, I'm more than ready to forget them.
I CAN SPEAK was hilarious. This was easily one of my favorite stories this year. Saunders is witty and kind of dark too. I really love the whole premise of this letter and the fact that it's a letter in general. Working as a letter from a struggling employee to a disgruntled consumer, I CAN SPEAK is a mostly humorous story that satires odd baby toys that parents sometimes force on their kids; however, the I CAN SPEAK is especially odd considering you strap it onto your child's face and the mask then speaks. At first I didn't realize how the toy worked, but as I read on I soon saw the genius. "Last weekend my supervisor, Mr. Ted Ames, stopped by ... and boy did we all crack up laughing when Billy began rubbing his face very rapidly across the carpet in order to make his ICS2100 shout, "FRICTION IS A COMMON AND USEFUL SOURCE OF HEAT!"—wow. I love the visual of this baby struggling to get this thing off their face while it's shouting and parents are looking on in awe and laughter.
ReplyDeleteOf course I could use a little more humor in my stories, but I think Saunders gave me the idea to make my stories in different formats. I think writing a story through the medium of a letter would be a great exercise for me. I think Saunders did an amazing job of throwing so many significant details in, setting scenes, and telling a great story in general through this letter.
I have to say that I'm going to side more with Alex on this one. While I don't think that Saunders was at the same level of distaste that I had for Lydia Davis, this isn't far behind. I found "The Barber's Unhappiness" to be more difficult to read than I CAN SPEAK, and got through the second okay, able to find the humor in it and read it as it was. "The Barber's Unhappiness" was a different story.
ReplyDeleteI still don't think I can say I am entirely sure what happened there. He was talking about living with his mother and taking classes at this driving school and going to a get together with those people but the story itself was a rapid fire stream of fantasies that this guy has as he looks at nearly every woman he comes across. He goes on for pages upon pages about the crying woman on the street who he morphs into some kind of Miss Hacienda that doesn't even exist. It was hard for me to follow this and I found my mind running in circles trying to keep up.
The value in this, I suppose, is learning to write in different formats and trying different styles like Saunders does with the letter. Writing a story in the form of a letter could be very interesting, and is a project worth thinking about, as for the content of this story, I have to say it was lost on me.
I don't understand how anyone can dislike George Saunders. I felt like the ways he told his stories were clever, and funny. Each story had something beautiful and funny on each page. The plot of "The barber's unhappiness" was somewhat basic, but the way it was told made it interesting. I felt by the end I knew the barber like a good friend. It is a good example of a story being character driven. I took not of the fact that even though we have an outside narrator, he knows everything in the barber's mind. It is a good perspective to write a story in. I should try it. I enjoyed all the things that went on in the barber's mind, and the way they were phrased were funny. "Next to the white-haired woman was a pretty girl. A very pretty girl. Wow. One of the prettiest girls the barber had ever seen. Boy was she pretty." Lines like this are just funny. I felt I was able to see into the barber's head. One other thing I can take away from Saunders is the fact that there is stuff under the surface that the characters aren't aware of, and are never acctually said directally in the story. They are only inplied, but the reader is fully aware of it. Like in "I can speak" it is obvious that the "I can speak" is a rediculous product, but the salsemen is fully believes that it is good. We can also see how totally rediculous the salsemen is being, even though it is from his point of view. That, and just Saunder's unique style in general are all things taht I will take away.
ReplyDeleteIf there’s one thing about these pieces by George Saunders that sticks out, it is his ability to populate his stories with characters that inspire both pity and disgust at the same time. It is not enough to see them, of course; Saunders does an excellent job of keeping the reader’s perspective centered on the strangest character of the lot. In “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” for instance, the third-person perspective is so close and intimate with the barber that it might as well be first-person story. “I CAN SPEAK!” is similar in that it IS a first-person story, albeit written in a non-story form; the letter from customer service is a very imaginative, not to mention useful, technique that allows Saunders to write from a first-person perspective at the same time that it warns readers to distrust the speaker within the first sentence or two (who among us, after all, would actually trust a customer service representative about the true goodness of his or her company, especially if that representative is waxing poetic over a product that had just been returned for a refund?). The stream-of-consciousness approach to writing that Saunders takes with “The Barber’s Unhappiness” is muted in “I CAN SPEAK!” due to the format, which is itself a form of writing that requires thought and deliberation—the reader can assume, based on what the speaker writes, that the stream of consciousness behind the letter is very strange, but the letter itself is formatted to be as simple and easily-read as possible (as all business letters should be). While the format tips the reader off to the speaker’s unreliability, then, it also makes it more difficult to display the speaker’s strangeness (relative to the ease with which the reader is put into the barber’s head in the first section of “The Barber’s Unhappiness”). In spite of this disadvantage, Saunders manages not only to characterize the speaker through the anecdotes he writes in the letter (as well as the rather frightening nature of the company he works for), but also manages to give us a smidgen of characterization for the letter’s recipient, both through the speaker’s direct responses to certain points in her fictional rejection letter, as well as the very fact that she purchased an I CAN TALK! for her son in the first place.
ReplyDeleteOn a somewhat-related note, I found it very disconcerting when the speaker rebukes the recipient of his letter about her high assumptions with, “Did you, we often wonder, not look at the cover of the box?”—and the reader, who must have figured out by this time that the speaker is at least a little crazy, is forced to agree with him.
(It might be obvious based on this review, but I found "I CAN SPEAK" to be much more entertaining than "A Barber's Unhappiness.")
I find Saunders' "the Barber's Unhappiness" to be a very inspiring story, in terms of its form. It is a short story, but it is a full 20 pages long and is broken into short chapter-like segments. This actually felt more like novella than a short story. I think I can really take the form away from this piece, because it shows me that one can make a lengthy story, and perfect it without the vast amount of time required to write a novel.
ReplyDeleteThe voice of this story also stuck out to me. I can tell from Saunders' picture that he is white, but as I was reading, I couldn't help but feel the narrator was African-American. The way the dialogue was written, as well as the narration were not what I would expect. I feel as though most stories I write, and I am assuming this is somewhat true for many writers, my protagonist(s) as of the same or similar ethnicity as myself. It would be interesting to try writing in some different ethnic dialogue.
I am with Alex on this one, I want to find something in these stories that was really interesting and meaningful but I'm really struggling. "I Can Speak!tm" is definitely a social commentary that reminded me of "Brave New World" and was interesting on that level, but to be perfectly honest it didn't blow my mind.
ReplyDeleteThe P.O.V. was interesting in "A Barbers Unhappiness" but that's about all. I think if I want to write a close 3rd person I may use this as an example. Besides his expert use of P.O.V. there wasn't much else that the story did for me. I asked myself at the end of the story who had changed, and I don't think anyone did, now I see why that is kind of a rule in fiction.
I had a terrible time reading "The Barber's Unhappiness." It took me the better part of two hours, with numerous breaks to finish that story. It did nothing to hold my interest because I felt as though Saunders was not invested in the piece himself. His thoughts were all over the place and made it difficult to have a concrete feel of the piece. I would have to 100% agree with Alex's sentiment of wishing I could have that time back.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I found 'I CAN SPEAK!' hilarious. I love his satirical commentary on the current baby product industry and of how much our consumerism rules our lives. This piece literally made me laugh out loud (yes I got a few strange looks). On the second page the product number suddenly changed from ICS2000 to ICS2100 and I had to go back and double check it (oh subliminal messages and marketing). The guilt trip that is the last paragraph had to be my absolute favorite however. This entire piece is so stereotypical of how our society operates, and when you did think about it seriously it can be quite scary but Saunders presents in a way that makes the reader laugh. That is something I really admire in a write and hope to be able to bring it into my own.
I found George Saunders very hard to read due to the random streams of consciousness and images that were very hard for me to understand. Yet I think if I read them again, I think I would like the stories better. The stories were very interesting as they used humor in very serious situations but the way he wrote them doesn’t sit well with me. I felt like I was reading one of those dry philosophical textbooks that would put anyone to sleep. I don’t know to describe it but something in his technique isn’t right.
ReplyDeleteOut of the two stories I like “The Barber’s Happiness” the best because I understood what was going on and I liked how Saunders described the character of the barber as a lonely man with deformed toes, which makes me wonder how he is able to walk without the special shoes. The story “I CAN SPEAK” was funny yet at the same time I didn’t really understand what the product was except that it was a mask that made toddlers or infants talk. I don’t know if that is even correct because there was so much going on and some of the words Saunders used didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me.
If I had to choose between George Saunders and Lydia Davis, I would chose George Saunders because he isn’t really too experimental and really the only problem I have with him is the different details and word choice that he uses. Lydia Davis was too out there to even make any sense to me and although I admire her stories, I don’t really take anything from her. With Saunders, I would take his technique of characterizing a character through his thoughts. The stream consciousness of the barber fit the character so well that it brought him alive. In the story “I CAN SPEAK,” the little nuances and details that the narrator writes characterizes himself to the point where the reader questions whether he is a moral person or not for using this product. In my family tree George Saunders is a distant uncle but not as distant as Lydia Davis.
What amazes me about George Saunders is that he kept me interested in these characters, who I didn't even really like that much. Sure, once you've stuck with the barber for 20 pages, you feel sort of close to him, but I felt what Gary said he felt- a mixture of pity and disgust? In "I CAN SPEAK!" I didn't feel as much disgust, but pity was definitely involved. I agree with someone else's comment that the salesman's guilt trip at the end of the letter is easily one of the more funny elements of the story, and it's completely and totally necessary for it not to become just weird and forgettable.
ReplyDeleteI agree with others that it was difficult to get through"The Barber's Unhappiness" and that it took many breaks to accomplish, but I don't think it made me angry enough to want my time back. It really just made me curious about George Saunders' imagination and particular way of seeing the world. I want to know if all or most of his stories are done in this style or if these two stories are outliers. I don't know if I'd pick him up to read on a regular basis, but I think I would enjoy him in the same way I did today- in smaller doses.
I'm with almost everyone else that I found "I CAN SPEAK!" to be more enjoyable than "The Barber's Unhappiness." It was just hard to get through, and it just seemed like every sentence I had to go back and reread to make sure that I was reading it right. I did feel bad for the character, so George Saunders did that well, but overall, I just didn't want to finish the story. The barber was bringing his unhappiness upon him in many scenarios, so while I did feel bad about him having no toes and everything, I also just wanted him to man up and not look for the flaws in every girl that he met.
ReplyDeleteIn "I CAN SPEAK!" I found the humor to be more prevalent, and I could definitely see the social commentary in it, about the ridiculous baby toys that are being developed. I thought it was a funnier story, but still wasn't really what I would choose to read. I did like that it was in a letter format, and to take something from Saunders, would be his experimentation with form and POV, as some of my classmates have said.