Alan's review
One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies by Sarah Manguso
This review concerns only Unferth's Minor Robberies:
It is twisted and incompetently brilliant. She is the literary equivalent of a cheeky post punk band--elliptical, experimental, disturbing, anxious, manic, snottily and sincerely casual, falling apart--she whips off tiny snippets. Part of her inimitable voice is her intentional inelegance. Example: ". . . if reincarnation is right . . ." She very much has the tools to say "if the idea of reincarnation holds water," but she doesn't, and it is so much better that way. The formal elements of the punk aesthetic are alive here, if only analogously--she does not actually address or reference the movement at all in content. But the lowness of her language, the wiry tone, the shifting subjunctive style and miniature focus pack the same kind of gut punch, and like the best of those bands, she manages to be both avant garde and entirely guttural. A series of miniatures of the deformed genitals of the human heart,...more
It is twisted and incompetently brilliant. She is the literary equivalent of a cheeky post punk band--elliptical, experimental, disturbing, anxious, manic, snottily and sincerely casual, falling apart--she whips off tiny snippets. Part of her inimitable voice is her intentional inelegance. Example: ". . . if reincarnation is right . . ." She very much has the tools to say "if the idea of reincarnation holds water," but she doesn't, and it is so much better that way. The formal elements of the punk aesthetic are alive here, if only analogously--she does not actually address or reference the movement at all in content. But the lowness of her language, the wiry tone, the shifting subjunctive style and miniature focus pack the same kind of gut punch, and like the best of those bands, she manages to be both avant garde and entirely guttural. A series of miniatures of the deformed genitals of the human heart,...more
