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The Bigness of the World
by Lori Ostlund
University of Georgia Press
2009, Hardback
First collection
awards:
Winner, 2008 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction;
California Book Award for First Fiction, Edmund White Debut
Fiction Award
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Lori Ostlund
has taught in Spain, Malaysia, and New Mexico and currently lives and
teaches in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in such journals as the
Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Hobart. The Bigness of the World was the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2008.
Read
an interview
with Lori Ostlund
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"I sat on the bed and
tried to determine the exact moment when her decision had been made,
when she thought to herself 'Enough,' but I could not, for it
seemed to me a bit like trying to pinpoint the exact sip with which
one had become drunk."
Reviewed by Annie Clarkson
These eleven stories
take us in unexpected directions. We start out thinking, oh, I know
where this story is going. We enjoy the revealing and beautifully
detailed prose, and then suddenly we are somewhere unfamiliar,
somewhere we would never have predicted, and everything has shifted.
The narratives are
exploratory, and almost seem to wander between countries, dates,
characters and parts of the stories in ways that seems random or
tangential, similarly to how memory works, making connections that
might initially seem disjointed.
But, this writer knows
what she is doing. Lori Ostlund is exploring, within the widest
means, the fallibility and vulnerability of her characters: the way
they blurt things out, or cry when they shouldn’t, underestimate or
overestimate themselves or others, how they can’t cope with their
lives or a part of their lives, can’t communicate with someone they
love, or haven’t seen the end of their relationship coming.
And we’re like these
characters as readers, because we don’t see it coming either. We
have been nodding our heads in agreement with a character only to be
as shocked or disturbed as they are by what has occurred.
The stories are set in
places where it seems the writer grew up, lived or travelled: Spain,
Malaysia, Java, New Mexico, mainly Minnesota. Many are teachers.
There are quite a few stories about disintegrating relationships,
particularly between women. It seems as though she uses what is
familiar to her as a writer as a way of exploring the unfamiliar, and
in these stories the familiar and unfamiliar are not as separate as
we imagine: people go abroad to escape routine, only to find it is
still there; others find strangeness exists within their home
environment.
In The Day You Were Born, for instance, a 9-year-old girl copes with her father’s
mental breakdown. She has answers trick questions, is shown the cuts
on his wrists, and protects each of her parents by trying to be more
aware than they are. There are sad poetic details in the way her
father describes the symptoms of his anxiety as "the maggots",
and her mother as always having "a pebble in her shoe". This
story explores the complexity of the situation and how the father is
completely inappropriate and yet is more emotionally attuned to his
daughter her in certain ways because "[h]e understands about the
dark."
The characters are
unique and often quirky. Ilsa in The Bigness of the World is "absolutely petrified" of abbreviations and math and "deeply
afraid of" mold on bread and cars with power windows. Annabel’s
father in The Day You Were Born gives her sardines with
marshmallows to see if she will eat it as a test of how much she
loves him. The relationship between a woman and her father is
characterised by their conversations about poultry and fowl in
Talking Fowl With My Father.
These are people we
might meet, living ordinary lives, and yet what happens to them is
frightening, upsetting, or slowly life-changing: two children find a
parent has been sent to prison; several long-term relationships
disintegrate; a group of tourists witness a death; a teacher uses
unusual discipline within the classroom; a young boy discovers his
dad is gay.
Many of these stories
have moments that could be described as defining or resonant. Each
one is unexpected because there are so many incidental details and
tiny stories within each story that we can never be sure which
particular details will become heightened by whatever emotions the
characters (and the reader) have experienced. Ilsa’s conversation
with the children about the bigness of the world for instance, which
she stresses they need to understand because "there have been times
in my life when the bigness of the world has been my only
consolation". In Bed Death, the story of a disintegrating
relationship between two women, failure is symbolised by the
apartment block where people go to kill themselves because it is "the
only building tall enough.’"
Observations like these
are earned. What Lori Ostlund is able to do that many writers fail to
do is capture so authentically realisations, moments of change, and
the aching truths within her stories. The different ways there are
that someone can say "Don’t Cry", for instance. Or what can
bring us to tears, like how ‘A simple gesture of sympathy or
solidarity, even, it seemed, one of a meteorological nature, could
crumble one’s resolve far more quickly than adversity itself.’
This is very exciting
fiction. The stories are quietly and beautifully observed. Lori
Ostlund pushes her stories far beyond where many short story writers
go, and the endings of her stories are quietly devastating.
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