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Jan
24
The Bare Necessities—Siobhan Fallon (YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone, a collection of eight linked stories about life on military bases in Fort Hood, Texas and Baghdad, Iraq, published by Amy Einhorn Books.
Wow, I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to narrow down my book choices to a mere five. So I am going to list the five books that I return to again and again, for insight, for craft, for inspiration, for escape. When there are so many amazing books in the world and never enough time to read all of them, reading a book more than once seems like the best indication of its value in my life. These are the books I always keep close:
Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find
Flannery, my God, woman! Who in the world would think to write a funny story about a murdered family? The story starts out so innocuous, two smart-mouthed kids taunting their grandmother, the grandmother smuggling her cat on a car trip, the cat jumping out of its basket and causing the father to drive the car into a ditch. All of this is very amusing and slapstick until a car pulls up, seemingly to help the family out, and the grandmother recognizes The Misfit. Members of The Misfit’s gang lead the six members of the family, one by one (including an infant!) off to the woods to be shot. The story is told with eviscerating hilarity and ends with that unforgettable line, “She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Or “Good Country People:” a bible salesman seduces a woman, then steals her false leg and abandons her in a hay loft. There is something so cataclysmic about O’Connor’s stories, the characters left ravaged and despairing by something or someone seemingly harmless. The reader gets the unsettling feeling that nothing in the world is good. Every time I read this collection I am both electrified and terrified at how limitless and eye-opening fiction can be.
Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh
I think Benjamin Percy is one of our most exciting writers right now. His collection Refresh, Refresh, as well as his new novel, The Wilding, is fearless. He doesn’t shy away from the violence humans are capable of, how fine a line there is between civility and savagery, human and animal. All of the stories are fresh (no pun intended); he gives the reader everything from marital angst to nuclear meltdowns, but the title story, “Refresh, Refresh,” is the one I recommend the most often. It’s about these rough and scrappy teenage boys trying desperately to become men. Their fathers are all deployed and the absence hangs over the action, it creates the momentum and the tension, pushing these kids to the breaking point without ever having to dissect the plight of deployed soldiers or the politics of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an unforgettable point of view, an unforgettable story, an unforgettable collection.
Peter Carey’s My Life As A Fake
I love this novel. It starts off feeling very staid and upper-crust British, about a middle aged poetry editor on a trip to Kaula Lampur, and somehow manages to become a mystery, a ghost story, a study of the possibility of truth in fiction. Carey has a character literally stepping off the page in a Frankenstein-esque transformation of poetry made into flesh, there is an insanely convoluted plot spanning decades and continents, and yet, I, the reader, am with him every step of the way. The settings of Carey’s novels are incredibly diverse, from the Australian Outback to Napoleonic France, yet regardless of time and place, Carey always has a compelling voice. Inevitably, by the first paragraph, I am drawn in.
Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier
I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator and you can’t get more unreliable than the protagonist of The Good Soldier. He keeps telling the same story over and over again, but each version is bizarrely different, full of contradictions and half-truths; you can see the narrator trying on different shades of ignorance to decide how much clarity he can handle. The reader has to put the story together, piece together the motivations of the characters, realizing which version is the version closest to reality, which good character is actually the villain, which sinful character the most saintly. Reading this book freed me as a writer, it demonstrated how human and limitless a story can be, and I feel like it changed my writing utterly.
Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
I read The End of the Affair every couple of years, trying to space out my revisits because I want it to surprise me again, and it always does. Like My Life as a Fake, it transcends all genre, it is part detective novel, part love story, part passion play, part meditation of the sacred and the profane. I love a narrator who is surprised by his own story, and in this novel every twist and turn is so unexpected that the reader feels like a participant as the narrator pieces together the truth, which contradicts everything he had assumed was true.
Related posts:
Yay, Sio! So glad to see you here this morning
Great list, honey!
I have heard that The End of the Affair is amazing on audio. I’ve been trying to find it…
Sandy´s last [type] ..2011 Book to Movie Adaptations – Mark Your Calendars!
I had no idea Flannery was so… dark. I want to read all of these books now!
Care’s Online Book Club´s last [type] ..Happy National Pie Day!
I need to read Flannery O’Connor. I’m not usually a fan of short stories, but Siobhan’s were so well crafted each one seemed bigger, if that makes sense. Thanks for sharing, book lady.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rebecca Schinsky and Lydia Hirt, spookchick. spookchick said: Wow! The Bare Necessities—Siobhan Fallon (YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE …: It starts off feeli… http://bit.ly/i27lgg http://www.ghosthunttv.com [...]
[...] on by this post of Five Valued Books by Siobhan Fallon’s at The Book Lady’s Blog, I want to read something deliciously dark* by Flannery O’Connor. I can hardly go wrong; [...]