In this debut collection of seven dystopian fantasies, some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper’s, America in the near future is a toxic wasteland overrun by vicious thugs and venal opportunists who prey on the weak and misshapen. Saunders’s feverish imagination conjures up images as horrific as any from a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a field full of braying mules toppled over from bone marrow disease; a tourist attraction featuring pickled stillborn babies; and cows with Plexiglas windows in their sides. The black humor and vision of American enterprise and evangelism gone haywire are reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut‘s early works. In the novella “Bounty,” for example, the clawed-foot narrator, who flees slavery under the “Normals” to find his sister, sees a McDonald’s that is the headquarters of the Church of Appropriate Humility, aka “the Guilters.” “In Guilter epistemology,” he observes, “the arches represent the twin human frailties of arrogance and mediocrity.” Despite the richness of the vision and the occasionally heart-melting prose, however, there is little difference in voice to distinguish one story from another. Read in one sitting, they blur into a bleak and unsettling vision of the world to come.
George Saunders, a geophysicist, maps out magical realism with this short story collection. He puts an American spin on that sensibility in the sensationally good title tale, where things in a “Westworld“-like amusement park go extraordinarily wrong, but in ways in that make perfect sense to any denizen–or reader–in the modern world. CivilWarLand is hilarious, yet ultimately sad and moving–and isn’t that life in a nutshell? And how can you resist any writer who cooks up titles as good as “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”?
Librería del balcón 