Chicago Tribune Reviews You Think That’s Bad

The intrepid British travel writer Freya Stark, best known for her wanderings in the Middle East before the midpoint of the twentieth century, was in remote precincts of Persia in the mid-1930s when she was struck with malaria. As she reports in her book, “The Valleys of the Assassins” (named for a Shia sect that employed murder as a political tool), she lay there “not expecting to recover,” looking over a barren landscape whose nakedness, “was in itself a preparation for the greater nakedness of death.”

We will meet Freya and her assistants, the guide Ismail and muleteer Aziz,  in Jim Shepard’s “The Track of the Assassins,” one of the standout short stories in his new fiction collection “You Think That’s Bad.” She is weak with malaria as the story ends, but Ismail has just washed her face with water from a goatskin and wished her well. They exchange smiles and she tells us, “My eyes close under the weight of so much sadness and gratitude.”

The stories in “You Think That’s Bad” are heavily threaded with sadness and gratitude, in fact: sadness for the disappointments that seem ever to beset our relationships, and gratitude for the thrill that walking in the world can otherwise entail. The hope that such disparate wellsprings of emotion can be reconciled – or at least, the conflict between them minimized – becomes a driving force in Shepard’s stories.

As a Polish mountaineer expresses it, in a story that hinges on tension between the climbers’ appetite for death-defying excitement and their wives’ consistent anticipation of widowhood, not to mention months-long abandonment as the lesser alternative, “The mountains seemed to us another chance, our attempt to understand ourselves and exorcise those aspects we detested. To become the sort of person we could begin to respect.”

A word on history here: That story, titled “Poland Is Watching,” is saturated with a background motif of national pride that reflects Polish climbers’ (real historical) notoriety in wintertime climbing in the Himalayas. Just as the historical Freya Stark was re-deployed in “The Track of the Assassins,” so those who made the film “Godzilla” will be in “Gojira, King of the Monsters” (the film was retitled in the West): special-effects master Eiji Tsuburaya, director Ishiro Honda, and stunt man Haruo Nakajima in reptilian guise. In “Classical Scenes of Farewell,” the most chilling, disturbing story in the collection, the Medieval French aristocrat and army marshal Gilles de Rais and his henchmen, executed in 1440 for serial murder of children, are reprised, in confessional narration by Etienne Corillaut,  de Rais’s page.

Shepard’s use of relatively accurate biographical fact is bent to his own dramatic needs. Unlike memoirs that skew the truth, this is fiction that uses truth to warp into its own staged, often memoir-like reality. Affect — the feeling of the lived moment — is Shepard’s quarry, in contexts that range from the Netherlands in a futuristic flood crisis (already, “Bangladesh was almost entirely a bay”) to the South Pacific during the Second World War to upstate New York to the environs of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

At the collider (and all of Shepard’s stories can be thought of as mini-colliders), the  physicist narrator remarks, “All of us have kids and spouses and pets and hobbies, but that’s not where we live. Where we live is that part of the cortex where we do our model building.”  His wife, who by his description felt he “wasn’t entirely on board for the stunned-by-grief-thing” after she had a miscarriage,  asks him, “What are you really looking for?” and he responds “That saving thing, I think: something that right now is beyond our ability even to imagine.”

That is the dilemma faced by many of Shepard’s people: they can spot the problem but have trouble groping their way toward a solution.  And often as not, home life has been a hatchery of unhappiness.  In “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” a young man doing avalanche research angrily considers writing to his sister, who has accused him of shedding suffering by walking away from everyone, that, “In our family the most exacting labor had been required to obtain the bleakest of essentials.”  Freya Stark observes of herself and a sister that their mother, “filled with happiness herself, had never noticed that our lives were heaped about in miniature ruins.” In the World War II story, a pair of brothers watches their father eye them critically from top to bottom. One brother leaves, teary-eyed, but the other, who narrates the story, “hung around for a minute, to see if it was just my brother or both of us he hated.”

A sense of disconnection between people runs freely through the stories in “You Think That’s Bad,” sometimes the result of intentional withdrawal, sometimes not. In “Gojira, King of the Monsters,” Tsuburaya and his wife Masano “sat facing each other like mirror images of defeat,”  him pleased at being able to provide their son employment, she distressed that her husband had ignored her wishes in doing so. At another point – and perfectly suggesting the emotional duality so commonly on display in Shepard’s work – she tells their son when Tsuburaya arrives home from work, “There he is with his warm smile. Orchestrating his catastrophes.”

The full review can be found here.

Jim reads in Brooklyn, May 24

For more information about the event, click here.

Jim Shepard Reads at Broadway Books in Portland Tonight!

Calling all PDX-ers – be sure to stop by Broadway Books at 7:00 pm tonight.  Don’t miss it!

Here is the link:  http://www.broadwaybooks.net/Events.html

I’m coming too and I look forward to meeting you!

The Los Angeles Time Reviews Jim’s New Book

I like a review that starts with stating a very obvious truth: that more readers out there out to know how amazing Jim Shepard really is.  Here is the review:

It’s not that Jim Shepard isn’t known, exactly; it’s that he isn’t known enough. Although his 2007 collection of short fiction, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway,” was a finalist for the National Book Award, he has never fully caught on with readers — his work is too diverse, too out there, too plain unclassifiable to find a place among the silos that define so much of our conversation about writers and books.

That’s to our detriment, for, beginning with his first novel, “Flights,” in 1983, Shepard has traced his own odd line through contemporary fiction, engaging everything from historical figures to the most outrageous landscapes of the imagination to fuel his work. In “Nosferatu” (1998), he builds a novel around the German Expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau; “Project X” (2004) describes a Columbine-like school shooting from the point of view of one of the attackers, a confused eighth-grader who seems as surprised as anyone when the shooters’ plan actually takes shape. These are prototypic Shepard characters: adrift, a bit uncertain, with a strangely futile sense of destiny. “At this point,” the narrator declares in “The Netherlands Lives With Water,” “each of us understands privately that we’re operating under the banner of lost control.”

“The Netherlands Lives With Water” is one of 11 stories in Shepard’s new collection, “You Think That’s Bad,” and it’s a stunner: a look at a future Holland in which climate change has created a flood crisis so extreme that it’s no longer certain how or whether the country will survive. “It’s the catastrophe for which the Dutch have been planning for fifty years,” Shepard tells us. “Or, really, for as long as we’ve existed. We had cooperative water management before we had a state.” What such a story really traces, however, is the point at which cooperation, management, all the tools of civilization may no longer be enough.

You can find the review here.

“Enough greatness to justify a life’s work in the form”

Here’s a piece by Justin Taylor on Bookforum.  This is just an excerpt:

You Think That’s Bad contains three new entries in the Shepard WWII catalogue. “Happy with Crocodiles” follows a US battalion from the Michigan and Wisconsin National Guard to Papua New Guinea, where they grow restive waiting for orders or action. The boys are young, underequipped, bedeviled by the climate, and bemused by the local aborigines. As the downtime piles up and the humidity spoils even the canned food, the narrator sorts out memories of an older brother who may have had ulterior motives for pushing him to marry his high school sweetheart. It’s a story of trust and betrayal that gradually transforms into a Nabokovian tangle of thorns.

“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” is a magnificent war story despite having no war in it. A team of Swiss avalanche researchers who call themselves the Frozen Idiots have “volunteered to spend the coldest winter in recent memory in a little hut perched on a wind-blasted slope . . . 3,500 meters above Davos.” The story’s present day is 1939, but the narrator is haunted by memories of a twin brother, Willi, whose adolescent death from shock a few days after an avalanche ruined the family and drove their mother to obsessive study of the physical properties of snow. It is her amateur scholarship that the narrator seeks to build on. As another member of the team remarks, “At certain altitudes, nothing might be less like a particular location than that same location under different conditions.” This wry, irrefutable nod toward the war (barely imaginable in ’39, but in retrospect looming) dances right up to the edge of portentousness without falling over the side. The quote could serve as the motto of the collection.

Set in Japan in 1954, “Gojira, King of the Monsters” tells the story of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special-effects innovator who brought the world Rodan, Mothra, Ultraman, and, most important, Godzilla. It is a rare departure from the first person for Shepard (there are two in YTTB; LYUA contained none; there are six in the entire Love and Hydrogen) and he does not stray far. We are with Tsuburaya at all times and have access to his inner life. But the small space between narrator and protagonist is essential. Tsuburaya considers the destruction wrought by the Allied forces during the war (atomic bombs as well as merciless fire raids) in light of the 1923 earthquake that leveled Tokyo and Yokohama a generation earlier (his father was one of the many thousands killed). These memories of apocalyptic devastation—the first disaster natural, the second man-made—contrast with those of a baby daughter who died peacefully in her sleep years before. All the while, he’s at work dreaming up the ultimate movie monster, as well as working out the technical challenges of actually building and filming the thing.

“Gojira” is without question the collection’s pièce de résistance. It brings all of Shepard’s energies to apotheosis and should have been the last story in the book—or, failing that, the first one. It is difficult, if you’re reading straight through, to see the final three stories as much more than afterthoughts, particularly the paint-by-numbers “Boys Town,” about an Iraq-war veteran with PTSD, which takes its title from the Spencer Tracy film of the same name.

Still, Shepard’s rare failures are more interesting than a lot of other writers’ successes, and he never commands less than your full attention. When the narrator of “Boys Town” says that “what I did was, in life you’re supposed to leave yourself an out, and I didn’t,” you feel for him, no matter that his personal apocalypse has been predictable (and predicted) more or less from the story’s start. In the last story, “Poland Is Watching,” a winter mountaineer on the verge of collapse approaches the summit of deadly Nanga Parbat. Against all odds (and reason), he will attempt the final ascent. When he tells of the need to forge “connections to this wild and beautiful earth,” he not only inspires belief and empathy, but seems to speak for every voice in the whole Jim Shepard catalogue, perhaps even for the author himself.

The full post can be found here.

Jim Shepard Gets Props from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Crowd

Here’s a great review of Jim’s work at the blog Tor. com, entitled “Genre in the Mainstream: Jim Shepard’s Human Monsters”

When I recently asked Shepard a modified version of the clichéd, “where do you get your ideas?” question, he responded, “I would be nowhere without my obsessions. Obsessions are good.” And one of Shepard’s obsessions seems to be monsters.

In the first Jim Shepard story I ever read (mentioned in a previous article here) the machinations and desires of famed amphibious monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon are explored in a heartbreakingly matter-of-fact tale. Acting as a sort of prequel and companion piece to the famous film of the same name “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” begins 250 million years before the boat of humans shows up and starts cramping the Creature’s style. But when the people do get there, the reader is treated to all of the Creature’s inner thoughts, ranging from his enjoyment and regrets about his actions, to specific and excruciating gruesome detail of his kills. Among other things, the Creature comments on the dopey habit the humans have of always leaving around a handy rope, seemingly for his benefit.

“Creature from the Black Lagoon” succeeds because despite the humor it doesn’t present the gimmick of doing a literary short story about the Creature in a gimmicky way. Instead the story takes you inside the psyche of a monster to a point that might be a little too close for comfort. Shepard employs this technique not just in his stories that deal with literal monsters, but in his “straight” literary stories, too. His most recent collection You Think That’s Bad (released March 2011) follows in the trend of his previous books by featuring a host of stories that star actual historical figures as the protagonists….

All of Jim Shepard’s novels and short story collections have something in them for a reader of the fantastical genres. “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” is in the book Love and Hydrogen that pound for pound has more SFF-style stories in it than the newest book. However, the new book You Think That’s Bad, contains the wonderful story I just described and a bunch of other ones that will appeal to the same kind of sensibility. If you’re a human who enjoys exploring your inner monster, or a monster who is searching for your inner human, the writing of Jim Shepard is here to help.

Visit Tor.com for the full review.

The Japan Times Reviews “Master of Miniatures”

The review is entitled “Of monsters and men: Godzilla’s stable master:”

Jim Shepard’s “Master of Miniatures” is a masterful miniature, a small container filled with substantial events and substantial pleasures. Based on the life of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects man who made it possible for us to enjoy Godzilla destroying Tokyo, it’s the story of that destruction, the seismic destruction of Tokyo in 1923, the aerial destruction of Tokyo in World War II, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also the destruction that those catastrophes wreak on Tsuburaya’s marriage.

The novel begins with the disaster of Tsuburaya’s marriage. Having forgotten Tanabata, the Star Festival, the one day of the year the two stars, Altair and Vega — the two lovers — can come together, he wonders, “at which he was more adept: hurting Masano inadvertently or intentionally.”

The Tsuburayas, we learn, had, once during their long-distance courtship, identified with the star-lovers. The day the lovers come together had been special for them. The brief period of togetherness the couple enjoyed, however, has ended. Now, after the death of their daughter “they each put in longer days, he in his innovations and his wife in her grieving.”

Tsuburaya’s innovations are, of course, in the realm of special effects, the ingenuity that made Godzilla — the monster and the movie — as powerful as they were. We learn, among the many other interesting things Shepard squeezes into a mere fifty pages, that the Godzilla-suit worn by the actor who towered over the 1/25th scale Tokyo weighed 100 kilos and thus, for scenes that would show only the top or bottom half of the monster, only half the suit was worn. We learn that the planes that menaced Godzilla to so little effect were filmed hanging upside down, and that the film was then inverted in order to conceal the wires because “no one noticed them below the aircraft instead of above.”

That Shepard is able to enrich his novella with such information and that the knowledge he shares is always essential, never arbitrarily dumped, is a marker of his skill.

As we learn in accurate detail about the various catastrophes that accompany the creator of the destruction of Tokyo through life, we notice that he’s never quite present for them. On the day of the 1923 earthquake, for example, he was meant to have met his father from whom he had been estranged after running away to Tokyo to pursue a career in the movies. Tsuburaya is unable to make that rendezvous, a missed opportunity that increases in significance when his father, after ordering Tsuburaya from his hospital room, dies of the injuries sustained in the quake and its aftermath.

This is an example of how Shepard is able to use a catastrophe such as the Tokyo quake not as sensationalistic filler, but as an element of his novella’s design. The ever-widening schism between Tsuburaya and his wife, for example, also appears to stem from his never quite being there, even after his daughter dies. He always retreats into his work: the meticulous creation of destruction.

The smaller a work is the less baggy it can be. To be a success it must succeed at sentence, rather than paragraph or chapter, level. When Shepard writes not that an interviewer was aggressive, but rather that he “asked each of his questions as if jabbing a tied dog with a stick,” we see that he understands this.

Shepard has created a text rich with sentences as carefully wrought, and luminous with details that radiate well beyond the covers of this deceptively small book, a miniature that is anything but.

The full review can be found here.