Other Electricities by Ander Monson
#69 in my book challenge for the year, Other Electricities was highly recommended both at Blog of a Bookslut and The Lit Blog Co-op. It’s a collection of connected stories, narrated by different characters of a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
He remembered reading fragments of a story from a National Geographic…Most of the story had been lost, but he was able to pick up on the leftover bits…With these points of reference he was able to reconstruct the story to his satisfaction. In a way, it was like reconstructing old fragmented poems, or like translating from one language to another, from a world of hard but sparse facts to a storyscape of soft, fulfulling fictions. P. 142
Taken individually, some of the stories are quite powerful, like the one of the title and “To Reduce Your Likelihood of Murder.” Monson’s stories were defiantly fragmented, and in the end what I wanted was that “storyscape of soft, fulfilling fictions.” What I found instead was a group of well-written, intriguing stories about characters who moved by too quickly for me to develop any deep attachment. The stories, like the town in which they are set, are chilly and harsh. This is not a novel in stories, and it is not a comforting book. But it is a well-written and challenging one, especially for those who love the short story form or experimental fictions.