Books: We Never Talk About My Brother
Oct. 6th, 2009 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwWell, reading anything by Peter S. Beagle usually leaves me in a state of deep calm, which is something I need quite a bit of at the moment.
Several of the stories in this volume are just heartbreaking, and oddly these are often the same stories that are very light and funny. I suppose it isn't odd, exactly, more a feature of the storywriter. Spook, for instance, was very funny and yet there was something deeply uncomfortable in the story, something about the relationship with the large unpleasant man whose assistance they request. I don't know, but it's like a burr underneath the humor. Not in a bad way. I can't remember if Ben is the man who lived with the goddess in Folk of the Air, but I think maybe? It's been forever since I read Folk of the Air.
I hadn't read the title story before, and thinking about it, it reminded me a bit of several classic 50s-70s sf stories, and yet not, because there's not such a sense of the world being put right at the end of the story, instead it's one of many iterating changes. A lot of the stories with similar plots set their darker character up as the first/unique aberration, and the battle against that character as a moral battle. Where this story fits better into human history as I understand it by suggesting many people with the ability to remake the world, along many lines.
I guess the best I can summarize it is that for me, a lot of these stories took place in a story-space where being human and ugly and flawed didn't mean you weren't human. A lot of times stories that examine deep points sort of dissolve focus at the end, and I'm left with this tragic sense that the characters were like a filter, and the philosophical point is meant to be a truth. Reading the stories in this collection gave me a deeply different sense - that whatever philosophical filters might get applied, we're still people. And that human lives can't be resolved into (I erased intellectual explanations and am stuck here with no good replacement) systems.
Several of the stories in this volume are just heartbreaking, and oddly these are often the same stories that are very light and funny. I suppose it isn't odd, exactly, more a feature of the storywriter. Spook, for instance, was very funny and yet there was something deeply uncomfortable in the story, something about the relationship with the large unpleasant man whose assistance they request. I don't know, but it's like a burr underneath the humor. Not in a bad way. I can't remember if Ben is the man who lived with the goddess in Folk of the Air, but I think maybe? It's been forever since I read Folk of the Air.
I hadn't read the title story before, and thinking about it, it reminded me a bit of several classic 50s-70s sf stories, and yet not, because there's not such a sense of the world being put right at the end of the story, instead it's one of many iterating changes. A lot of the stories with similar plots set their darker character up as the first/unique aberration, and the battle against that character as a moral battle. Where this story fits better into human history as I understand it by suggesting many people with the ability to remake the world, along many lines.
I guess the best I can summarize it is that for me, a lot of these stories took place in a story-space where being human and ugly and flawed didn't mean you weren't human. A lot of times stories that examine deep points sort of dissolve focus at the end, and I'm left with this tragic sense that the characters were like a filter, and the philosophical point is meant to be a truth. Reading the stories in this collection gave me a deeply different sense - that whatever philosophical filters might get applied, we're still people. And that human lives can't be resolved into (I erased intellectual explanations and am stuck here with no good replacement) systems.
