Review of May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks

May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks is a collection of thirty short stories, some of them a page or two in length. Most of these stories, like the first story “Death and the People,” are modern fairy-tales gone wrong due to people’s rampant desires. The first story in the collection is a story much like Everyman and Dr. Faustus. Death approaches the people and asks a single person to follow him to the afterlife, but the people are so close to one another that they tell Death that if one goes all must follow. Through much persuasion, the people convince Death to take them all to the afterlife. Like Dr. Faustus, the people don’t take Death’s warnings seriously. Away from earth, the people become restless and bored because in the afterlife, humans don’t have the luxuries and means of entertainment they had on earth. They all drain Death to the point of annoyance. He goes to the Ones in Charge for advice. After the people are taken back to earth and offered a fresh start, there is new hope for mankind. The first thing the people speak of when they are back on earth is “how they came to be.” Sparks, or rather the omniscient narrator, gives the people, essentially the reader, a second chance at life—or an idea of what that would look like. Will the human-race destroy the earth once more? Sparks ends the story where other writers might start or continue. 

Each narrator in Sparks’ stories has a unique and distinct voice and point of view. She uses a third person omniscient narrator when a story deals with fables and supernatural events—a technique Sparks uses to distinguish immortality vs. mortality. A third-person omniscient narrator achieves omnipresence—the ability of being in many places at once and one that has more information on its characters than the characters themselves; the narrator in a sense becomes God. In stories with more quotidian characters, Sparks uses the first-person plural or second person point of view to reach a broader audience, since human emotions and common circumstances like loss, divorce, and relationships are presented. In “the dictator is drinking alone,” there’s a strong sense that something important has been lost in the dictator’s life, but the subjective third person narrator does not say what that something is. Sparks does a great job of conveying a sense of grief and unwanted solitude in the dictator’s life with props like whiskey and characters like the dictator’s pathetic son, but that thing that the dictator has lost is never named. All the reader gets in the end is Joey (from the 1953 movie Shane) screaming for Shane to come back.

           

Instead, adult fables deal with the feelings of solitude, awkwardness, hope, despair, and loss, emotions all humans feel at some point. In “to make us whole,” an emotionally unstable mother sketches “blood-flowing clouds” on her children’s bedroom walls—she has no money to buy drawing paper. Her husband committed suicide after “being discovered in Disgrace” (morality plays an important role in Sparks’ stories, to the point where sins become personified). The narrator explains how her siblings have witnessed their mother’s erratic behavior since their father’s death. The mother’s emotions are understandable, and she is sympathetic, but Sparks takes the reader by surprise when the family go on a supernatural journey; their new bathtub comes to life—trees and dresses come out of it, and an arm seeps through the drain and transforms itself into replicas of the family it invaded. Again, the story ends at the moment other writers would label a climax rather than an ending. The outcome of this family’s life could’ve been explored more, but it ends abruptly as a way to leave questions unanswered and allows the readers to fill in the pieces.

     

In one of Sparks’ most visually detailed stories, “the world after this one,” a young girl named Esther describes a life with an unstable sister, Ellie, her obsessively religious father, and a mother who almost seems to appear and disappear out of the living world. This is how Esther characterizes her father. The descriptions that follow are absolutely amazing. Esther’s father cannot love his daughters because every day, he is off trying to save people’s souls. In turn, he cannot be loved because he’s always wrapped up in an internal fight. “His gargoyle face is perfect for preaching, but bad for loving. Esther finds it impossible to love. The nose is too sharp, the cheeks too sunken. It is the face of an ascetic, a man who lives alone with his god and his demons. Now he shakes his head, like he’s coming out of a vague, bad dream, and continues on with his sermon. Esther shrugs and keeps typing on the old Remington. Her father thinks computers are the devil’s code machines” (42).

           

Sparks’ characters are doomed to fail over and over again. The connection between Sparks’s work to Dr. Fausuts can only fundamentally merge if the first story in her connection, “Death and the People,” is somehow linked to all of the characters in this collection. What this means is that Sparks’ more mundane or “human” characters need to shed their corrupt skin to that of supernatural beings to escape what most haunts them, human emotion. 

Art of the Sentence Piece

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

            The more I stare at the typed version of this sentence, the smaller it becomes, at least visually. Book in hand, I read it, see it, and taste it as if the twenty-six-word sentence were pages and pages in length—as if it weighs four tons. I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude in my early teens. Images of the Buendía family’s chaotic, almost barbaric traditions stuck with me everywhere I went, like the image of Jose Arcadio Buendía tied to an Eden-like tree of knowledge under the harsh ever-changing weather of Macondo, or how Amaranta’s stubborn virginal ways eventually led her to her death, but I don’t remember having this particular sentence stand out from the rest. It wasn’t until I came back from Nicaragua this year, after four years of not going to my country, that I picked up the book again with nostalgic eyes and realized that I couldn’t move past the first sentence of the novel. It wasn’t until about a month ago that I was able to know why I had become so drawn to this sentence.

       
There is a sort of longing in the last part of the sentence, “Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Colonel Aureliano Buendía is a stoic character who, throughout the novel, removes himself from human contact because he is unable to feel anything for anybody. Yet this sentence says otherwise, it gives the reader a glimpse of a character who has been deemed hopeless and portrays him as a man who is tormented by a lost father-son relationship that stopped the very moment José Arcadio Buendía took his son to discover ice.

         
The novel tells the story of a family carried adrift along the currents of a more modern, mechanical world. The unknown gypsies of major towns travel to Macondo with pots and pans, magnets, ice and other inventions that still had not been discovered in that part of Colombia. José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of the town, becomes mesmerized by the new inventions to the extent of neglecting his duties as a father and husband. The family’s innocent routine is interrupted by modern ideals. José corrupts his son, Aureliano by taking him to see the gypsies on the day they have brought ice. From that day until his death, Colonel Aureliano Buendía “discovers” the same world his father had been obsessing about for years. In short, his mind becomes tainted by the traditions of other regions. Macondo had never seen ice; therefore, it leaves a tremendous impression on the thirteen year-old Aureliano Buendía, to the point that his only memory in life is “of that distant afternoon.”

       
García Márquez could’ve simply written, “As he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía suddenly remembered the afternoon his father took him to discover ice.” But words like many, years, distant, portray something that was once reached but has not been recovered for multiple centuries. Phrases like “distant afternoon” sound romantic, like an unreachable, unimaginable lover that one hasn’t met but it predisposed to meet at some point in life. Given that One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered magical realism, García Márquez almost has an obligation to overdramatize each word by humanizing its qualities, not to mention playing with time, which was one of magical realism’s main concerns during the Post-Modern era. Márquez links the past and the future in this sentence by preparing the reader for a future war-zone, which Colonel Aureliano Buendía will undoubtedly take part in and a past filled with innocent, naïve minds of people who are just beginning to discover materials that have long existed in other parts of the world. When I see this sentence, I see grief—an assault; I see the colonel getting shot by the opposing party. I see a man that once comfortably rested under his mother’s arms as she rocked him to sleep—the woman who never thought that her newborn would ever grow pubic hair on his face, or leave that comfortable warmth of her arms, let alone be part of a war that kills other adult-children just like her own, leaving another mother parading around the dusty streets, following her son’s casket to the cemetery.

       
Márquez successfully captures the rise and fall of a town in a book in just one sentence. In the New York Times Book Review, William Kennedy wrote, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, and meaningless in life.’ Even though this quote appears in the back covers of all the English translation copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a place where a publisher will cherry-pick their blurbs to get readers to buy a book, Kennedy was right; the book is a must-read for every human on the face of the earth because it tells the tale of a people. Essentially, Macondo is all of us and with a sentence like this, it’s hard to put the text down.

I store One Hundred Years of Solitude on the very top shelf of my book collection not only for the author’s literary genius, but because I can relate to García Márquez’s upbringing. Like him, my grandparents used to tell me the folkloric tales of Granada—tales of La Llorona, the devil, the legend of the Carreta Nagua, and the dead inhabitants of the town that sleep at one’s feet at night. García Márquez used most of the material that his grandmother, Tranquilina, shared with him, and placed those tales in the form of stories that created One Hundred Years of Solitude. I barely spoke to my grandfather, Enrique, on the phone those four years I had not travelled to Nicaragua. When I was finally able to visit him, I thought he would pick up where we left off, but not only did he not have any more stories left to tell, he hardly spoke to me. He didn’t know me; too much time had passed, too many deaths had claimed our family members. And his lung cancer prohibited him from sitting for too long in my presence. When I left him, I thanked him for telling me all those legends as a child—I thanked him for helping me become a writer. He didn’t say a word. When I came back to the States, I grabbed One Hundred Years of Solitude like a life raft. I wanted to relive those festive moments with my grandfather, even if it meant reliving those memories through another man’s story.

A couple of days ago, I envisioned myself being eighty; old and crippled, the four hundred and seventeen pages that make up One Hundred Years of Solitude tattooed all over my body—the words’ ink poured into my skin—my grandfather’s voice nearest me—from my scalp to my toes. The image of it is compelling—that of a walking novel, but after considering it further, I have only decided on its opening sentence; I believe it captures the book’s brilliance on its own.  

Review of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

This book was recommended to me sometime in high school seven years ago. I finally had the chance to read The Things They Carried about two weeks ago. A bit late for today's standards (for a writer), but at least I got it done. I was afraid to become disappointed in a book that was so highly acclaimed by everyone I had come across. It's safe to say that this was not the case. In such a short period of time between finishing the novel and thinking about what I would write in my review, The Things They Carried has become one of my favorite story collections. I say collection because O'Brien did not write this novel in a conventional, chronological way as it was done primarily in Realism, a style much like the style O'Brien chose to write this collection.

Each chapter in The Things They Carried can be read on its own or compacted together to form what it has become after publication. A lot of negative reviews are based upon this absurd idea that this novel is about Vietnam, disregarding the love stories that are in the text, and I am not referring solely on First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’ love for Martha. I am referring to the whole shebang. Despite being in a war zone, these men have become the objects that they carried—objects used as survival souvenirs. Essentially, they become these objects—objects that we use in our daily lives. The men almost become superstitious and become infatuate with materials they think will bring them safely home.

The most captivating story for me can be found in the chapter titled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” a clear chapter that demonstrates this book is not about Vietnam, but about the experiences of people who didn’t have a voice before joining something of this magnitude. Mary Anne Bell, for which this chapter is dedicated to, is a heart wrenching character—a young, seventeen year-old blonde from the suburbs who is flown in from the boonies in Cleveland to Vietnam to visit her high school sweetheart Mark Fossie. Within several days Mary Anne Bell demanded to be around the “thatched roofs and naked children, the wonderful simplicity of village life” (96).  Within a few weeks Mary Anne realized she was in a war after practicing being in ambush on several occasions. And one day, she never returned. “And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back.” Mark Fossie’s perfect woman did not get swept away by Nam, what happened to her is that she discovered her true self. Mary Anne felt as though she was part of a community, a person doing actual good whether it was being a part of the Vietnamese people or not, at least she was not going to follow the classic outline of a woman’s predestined life; get married, have children, take care of the kitchen, the husband, and throw away the self along with a predestined plan not of her own. Mary Anne fell in love with nature, to the possibility of living out a life free of restrictions. The story is overwhelmingly melancholic because of the time span a human being can lose his or her innocence, in this case, the lost innocence of a young woman who lived for years in a comfy suburban area, not knowing what the meaning of war was, to only be pushed into it so easily and see it alive in front of her—this all foreshadows the narrator’s lost innocence. He chose to re-tell this story because in a way, the narrator feels as though he’s still lost out there, deep in the jungle, just like Mary Anne.

If the narrator really wanted to talk about the war in Vietnam, I doubt he would be re-telling or even observing the small things that happened to these men. When it comes to a work of fiction, usually, politics and war is only a framework to hold the core of the story in place. The real meat lies in characterization. And Tim O’Brien has awed me. How can I not fall in love with a man who always wears panty hose around his neck while in combat? Or Jimmy Cross’ lonely idea of love, or the narrator’s constant repetitive sentences to portray trauma. Or the fact that despite being stories about love in a war zone, the narrator is trying to teach you how to write a good story while he pushes through his memories (meta-fiction).

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) T.S. Eliot writes, “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”
What this means is that we should forget about the author, and look solely at the text in front of us (also called New Criticism). I don’t care if Tim O’Brien says this story is about him or if reviewers constantly throw that at my face. I care about what’s written down. As a fiction writer, reader, reviewer, I’m looking at this as fiction because that’s what is states in the back cover. Therefore when I was reading this collection, the narrator, named Tim O’Brien was not the author Tim O’Brien whose picture lies on the back cover. Critiquing the work exclusively on its craft and not on blue-book knowledge, will give us the opportunity to break apart each word and savor the way it is beautifully glued together into sentences and paragraphs to create stories and characters we will never forget. Every time I get stuck in my own work from now on, I will refer to this magnificent collection of stories.