Every now and then my daily writing habit produces, almost accidentally, a short story, and when it happens it makes me immediately want to revisit some of my favorite renditions of the craft from years past. Like this gem of a collection by the great Pacific Northwest writer Charles D'Ambrosio. What follows is a review I wrote of the book when I first read it in 2006.Raised in Seattle myself, much of what I wrote seven years ago about The Dead Fish Museum holds true. However, this time around I was struck, perhaps because I now live in Los Angeles and feel great nostalgia for my home, by D'Ambrosio's incredible gift for evoking the feel, the damp, somehow beautiful dreariness of that rain-soaked landscape. The Seattle area, where constant precipitation turns the nearby ocean into a blanket of gray, has a cool, churning beauty to it that is somehow both heavy and uplifting. D'Ambrosio's prose has that same feel.From The Portland Mercury, 2006:Charles D'Ambrosio has no novels to his name, no film adaptations, and no epic pseudo-memoirs with egregious titles. All he publishes is short fiction and short nonfiction, and slowly at that—two story collections and an essay collection over 10 years. He is a writer's writer, a man who has climbed to the upper echelon of American letters with nothing but his perfectly honed prose to guide him. Six of the eight stories in his new collection, The Dead Fish Museum, were previously published in The New Yorker, and the magazine printed a seventh, "The Bone Game," in February. That's impressive.D'Ambrosio has described his own writing as "plotless," but plot is a whole different beast from story. Yes, D'Ambrosio's characters lead plotless lives, but their stories are as vibrant as anything you'll ever read. Ramage, the protagonist of the collection's title story, is a depressed carpenter who works on the sets of porn movies. The empty lives of the people in his profession—from his vapid, volatile hired hand to the fake-boobed has-been starlet—mirror the emptiness of his own life.The people in Dead Fish are sad, but not quite lost. They're too self-aware to be completely unhinged, but their inability to act on that awareness is heartbreaking. In "Up North," a New York insurance worker's angst over his wife's rampant infidelity comes to a head while visiting with her family in the woods. "She had never been a faithful lover," he tells us, with breathtaking clarity, "either before or after our marriage; she preferred sex with strangers, which I could never be, not again... And yet she continued to need the scrim of familiarity I offered, so that the world would fill more sharply with the unfamiliar."Such openness pops up everywhere in Dead Fish. The writing is beautiful, but not dazzling; unaffected, but not detached. D'Ambrosio sees a moment, an interaction, a place, and describes it with the clearest, most evocative language imaginable. His exquisite plainness is almost hopelessly refreshing—a tender, conversational intimacy that warms even the darkest tale.
Hailed as a latter-day Raymond Carver, the master of the American short form himself, I picked up Charles D'Ambrosio's collection up with much anticipation. The first story, "The High Divide", however, didn't quite engage me, perhaps because I was a little thrown off by (what I interpreted as) the deliberateness of 'exoticising' the setting and the main character's circumstances with these opening lines: "At the Home I'd get up early, the Sisters were still asleep, and head to the ancient Chinese man's store." How the boy came to be a resident of the Home also seemed an attempt to shock with the quietly disconsolate way it is revealed to the reader. However, these cynical musings soon gave way to real awe and wonder as I got swept away by the brevity and precision of the prose and 'slice-of-life' vignettes D-Ambrosio so expertly crafted.In the stories that follow, we are introduced to characters who struggle to live, or are sometimes so detached from the business of living they wither away at the edges of society. The middle-aged owner of a typewriter (repair) shop fights to keep his business relevant while providing care to his mentally-disturbed/deficient adult son, a suicidal screenwriter committed to a psychiatric hospital becomes embroiled with a ballerina who is addicted to burning parts of herself, and arguably makes an uneasy truce with himself by focusing on someone more damaged than himself. A man married to a fledgling actress spends time "Up North" with her family and friends while dealing with feelings of betrayal, and awkward machismo. Littered among the other stories are similarly unhappy individuals. In "Blessing", a couple from New York, Tony and Megan, to escape the harsh city for some solace in the outskirts of Mount Vernon, Washington, but finds another kind of disturbance when her family visits. Perhaps Tony's reflection on his disconnection from his absent father while looking at a picture of his parents sums up the condition of D'Ambrosio's characters best: "The photo yields nothing in the way of memories, nothing I might attach myself to, and my perspective on the scene.. is that of the anonymous man who, strolling down a sidewalk sometime in AUG 1961, was stopped by a young couple, handed a camera, and asked to press the button - a stranger on his way elsewhere."With nary a touch of romance or window-dressing, the author manages to cast his characters in a sympathetic light, and the afterglow of sadness that lingers long after the last sentence of each story. Definitely worth a read.
Do You like book The Dead Fish Museum: Stories (2006)?
il museo minimalista della sfiga e dei sopravvissuti a essaantologia minimalista di marcata impronta americana, i protagonisti sono persone che hanno avuto problemi e sono sopravvissuti, ma non sono più tornati a essere come prima, la malattia mentale, l'abbandono, la prigione, la droga, sono tutte cose da cui non si torna indietro o almeno chi torna non è lo stesso che è partitoracconti densi, ma non cattivi, lievi nel sottintendere e un po' grevi nel suggerire un'evoluzione più triste che avverrà fuori scena, dopo che il sipario è calato e il libro è stato riposto sullo scaffale...i tormentati scivolano via, ma le loro derive restano annidate in un angolo, come grani di sabbia dura attaccata alle ciabatte dopo una passeggiata sulla spiaggia...
—Mircalla64 (free Liu Xiaobo)
A friend of mine raved about this collection. She absolutely RAVED about it–to the point where I became rather suspicious. Could it be THAT good? She kept telling me to read it.So of course, in my stubborn way, I decided to NOT read it right away. I mean, no one tells me what to do and what to like!But I finally did pick up the book, a year later. And fell in love with the stories and D’Ambrosio’s writing. These are complex, complete stories–the characters so intricate, the writing both ruthless and compassionate. The level of detail he provides (and the eye for the right details) is amazing–I’ll have to pick apart each of the stories later, see where he goes deep and where he hangs back, and try to learn that perfect balance between the near and far. In terms of themes and such–they somehow remind me of Mary Gaitskill’s stories in the way they show the dark side of humanity.Awesome collection.
—Christine
Protagoniste dei racconti di D'Ambrosio sono le vite dolenti, incompiute, fallite, mancanti di una più parti vitali dei protagonisti (un bambino, una coppia che ha appena comprato una casa, una coppia di tossici che vivono d'espedienti, un giovane ereditiero alla morte del nonno, il marito di una donna stuprata da giovane e che da allora non ha mai avuto un orgasmo, lo sceneggiatore con disturbi mentali...)I personaggi sono fissati in un presente fatto di piccoli o grandi avvenimenti (la visita di parenti, un ricovero in ospedale psichiatrico, in viaggio...) che rimandano alle sofferenze destate dai vuoti delle loro vite. C'é una ricerca di senso ma più che altro ci viene raccontata una rassegnata accettazione dell'impossibilità di un cambiamento.La prosa di D'Ambrosio é semplice e limpida, quieta vien da definirla, ma come dei ciottoli gettati nella tranquilla superficie di un lago, i racconti fanno nascere dentro di noi increspature di senso che si allargano sempre di più. Ho chiuso la lettura provando quel senso di perdita e di vaga nostalgia che si vive quando un libro ha la capacità di produrre echi e risonanze dentro di noi che ci portano lontano e in profondità. Cosa rara, purtroppo.Ah il titolo. Il museo dei pesci morti. Che strano titolo mi son detta.A pag. 184 si scopre l'arcano.
—Paola
