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The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories

di Donald Antrim

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1076252,740 (3.33)5
"A masterful story collection--heartbreaking and hilarious--from one of America's greatest writers Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do--bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo--they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved. These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." And here, at last, is the story collection we have been waiting for, The Emerald Light in the Air, Antrim's best book yet"--… (altro)
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Not what I was expecting having previously read only Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World, but these stories make sense when you realise all seven were published in the New Yorker. With one exception they’re about educated, middle-aged, more or less ridiculous Manhattanites processing their neuroses in public and in private. But if that sounds horrible, Antrim imbues his creations with enough humanity to make you laugh at them, cheer for them, and condole with them. Like the subject of Another Manhattan who lands himself with a $300 florist’s bill he can’t pay on the way to dinner with his wife and the couple they’re having unsatisfactory affairs with, or the buffoonish lawyer navigating an awful book launch party while trying to get over his very-much-ex.

A three- or maybe four-star set of six, if you like that sort of thing. But about that one exception, the title story here. It’s been a long time since I put a book down and just exhaled. Simply one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Antrim packs so much into twenty pages, mingling the interior world of his character with the chain of events he finds himself swept along with. Driving into the country to throw out his ex’s art, he slides off the road, drives along a creek as a storm starts, is mistaken for a country doctor, visits a dying woman’s bedside, tries to help, while remembering his first sex, his first love, his shock treatment for depression, a luminous trip to Italy. It’s about trauma, death, regret, nostalgia, and bumbling through it all as best you can, and it’s beautiful, its sentences vibrating and shining like filaments in a web — full of incidents and connections that are amazing and somehow entirely real and — holy shit, just read the damn thing! ( )
  yarb | Feb 26, 2022 |
Almost without exception, there is something askew in the stories of Donald Antrim. Typically the perception of the central figure or figures will be a bit off. That might be due to a mania that has seized them or a dependency of some kind that is not being addressed, or they may have a history of mental illness and be on the cusp of another episode.

In the earliest story here, “An Actor Prepares,” what emerges is something zany, beyond whatever norms you might expect to hold, but ruthlessly pursued and realized. In each of the other stories, something sadder finds expression. Characters are in the grip of forces they acknowledge are beyond their control. They are helpless in their plight, and worse, do not seem able to be helped even by those around them who love them. Suicide is a real possibility at any point, but more typically resignation and dissolution are all that can be managed. In each of these sadder stories, with the possible exception of the title story, “The Emerald Light in the Air,” grim reality awaits whether institutional or otherwise.

The title story, which is the most recent of those in the collection, reveals a new twist, an almost redemptive possibility that stems not from direct action but from acceptance of the path one is forced upon. Toward the end of this story, the main character, Billy French, shoots a padlock off a chained gate and achieves a kind of modest freedom, even if it only means allowing Billy to get his car back to a road from which he will be able to find his way home. In short, Billy effects his own possibility for hope. But it is like a breath of fresh air.

Each of the stories here is well worth reading. And the collection as a whole is to be recommended. ( )
1 vota RandyMetcalfe | Sep 14, 2016 |
I wasn't familiar with Donald Antrim's work before, but now that I am I want to find out more. Antrim's stories - with the exception of "An Actor Prepares" probably a piece of juvenilia which although funny and chaotic is ultimately confusing - are sad and profound, as the characters' worlds unravel before them. In "Another Manhattan" a young man's good intentions - buying flowers for his wife - collapse under the pressure of his ongoing mental difficulties and the night swirls out of control. Its one of the most moving descriptions of mental breakdown I've ever read, and it feels true. In "He Knew" a fading actor and his wife, struggle through a Manhattan Saturday each in the grip of their own neurosis, testing their love for each other. In "Ever Since" a young man struggles to respond to his new girlfriend, still obsessed and weighed down by the departure of his previous long term girlfriend

This collection is only 150 pages; but so intense are the stories that it takes much longer to read than the average novel. Truly excellent ( )
1 vota Opinionated | Aug 21, 2016 |
In seven stories that feel both conventional yet quirky, Antrim offers a concise compendium of bad decisions. His characters have serious flaws they do not accept and set out to prove they are better than they are with results that are both comedic and tragic, but also sad, while not foreclosing on the possibility that there is a modicum of heroism in some of them. Some of them. Let me make that clear. Certainly there is nothing noble in the narrator of "Pond with Mud," an emotionally condescending man who sets out to take his girlfriend's young son to the zoo and runs into the boys estranged alcoholic father in the train station. The narrator offers to buy his putative rival a drink. When the meeting in the bar doesn't give the narrator the ego high he was after, we get the worst and most raw bad decision in the collection. ( )
1 vota byebyelibrary | Oct 12, 2015 |
I nearly abandoned this book halfway through the first story, and I would have missed reading probably the most accomplished short stories- things unravel and go thrillingly strange and tender. ( )
  jconnell | Sep 5, 2014 |
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"A masterful story collection--heartbreaking and hilarious--from one of America's greatest writers Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do--bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo--they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved. These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." And here, at last, is the story collection we have been waiting for, The Emerald Light in the Air, Antrim's best book yet"--

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