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Leaving The Sea: Stories (2014)

by Ben Marcus(Favorite Author)

3.39 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307379388 (ISBN13: 9780307379382)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Knopf

review 1: The first section surprised and bummed me out - and not in the way I want to be surprised and bummed out by Ben Marcus - but after that things got better. Definitely an uneven collection, but there are some great pieces in here. Marcus is possessed of an absolutely unique voice and perspective, of that there is no doubt, I just hope he's not moving into writing exclusively about men worn down to bitter nubs by women/babies/families.
review 2: Doesn't start off too promisingly, the first 4 stories lacking Marcus' linguistic pyrotechnics and displaying rather conventional narratives involving people in difficult family relationships. The second story is even about a writer giving a creative writing course which I always find self-indulgent an d full of in-trade r... moreeferences. But then the book absolutely takes off & soars as you see Marcus display what I call linguistic dystopias as he creates scenarios where language has broken down and been misplaced one after the other and reveals that he is able to do in short story form what his longer novels do. "First Love" is simply the best, as it looks at the strange ritual of seduction & sex through very alien eyes, as if to say all the signs & symbols we use in such a dance, are baffling and leave us a world apart from communicating with our partners. The other story I really enjoyed was "The Loyalty Protocol" which saw some rehearsals for evacuation in the face of an unspecified apocalyptic threat that laid bare the utter futility of the bureaucratic thinking that dreams up such plans. It echoed parts of Marcus' novel "The Flame Alphabet" but still struck new ground. No one else writing today that I know of amputates and then resutures language into the wrong places as Marcus does. So we have "languageflower" in "First Love" and fabrics replacing language in "The Father Costume" where fabric both mutes sound and possesses its own encoding of messages and communication. less

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