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What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us (2009)

by Laura van den Berg(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0976717778 (ISBN13: 9780976717775)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Dzanc Books

review 1: I spent most of the day hate-reading this book. Its repetitive structures (of plot, imagery, relationships) were frustrating and plodding. and yet there were occasional moments of sweetness where something genuine peeked out from behind the undergraduate writing-workshop cleverness. Maybe that's why I kept going. van den Berg's stories are variations on a single theme: educated, lonely white woman encounters primitive-mythological (Balinese death mask, Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster). There's always water, which seems to be kind of a meta-metaphor--as if it represents the fantasy that all problems might be washed away, all mysteries revealed (or just drowned, as if each story is a rewriting of Kate Chopin's Awakening). Characters are incessantly touching each other between the... more shoulder blades in ways that are supposed to be fraught with significance and intimacy. But the stories lapse into heavy-handed axiom. Van den Berg seems not to trust her imagery to signify nor her readers to interpret.
review 2: These stories have a perfect mix of the strange and the intimate ordinariness of character lives. Some have more bizarreness than others, but always the right amount. The best aspect of these stories, though, is the subtlety of the emotions. The emotion is always there, and you can always feel exactly what the message is through what the character is feeling, but it isn't crassly articulated. Pressed, I'm not sure I could articulate it myself. Instead, I just sat back after reading each story and knew I got it (whether or not what I got was what was intended). less

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