Pastoralia
You don’t get enthusiastically blurbed by Thomas Pynchon, Michiko Kakutani and Garrison Keillor for no good reason, so a while back I bought Pastoralia by George Saunders.
This is one of the darkest, most disturbing, most keenly observed and damned flat-out funny books I have ever read. Saunders is a master of dry understatement, and has an ear for dialog like very, very few writers you will ever read. I won’t quote anything because it seems unfair to pull it apart (the link above has generous excerpts anyway) but some passages literally stopped me in my tracks and I gasped out loud. I couldn’t read the book in public because I would laugh so hard tears would roll down my face.
In an age when satire has become almost redundant, Saunders shows that there’s always a way for a master to crack things open just a little bit wider.
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Posted to Books • 2002.04.24 (Wed) • 22:05
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