『S1E5 - S1.E5: What It Mans When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah』のカバーアート

S1E5 - S1.E5: What It Mans When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

S1E5 - S1.E5: What It Mans When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

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 Episode Notes Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well.  In this episode, I will be reviewing What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Are you ready? Cos I am. Let’s go clubbing! This book is a short story collection. So first things first, before I launch into my review, I’m gonna tell you about my beef with short story collections. I don't typically read them. And the reason I don’t read short stories is because I don't feel like I get enough time with the characters or enough time to sink my teeth into the character’s stories before I'm being dragged off into another story. It feels like speed dating. And for this reason Short story collections have always felt unsatisfying to me. So I usually avoid them.  Something else that I don't like about short stories, is that usually not always, but usually the endings never give any resolutions. So I'm speaking of a true resolution though not the resolution that I want. Let me explain. For example, I, just like most people, typically yearn for a happy ending to stories. But even where I don't get a happy ending, I want some sort of closure. So even where I don't get the happy ending that I want I will admire the alternative ending. I respect the alternative ending. I will think that it's brave of the author to choose the alternative ending. I may even concede that the alternative ending was the better ending. But on the other hand, I also think it is cowardly for a writer to choose no ending, to leave the story unresolved. And I feel like short story writers are typically guilty of this and short stories give writers a cop out from any sort of true ending or closure. Short story writers are notorious for jumping off the story and leaving you hanging with some intentionally esoteric ending, with some fill in the blanks with your own ending. Personally I find it gutless, weak, pathetic and I don't see anything to be admired with a lack of resolution in storytelling. And short stories are often guilty of this. So there’s my rant and now that’s out of the way. But first I’ll give you a teaser of the book. The stories tackle domestic abuse, untreated ptsd and its effects on a family, troubled teenagers, ghosts, domestic and sexual abuse. So this review is going to be a little bit different than the reviews of novels. Because this is a short story collection so we are not following the same characters from beginning to end, we're not following the same narrative arc, the themes change from story to story, and so forth.  So here’s what I loved about What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky. Fortunately in what it means when a man falls from the sky, most of the stories are well resolved. This does not mean Happy Endings or Bad Endings it just means there's closure. Most of the stories don't leave you intentionally hanging by the end. What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky is gorgeously written. The author's sentences are so economical it's a thing of stunning beauty. Lesley Nneka Arimah says the most with the least possible amount of words. I'll read from the first story called The Future looks good  and this is from on page 2. But before I read it, the context here is that a step mother puts a boy out of his home. Got it? Ok here we go… "The boy is 15 and returns from the market to find his possessions in two plastic bags on the front door step, he doesn't even knock to find out why or to ask where he's supposed to go but squats with other unmothered boys in an abandoned half-built bungalow where his two best shirts are stolen and he learns to carry his money with him at all times. He begs, he sells scrap metal, he steals, and the third comes so easy to him it becomes his way out. He starts small, with picked pockets and goods snatched from poorly tended market stalls. He learns to pick locks, to hotwire cars, to finesse his sleight-of-hand." See how she very quickly describes how this boy is abandoned by his parents and forced to become scrappy and street smart. It is So tightly done. there was not a spare, extra word. For example if you contrast this against Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. There's a huge chunk of the novel Oliver Twist where Charles Dickens spends a lot of his prose talking about how the Artful Dodger and Fagin teach Oliver how to become a pickpocket. A good good chunk of Oliver Twist is spent on what Lesley Nneka Arimah spends on a paragraph. Of course I understand that there are differences, one is novel and the other is a collection of short stories, and that in economizing your prose you sacrifice other things like character development and developing a fuller story for instance. But i still think my comparison between the two examples for the purposes of making my particular point about economy of words, holds. Or check this out on page 24 in the 3rd story titled Wild, but before I read the sentence I'd like to set the stage. Here we ...

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