The Magical Realist and the New Weird: Kelly Link
Despite the grand, grandiose title of this post, I don't have any grand, grandiose pronouncements to make on Kelly Link.
I just have a question: why do people like Kelly Link's stories?
(I'm expecting/hoping Chris and maybe John will take up this question; I'm honestly a little perplexed by this. At least tell me why you like them.)
It could be that I am simply unpleasable; or that these stories would have tickled the part of me that enjoys clever writing had I simply read them at the right time. But as it is, this book (Magic for Beginners) was a real grind for me to get through.
It could have been the clever turns-of-phrase that exposed rather than hid a certain hollowness of feeling at the core of these stories. (Or is this just an effect of writing about characters who are numb or inarticulate or vaguely longing or just plain vague?) It could have been the somewhat rote fragmentariness of the stories, as if a machine wrote it but tried to make it look hand-made by pre-stressing the edges. (But let's take that metaphor one step further: a machine-made fragmentariness, where the edges have been filed away and sanitized to avoid lawsuits from cut fingers. You couldn't even get a paper-cut from these stories.) And last, but not least, the peculiar style of American magical realism which Link practices here has the tell-tale cowardice of being afraid of dragons*--everything fantastic rescued by being only possibly fantastic but more likely a metaphor. This may be what I find most disappointing in these stories: that to approach something like literariness, Link makes fantasy perform tricks rather than magic.
*As Le Guin puts it in her essay on the American dismissal of fantasy, "Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?"
I just have a question: why do people like Kelly Link's stories?
(I'm expecting/hoping Chris and maybe John will take up this question; I'm honestly a little perplexed by this. At least tell me why you like them.)
It could be that I am simply unpleasable; or that these stories would have tickled the part of me that enjoys clever writing had I simply read them at the right time. But as it is, this book (Magic for Beginners) was a real grind for me to get through.
It could have been the clever turns-of-phrase that exposed rather than hid a certain hollowness of feeling at the core of these stories. (Or is this just an effect of writing about characters who are numb or inarticulate or vaguely longing or just plain vague?) It could have been the somewhat rote fragmentariness of the stories, as if a machine wrote it but tried to make it look hand-made by pre-stressing the edges. (But let's take that metaphor one step further: a machine-made fragmentariness, where the edges have been filed away and sanitized to avoid lawsuits from cut fingers. You couldn't even get a paper-cut from these stories.) And last, but not least, the peculiar style of American magical realism which Link practices here has the tell-tale cowardice of being afraid of dragons*--everything fantastic rescued by being only possibly fantastic but more likely a metaphor. This may be what I find most disappointing in these stories: that to approach something like literariness, Link makes fantasy perform tricks rather than magic.
*As Le Guin puts it in her essay on the American dismissal of fantasy, "Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?"