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Loading... You Remind Me of Me: A Novelby Dan Chaon
Work InformationYou Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Dan Chaon is the best. This may be "literary fiction," but it's as unsettling as horror fiction. ( ) Digital audio performed by Jim Soriero. Chaon was already known as a talented writer of short stories when this debut novel was published. His background with that shorter form shows in this book. The first four chapters of the book introduce us to four different characters and time frames: 1977 and six-year-old Jonah is mauled by the family pet; 1978 and ten-year-old Troy is hanging out with teenagers smoking pot; 1966 and teenaged Nora is about to give birth at a home for unwed mothers; 1997 and six-year-old Loomis disappears from his grandmother’s backyard. Eventually the connections between them will be clear to the reader. What I really like about Chaon’s writing is how he explores issues of identity, how characters are shaped by their environment, by chance and opportunity, and by the choices they make. There is much to dislike about these damaged people, and yet I am drawn to these characters and their stories. I am distressed by the loneliness they endure and the wrong paths they take, and yet still find some hope for the future. The changing time frames and points of view do, however, make for a somewhat confusing experience. This is especially true for those who choose the audio version. Jim Soriero does an excellent job performing the audio. He is a skilled voice artist, with good pacing. Still, given the nonlinear plot, I’m glad I had a text version available so I could go back and reference earlier chapters easily. I really loved this book -- up until the last chapter. I felt the story was tied up neatly at the end of chapter 35. I was perfectly content with the way the novel ended and then along came chapter 36 to ruin the mood. I will likely look up other books of Chaon's because I was really drawn in by his style of writing, but I'll be a little more cautious about those final chapters... "There was no way to account for love, she thought, or for sorrow." Dan Chaon's gifts as a short-story writer show themselves in his exquisitely crafted sentences, as in this passage from the novel's opening: "In the movie you would only see him emerging from the bus, a boy running with his backpack dragging through the wet gravel, a red stocking cap, a worn blue ski jacket, stones grinding together beneath his boots, a pleasantly rhythmic noise he was making. And you would be up above everything like a bird, the long gravel road that led from the mailbox to the house, the weeds along the ditches, the telephone poles, barbed-wire fences, railroad tracks. The horizon, the wide plain of dust and wind." In this story of two half-brothers trying to make sense of the small and large failures of their lives, Chaon is sensitive to the subtleties of personality. He dwells in melancholy; he is well acquainted with sadness and longing. He is painfully honest about the complexities of relationships and shows us how people really feel about each other, how they struggle and fail to hide those feelings. The characters feel like real people -- so real, in fact, that they can become as boring as stretches of real life. They change and make decisions at a glacial pace. They can be so passive that the book becomes a dreamscape, where nothing that happens has deeply felt consequences. The chronology skips around frequently, sometimes for recognizable reasons of structure and pacing, sometimes not. I understand the novel's recursive style fits the theme of desperately wanting to remake the past, but honestly, after a while I wanted to take a pair of scissors to the whole thing and straighten it out. I admire the book for Chaon's facility with language and his willingness to look at people's motives and failures unflinchingly. The beginning and ending, where he apparently spent most of his energy, are as beautiful and moving as his short stories.
Dan Chaon's writing has grown darker and deeper with time, and his new book, the beautifully disquieting ''You Remind Me of Me,'' is no exception. It more than fulfills the promise of his story collection ''Among the Missing,'' which was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2001..... But for Chaon, whose subject is often the extraordinary fates of otherwise ordinary, anonymous people, these are artifacts -- a piece of flint, a shard of pottery -- from which he constructs a civilization. AwardsDistinctions
With his critically acclaimedAmong the MissingandFitting Ends, award-winning author Dan Chaon proved himself a master of the short story form. He is a writer, observes theChicago Tribune, who can “convincingly squeeze whole lives into a mere twenty pages or so.” Now Chaon marshals his notable talents in his much-anticipated debut novel. You Remind Me of Mebegins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaonexplores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable? In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary” people. No library descriptions found. |
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