Down to a Sunless Sea is another one of those books I probably wouldn't have come across except that I was offered a copy to review. I didn't know much about the book except that it was a collection of short stories about troubled people written by Mathias B. Freese, who is a clinical social worker and a psychotherapist in addition to being an author. Down to a Sunless Sea was apparently a finalist for a 2008 Indie Excellence Book Award in addition to receiving an Allbooks Reviews Editor's Choice Award. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with either honor. So, I accepted the book, not really knowing what I was getting into, but I am glad that I did.

Down to a Sunless Sea consists of fifteen short stories. Nine were previously published between the years 1974 and 2007, one ("Unanswerable") being an excerpt from Freese's historical novel The i Tetralogy. The other six stories make their publishing debut in this 2007 collection. Each story focuses on a person, portraying the interactions between society and self. Although overall the collection is somewhat dreary--the Holocaust is often used as a touchstone, for example--there are some very beautiful moments as well.

Despite the fact that the cover of the book declares the contents to be "short stories," for the most part I think it would be more accurate to call them character sketches. Even when there is a significant plot, Freese focuses more on the people rather than on the action. The stories tend to depict the darker aspects of human nature, but they are not approached without a sense of hope, compassion, and understanding. The writing is superb and the style is different from piece to piece, exhibiting Freese's skill and command of the English language.

The portrayals of the characters are exceedingly intelligent and relentless--Down to a Sunless Sea packs quite a punch for such a slim volume. I could see bits and pieces of myself throughout the book and so while I didn't always completely understand, I did feel a connection with these broken people. It certainly doesn't make for easy or light reading, in fact it's rather serious and even disconcerting, but it is very potent and very good.

Stories include: "Down to a Sunless Sea"; "I'll Make It, I Think"; "The Chatham Bear"; "Herbie"; "Alabaster"; "Juan Peron's Hands"; "Little Errands"; "Arnold Schwarzenegger's Father Was a Nazi"; "Echo"; "Young Man"; "Nicholas"; "Billy's Mirrored Wall"; "Unanswerable"; "For a While Here in This Moment"; and "Mortise and Tenon."

Experiments in Reading ( )

The book has some real bright spots. My favorite story was "Little Errands": the narrator has a compulsive disorder and the story is basically 4 pages of panic. Did she mail the letters, did they make it from the mail tray into the mail box, will the mailman pick them up, were there stamps on them...it made my skin crawl a little as I tried to imagine every little errand turning into this sort of enormous production. (I found it interesting, on a personal level, that I assumed the narrator to be a woman; looking back, the story doesn't indicate a name or gender.) I also found "I'll Make It, I Think" and "Herbie" very moving. The first is a story about a handicapped man and how he has dealt with his disabilities, naming his uncooperative body parts and dealing with his bitterness. I found "Herbie" terribly sad, a son being crushed by his father, even as his father tries to toughen him up.

I finished this book quite a while ago and have been letting it roll around in my head before I wrote my review. I thought with some more time, maybe the book would grow on me, but I have come to realize this one just wasn't for me.

There were a couple of stories that I really did like, but the majority didn't appeal to me. My favorite story was I'll Make It, I Think. It is the story of a young man who is physically disabled. You get a glimpse into his life and mind, and what you see isn't always pretty. He is angry and sometimes unhappy, but the story is unflinchingly honest.

I also enjoyed Little Errands a lot. It is a stream of consciousness type story and I really related to it. I occasionally have days when I feel like I am always second guessing myself and feel ragged and run down, like the character in the story.

I didn't really connect to the characters in the other stories though. It wasn't the writing, but more the feeling that I just didn't have anything in common with them. These stories are very short, sometimes only a few pages. I usually like my short stories to be a little longer so that I am able to get a sense of the character before moving on to the next story. ( )

Down to a Sunless Sea is a collection of stories about people who are at worst suffering from some defined or undefined mental illness and at best have a grim outlook on life.

Reading short stories is very different from reading novels, and as I hadn't read any short stories in a while this collection was quite startling. Novels give you a chance to get the lay of the land and you slowly come to realizations about the characters as they unfold not all at once, but over several chapters. Short stories plunge you right into the heart of the action, and in this book that is right into the minds of some seriously unbalanced people and their often grim experiences and/or outlooks on life. These differences definitely colored my reading of the stories in the first half of the collection as I struggled to find my balance in territory I hadn't explored in a while. Still I didn't get the point of a lot of these stories and it made me start to think about what is the point of short stories or any stories at all. I think all writing fiction, short stories and novels, when they are successful, convey at the very least how things affect people or other things. I'm not quite sure I got that here. I felt as if I were reading a bunch of vignettes or characters sketches in someone's writing notebook.

The characters are a strange bunch. I didn't like any of them but I didn't dislike any of them either. They just were. There were moments when I caught a glimpse of ways I have felt and reacted to things, albeit to a different degree. Little Errands, one of the best pieces for me, details the neurotic and obsessive-compulsive behavior of an unnamed narrator who is trying to run errands and mail letters, and having a very frustrating time of the experience, which unfortunately is their way of life. Fortunately for me I can have my little moments of neuroticism and infrequent OCD behavior and just call it a bad mood or a bad day. Insanity is in degrees and as with most things in life usually just a few steps away.

There was a little moment that resonated with me. It was brought into focus from the unformed knowingness in the back of my mind with this sentence:
"I missed Billy not because we were close, that is nostalgia; I missed Billy because he is a part of an arc in my life, a player in it, part of the context that explains me to me." [106]

I definitely have some people in my life that have defined periods of time for me and who I was then.

Some stories that stood out for me were The Chatham Bear, Little Errands and Nicholas (and this one probably because the pov was so different than the rest of the book, it was more interesting for the misspellings and grammar of the character). The tone of the first story was dreary and it remained relentlessly so throughout all the stories. No bright spots here. I worked through them slowly over a couple of weeks as they were hard to pick back up once I had put them down. If you're looking for light or upbeat read, I think the title says it all.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the short story format (and no, not just because my attention span is waning, smarty-pants). Not only do I enjoy being able to read a story here and a story there, but I've also come to appreciate the difficulty of writing the short story. It is, in my considered opinion, one of the trickiest genres out there.

One of the of authors who have mastered this art form is Mathias B. Freese. Down to a Sunless Sea is a treasure-trove of fifteen short stories in which Freese captures verbal snapshots within the human brain. In other words, he explores what makes people tick. As a psychotherapist and teacher, the author commands extraordinary insight into the mind. But so do a thousand others in his field. So what makes Down to a Sunless Sea so impressive? It's simple: Freese's ability to present each errant character in an understandable light.

My favorites? Since you ask:

"Little Errands" takes only four pages to perfectly convey what it's like to live with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (I know, I know, I ramble on about my book OCD all the time, but this is the real thing.) This poignant vignette takes one small incident -- the mailing of a letter -- and manages to convey the scope of living with the disorder without condecesncion.

In 1987, the tomb of former Argentine President Juan Peron was broken into and the hands removed from the corpse (they were ransomed for $8 million, in case you're wondering why someone would steal a dead person's hands). In "Juan Peron's Hands," Freese delves into the (just a little bit creepy) minds of the graverobber.

Two unclenched hands in a back street, no self, no name, no one, a reminder of us all. Two hands against a Magritte sky.
"Juan Peron's Hands," by Mathias B. Freese

Creepy the story may be, but prose like this is certainly beautiful to read.

"Alabaster" is the touching story of an elderly Polish concentration camp survivor who befriends a young boy. The boy, of course, knows nothing of the evil perpetuated during the War. His innocence, however, lies in stark contrast to the irreperable damage done to the old woman in the camps. The story is a haunting snapshot of a destroyed life. The woman survived, but at what cost to the psyche?

"Billy's Mirrored Wall" was perhaps the most resonant story in the collection. A man reflects on the importance of a seemingly innocuous event in his childhood. Coming from a solid blue-collar background, he remembers being vaguely impressed (in a twelve-year-old-boy, off-hand sort of way) after being invited over to a upper-middle class friend's home. The modern dishwasher, carpet instead of linoleum, but especially a wall covered in mirrors were all things he was unused to seeing in a home.

Boys being boys (even in the 1950's), his interest was passing at best. Just enough to mention it off-handedly to his own mother who, to his surprise, took great umbrage to the entire event. Her hurt at not being able to provide her own son with such minor luxuries morphs into anger and while the matter is quickly dropped, it is an event that her son never forgets. In fact, it incorporates itself into his adult life-view.
What Ma has done is to put something into me of her own design, unwillingly, and here I am left to master it, or make sense of it - really to metabolize it.
"Billy's Mirrored Wall," by Mathias B. Freese
The story begs the question of any parent: how much do we unwittingly damage our children in such passing moments?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading these stories and Down to a Sunless Sea has earned a permanent spot on my bookshelf. ( )