Pastoralia
by George Saunders
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A stunning collection including the story "Sea Oak," from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collection Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as "graceful, dark, authentic, and funny," George Saunders gives us, in his inventive and beloved voice, this bestselling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable show more American landscape. show less
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askthedust Le même style déjanté et corrosif .
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Either a Kafka-esque or a Beckett-esque society collapsed under the weight of expectations. A father working the worst imaginable job to provide for his sick son. A male stripper whose family is upset that he doesn't bring home more money, and is haunted by his dead grandmother (who encourages him to show his cock). A barber trying to win a date with any girl desperate enough to have him, so long as she doesn't seem too desperate.
Each story is hilarious and heartbreaking. Deeply American and deeply for our times.
Each story is hilarious and heartbreaking. Deeply American and deeply for our times.
''His childhood dreams had been so bright, he had hoped for so much, it couldn't be true that he was a nobody.''
“Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu.”
Wow! This dude is out there. This story collection is firmly in Kurt Vonnegut country. In the long opening story, we are in a historical theme park, set in a fuzzy American future and we follow a couple who live like cavemen, butchering goats, grunting and eating bugs for the tourists. They are closely monitored by the park's management, for efficiency and authenticity. The rest of the collection, is as equally wacky, but Saunders style of satire, is sharp and show more inventive and explosively funny.
Obviously, he is not for all tastes, but if he clicks for you, you are in for a deliriously, delicious ride. show less
“Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu.”
Wow! This dude is out there. This story collection is firmly in Kurt Vonnegut country. In the long opening story, we are in a historical theme park, set in a fuzzy American future and we follow a couple who live like cavemen, butchering goats, grunting and eating bugs for the tourists. They are closely monitored by the park's management, for efficiency and authenticity. The rest of the collection, is as equally wacky, but Saunders style of satire, is sharp and show more inventive and explosively funny.
Obviously, he is not for all tastes, but if he clicks for you, you are in for a deliriously, delicious ride. show less
Saunders writes fantastic short-stories that are funny, smart, and infinitely re-readable. They are set in an America that doesn't quite yet exist, but might be on the verge of breaking through to reality at any moment. It doesn't take long to understand where Saunders is coming from - after one story you either "get it" or you won't. His characters are often earnest and innocent - people just trying to make the best of this bizarre, unfair, and violent world that they live in. Above all else, though, Saunders' stories are *funny*.
George Saunders must surely be the master of the excoriating inner monologue. Across these six stories, his typically sad, misfit, life-bludgeoned characters find fault with themselves (and others, though usually that eventually comes round to self-criticism). It is as though Saunders has looked around him, picked out the saddest, loneliest looking people he can find and then set himself the task of imagining their inner lives. Their inner lives, it turns out, are just about as sad and lonely as their outer lives. Long passages of passionate self-examination and scab picking are then punctuated by brief actions or exchanges involving others. What is most surprising, however, is that these desperately sad characters usually end up doing show more something brave, self-sacrificing, or noteworthy. Not that anyone notices, or cares, or cares to notice. Except that Saunders himself notices and through him so do we.
The sad characters in Saunders’ stories most often have tedious, mind-numbingly inane, bureaucratically mangled jobs. In the long opening story, “Pastoralia”, the unnamed narrator spends his days as a caveman. He is working at a futuristic theme park with live action recreations of human history. He and the woman portraying his cave wife, Janet, must follow a strict code of cave behaviour throughout the day. They’ve both been at this job a long time. And the theme park isn’t doing especially well, so very few guests poke their heads in to witness the lives of cave people. Just as well as Janet is usually filing her nails or speaking in English (which is not allowed). To be forced to endure such humiliating work might be bad enough but the indignity is magnified by cost-cutting, self-serving management intent on firing as many of the staff as possible to rescue the bottom line. Every person we encounter is desperate about the few dollars that their employment can bring in for their families. Most would do anything to keep their jobs, including ratting out the poor behaviour of their peers. It is a sad and sorry world and Saunders drags us through it by the hair (caveman style). And it has no end. Because, I suppose, life, he is suggesting, has pretty much been like this since the days of our earliest ancestors. Despite its light tone and embarrassingly awkward moments for the characters, the effect is chilling.
The remaining stories, although they share satirical features with “Pastoralia”, tend toward the more hopeful endings mentioned above. It is as though we are seeing Saunders himself progress as a thinker, a writer, a humanist. In the final story of the collection, “The Falls”, the principal narrator, another self-excoriating character named Morse (which might just as well be “morose”), is dragging himself home at the end of another painfully long day at work. No need to detail his particular squalor. What is peculiar here is his action at the very end. Despite all of his convincing of himself not to do it, he goes ahead and does something wonderful. It is so startling that you might wonder whether Saunders himself was surprised by this ending. It really is remarkable.
Every story here is worthy of numerous readings. Heartily recommended. show less
The sad characters in Saunders’ stories most often have tedious, mind-numbingly inane, bureaucratically mangled jobs. In the long opening story, “Pastoralia”, the unnamed narrator spends his days as a caveman. He is working at a futuristic theme park with live action recreations of human history. He and the woman portraying his cave wife, Janet, must follow a strict code of cave behaviour throughout the day. They’ve both been at this job a long time. And the theme park isn’t doing especially well, so very few guests poke their heads in to witness the lives of cave people. Just as well as Janet is usually filing her nails or speaking in English (which is not allowed). To be forced to endure such humiliating work might be bad enough but the indignity is magnified by cost-cutting, self-serving management intent on firing as many of the staff as possible to rescue the bottom line. Every person we encounter is desperate about the few dollars that their employment can bring in for their families. Most would do anything to keep their jobs, including ratting out the poor behaviour of their peers. It is a sad and sorry world and Saunders drags us through it by the hair (caveman style). And it has no end. Because, I suppose, life, he is suggesting, has pretty much been like this since the days of our earliest ancestors. Despite its light tone and embarrassingly awkward moments for the characters, the effect is chilling.
The remaining stories, although they share satirical features with “Pastoralia”, tend toward the more hopeful endings mentioned above. It is as though we are seeing Saunders himself progress as a thinker, a writer, a humanist. In the final story of the collection, “The Falls”, the principal narrator, another self-excoriating character named Morse (which might just as well be “morose”), is dragging himself home at the end of another painfully long day at work. No need to detail his particular squalor. What is peculiar here is his action at the very end. Despite all of his convincing of himself not to do it, he goes ahead and does something wonderful. It is so startling that you might wonder whether Saunders himself was surprised by this ending. It really is remarkable.
Every story here is worthy of numerous readings. Heartily recommended. show less
Sharp satire here, sometimes brutally so, and endlessly readable. Saunders touches on his usual themes: consumerism, the pathos of humble little lives, and man’s cruelty to his fellow man via capitalism and technology. It feels a bit much to call out 3 of just 6 stories as favorites, but it’s in keeping with how strong this collection is, and I found myself liking Pastoralia, Sea Oak, and The Barber’s Unhappiness the most. Saunders’ writing is brilliant and funny; this is one to check out.
A collection of short stories that had me rolling. Absurdist comedy mixed with slice of life complaints about life sucking is the key to my heart. The author does a fantastic reading of his own material. The strength of the stories taper off toward the end and it feels a bit like a good Python sketch where it dips out when they'd stopped thinking up fun things to do with the idea, but before you're satisfied. Most of these stories could easily have been the start of a longer work.
George Saunders’ characters are disillusioned, divorced from reality, hopeless, misunderstood, at the end of their rope – or their life, heartbreaking, and hilarious. Some are plain sad, but sad in a distressingly hilarious manner. Black humor seems too mild a term for what Saunders creates in his stories.
In “Sea Oak” an eternally optimistic aunt who’s led a thankless existence comes back after death – right from the grave - to straighten out her hapless Jerry Springer Show-ready single-unmarried-mother nieces and waiter-stripper nephew. “You, mister,” Bernie says to me, “are going to start showing your cock.”
In “The end of FIRPO in the world,” Cody, a boy whose “rear smelled like hot cotton with additional show more crap cling-ons” and lives with his mother and her boyfriend “Daryl, that dick” in a house that smells “like cat pee and hamburger blood” comes to a tragic end while planning a “manly” caper meant to show everyone what he’s made of.
None of Saunders’ characters are comfortable in life and are usually their own worst enemies. Each story in Pastoralia is supremely inventive and original. show less
In “Sea Oak” an eternally optimistic aunt who’s led a thankless existence comes back after death – right from the grave - to straighten out her hapless Jerry Springer Show-ready single-unmarried-mother nieces and waiter-stripper nephew. “You, mister,” Bernie says to me, “are going to start showing your cock.”
In “The end of FIRPO in the world,” Cody, a boy whose “rear smelled like hot cotton with additional show more crap cling-ons” and lives with his mother and her boyfriend “Daryl, that dick” in a house that smells “like cat pee and hamburger blood” comes to a tragic end while planning a “manly” caper meant to show everyone what he’s made of.
None of Saunders’ characters are comfortable in life and are usually their own worst enemies. Each story in Pastoralia is supremely inventive and original. show less
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ThingScore 83
Here it is, revisited for our entertainment in George Saunders’ second collection of satirical short stories, the new-look land of the free: themed up, dumbed down and laid out ready for embalming. Saunders has been compared to Pynchon and Vonnegut, yet the disgust that fuels his world recalls Nathaniel West. He shares too West’s taste for grotesquery yet these stories are raised above the show more level of mordant masterpieces by an extra dimension: hope. show less
added by steevohenderson
Saunders specialises in giving losers - the ugly, the weak, the self-absorbed - a flicker of appeal or delusional hope. We meet them in motivational seminars, drivers' education courses, walking home from dead-end jobs. We follow them to places like Sea Oak, with "no sea and no oak, just 100 subsidised apartments and a rear view of FedEx". Inside those apartments, the tenants are watching TV: show more "How My Child Died Violently is hosted by Matt Merton, a six-foot-five blond who's always giving the parents shoulder rubs and telling them they've been sainted by pain." show less
added by steevohenderson
There are six stories in this collection. Four of them are very good, and the other two are at least good -- a success average that is highly unusual for a short-story collection. If, like your humble reviewer, you had to regularly review short-story collections, you would soon discover that they almost always suck -- tinseling suburban dullness with some distant derivative of the Joycean show more epiphany until you want to scream: Basta! That Saunders stories are on such a high level is close to miraculous. show less
added by steevohenderson
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Author Information
50+ Works 25,490 Members
George Saunders is the author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. (Publisher Provided) George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas on December 2, 1958. He received a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering and a master's degree in creative writing from Syracuse University. He is a professor at Syracuse University and a writer of show more short stories, essays, novellas, and children's books. He won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004 His books include CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, In Persuasion Nation, and Tenth of December: Stories, which won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014. His debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, received the Man Booker Prize in 2017. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2000
- Related movies
- Sea Oak (2017 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For Paula
- First words
- I have to admit I'm not feeling my best. Not that I'm doing so bad. Not that I really have anything to complain about. Not that I would actually verbally complain if I did have something to complain about. No. Because I'... (show all)m Thinking Positive/ Saying Positive. I'm sitting back on my haunches, waiting for people to poke in their heads. Although it's been thirteen days since anyone poked in their head and Janet's speaking English to me more and more, which is partly why I feel so, you know, crummy.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)They were frantic, calling out to him, but they were dead, as dead as the ancient dead, and he was alive, he was needed at home, it was a no-brainer, no one could possibly blame him for this one, and making a low sound of despair in his throat he kicked off his loafers and threw his long ugly body out across the water.
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