A collection of essay/stories.
The title piece is a wonderfully sarcastic blow up of modern american media. Bitingly hilarious. The other pieces range over many ideas, but many of them share the same theme of laughing at/criticizing modern media in some way. There is even an essay on Huck Finn.
Saunders has other moods besides sarcasm. The Great Divider, which reads like a bizarre documentary essay on a group of militia spending a night watching for illegal immigrants in Texas, both manages to make fun of the mythology these men live by and at the same time express a gentle kind of acknowledgement of the event as, underneath it all, a bunch of guys hanging out doing stupid guy stuff like they always have.
There is also the story on his visit to Dubai, The New Mecca. There is certainly irony in various points of the story, but there is also a complex awareness of his stereotypes and prejudices about the place, and how his experience and the people he meets don't always fit in so nicely to these preconceptions. He has an honesty in his writing.
Saunders is more than a social critic - he also has some interesting things to say about world views, ways of thinking and perceiving, cultural issues and culturo-centrism. One of the more sophisticated and human authors I have read lately.
No comments:
Post a Comment