Peter Orner

Peter Orner llegeix sempre i a tot arreu: al restaurant d'un hospital, al soterrani de casa, quan acompanya la seva filla al parc, en un autobús a Haití, durant les crisis sentimentals, quan està tramitant el seu divorci, durant la malaltia i la mort del seu pare. La lectura l'acompanya, l'ajuda a veure-hi clar i a entendre millor el món, l'il·lumina, li fa de refugi i l'ajuda a tirar endavant. I un dia decideix escriure sobre el paper de la narrativa en la seva vida, com ha quedat impresa en la seva història personal. El resultat és un llibre commovedor, lúcid i honest que convoca escriptors com Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, James Salter, J.D. Salinger o Juan Rulfo i explora el plaer de la lectura, la solitud i l'ofici d'escriure, i el paper essencial que té la literatura en les nostres vides.… (plus d'informations)

In this skillful and varied collection, Peter Orner once again shows us how it's done. "It" in this case being short fiction or brief, exquisite vignettes taken from his own experience. There are short stories here that are rooted firmly in their settings: some in the sleepy, hippie-inflected hills of Northern California, others in Fall River, Massachusetts's Jewish community. There are what I can only assume are semi-autobiographical stories describing how a new marriage breaks down as one of the parties slowly succumbs to mental illness. There's a lovely, perhaps necessarily incomplete homage to Len, a wildly inventive, endlessly energetic summer camp director who is slowly losing his life to a terminal illness he's forced to keep secret from his past associates. There are stories about Peter Orner's lawyer dad that are mostly about how different they were and how much he misses his dad anyway. There are a few stories you might have heard in a dorm room late at night as a college junior. And, as in any short story collection of any length, there are some strays. I can particularly recommend the title story, "Padanaram", "Naked Man Hides", and the aforementioned "Ineffectual Tribute to Len" which may be the real heartbreaker here. But Orner's batting average is so much higher than the average Tin House submission rat's that opinions are bound to vary and most things here work on at least one level.

What holds all of this together is an attention to craft and a deeply held appreciation for the short story form. Orner argues that while novels might tell us more about a character and their lives, their very size closes off their narrative: they purport to tell the definitive story of a person or an event. A short story, on the other hand, is, thanks to its very length and structure, half-built, incomplete, and, therefore, always a bit unfinished. It's eternally open and makes no claims to setting down a definitive account of anything or anyone. It's something to consider, and the stories in this volume make the author's case fairly well. So well that Orner himself seems to have come up in the world considerably since the relative success of "Am I Alone Here?" He's now teaching at Dartmouth and, while I'm not sure of the timeframe here, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright to, of all places, Namibia. Quite frankly, few writers working today deserve it more than he does. Sentence by sentence and story by story, Peter Orner shows that he's the real thing.… (plus d'informations)