The Stories of Loneliness
For readers looking for stories about predicaments of life,
“To Hell” is a good collection of seventeen short stories about everyday
life of the ordinary people who are mostly either experiencing a dilemma or
narrating it.
There is a thread that runs through the book. Majority of
stories include characters who had never thought they were supposed to
experience such predicaments. So they start analyzing events after happening,
as if they are not equipped with any kinds of prognostication. Although apart
from a few stories like “In the Lake of Grief”, or “The Youths” in which
characters come up with a decision showing their rebellion or struggle, this
analysis is not followed by a hopeful outcome. We are facing with those who
miserably feel alone and exhausted, those who have missed or are missing
something and are not motivated enough to stop it, those who are trapped on the
inside with a sense of stasis, feel regret or can’t talk to others about what
they feel or have in mind, and generally those who feel lost in a community of
people. It is difficult to emerge from a story with the impression that things
will get better, or that they will even change at all. While reviewing the
past, characters find the whole life absurd, as we see in “Things that are
being missed”, “The Seasons”, or “The Cries in Darkness”; or they cannot
understand why and how the pickle they are living in, has started. Where does
the problem lie? Why is it as if there is no common language to speak, and
consequently, no common understanding to share? The book doesn’t answer but the
characters are just portrayed there for us to ponder.
The variation of the collection is desirable. People of
different ages, jobs, and social classes are presented. While the setting or
characters’ thoughts make them touchable, their reactions to the events
sometimes wipe out this familiarity and leave us wondering about their special
ways of handling a situation.
The point of view, either first or third person, allows the
reader to immediately engage, but personally I enjoyed the distinguished
narrative language of stories which takes a predicament and turns it to an
ordinary event of life that is completely compatible with the theme and mental
conditions of the characters. Uninterruptedly, it keeps you reading a disaster
as fluent as a common newspaper report, and in this way, isn’t it willing to
trigger something about our being which keeps us living a vanishing life as
ease as a habitual moment, by the help of time?
Sima
H - M.A in Linguistics
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