footdaa.blogg.se

Real life by brandon taylor review
Real life by brandon taylor review











real life by brandon taylor review

Taylor has a talent for taking the dull hum of quotidian life and converting it into lyrics - see sliced potatoes rising “like something hauled out of the sea,” or how “woolly Christmas garlands and old coats peer at them from corners.” These intimacies, often cozy, pair splendidly with the uglier, more brutal elements to establish the book’s focus: the feral that lurks under the veneer, the unspoken impulses that can lead people to contort themselves into gruesome shapes. The other half tells unlinked stories that range from stellar to pretty good (I’m not sure Taylor is capable of “bad” writing). Roughly half the book follows Lionel, a damaged grad student Charles, a muscled dancer and Sophie, Charles’s headstrong girlfriend - and the dynamics of their entanglement after meeting at the aforementioned potluck, in Madison, Wis. It establishes a through-line for the collection: the messiness people bring to one another’s fragile lives. In the first story, a pained but casual conversation at a crowded potluck leads to the main character’s full-blown panic attack in the bathroom, ultimately leading to a thorny love triangle.

real life by brandon taylor review

Following the success of his much-lauded debut novel, “ Real Life,” Taylor’s first story collection presents sumptuous, melancholic portraits of characters overwhelmed. Whether Brandon Taylor knows it or not, in “Filthy Animals” he’s provided a perfect companion piece for our nervous era of reopening. After a long stretch of social isolation, many of us are now wading haphazardly back into public life, reintroducing ourselves to a roster of familiar faces as well as to forgotten discomforts - a crowded room, the icy judgment of strangers, the myriad pressures of being around other people.













Real life by brandon taylor review