Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories

I really don't like short stories very much anymore-especially the kind that appear in places like "The New Yorker" (which is otherwise an exemplary magazine) - for the most part, it seems to me that these stories are humorless, shapeless chronicles of middle class angst that start from nowhere and, if you actaully bother to finish one, conlude in a morass of pointless self pity- leaving this reader with only one agonized thought - "WHO CARES". If those are your kind of storeies, do not buy "Brief Encounters". Fountain's stories are crisp, compelling and often mordantly funny - there's not a wasted sentence, really not a wasted word. And, best of all, THINGS HAPPEN, EVENTS TRANSPIRE, and you turn the pages to see what's going to happen next.

The best book of short stories I have read in years. The usual complaint about literary short stories is that they concern themselves with insignificant domestic issues and ignore the larger world; and the most telling complaint about fiction that does address the larger world issues is that it is boring. Well, here is a writer who can enter into any part of the Third World, however remote, however alien to our Western vourgeois life, and tell a story with dramatic power, in a language that is enviably concrete and vivid, with charcters pulsating with life, with suspense in the movement of the action painfully intense, yet without any tricks of the trade. I have never read such goo writing applied to such a world-view. Whether it is Haiti, Thailand, Sierra Leone, Columbis--this is the familiar territory of human character, for better and worse. With such books as this, reading becomes the real staff of life.

A collection of short stories that casts its gaze beyond authorial self-indulgence and deep into the world at large, author Ben Fountain's debut book presents the reader with snapshots of characters caught amidst forces they can sometimes scarcely comprehend, let alone control, yet also ventures deeply into the hearts of its protagonists. A highly memorable debut from an author who doubtless has much more to show us.

One hint that a writer of short stories or novellas or even full novels for that matter is the sense given to the reader that all of the information is so solidly shared that the writer must be speaking from autobiographical stance. Yet all we gather from the brief jacket bit about Ben Fountain is that he has won some impressive literary awards, is editor of Southwest Review, and lives in Texas with his little family! There is nothing to suggest a world traveler who has grown into the soil of the various parts of the world he molds into his stories. We are left with the conclusion that Fountain is simply a brilliant writer - and that is even more impressive. Eight stories are served with exquisite writing technique, fastidious attention to detail, and an endless imagination for bizarre events that serve as a stage for characters at once participating in the darker elements of the world's doings while finding some sense of exotica on a planet that has heretofore seemed so blasé. He takes us to Haiti, explores cocaine trafficking there by both the innocent poor folk observers and the corrupt police force; he follows a devoted ornithologist in captivity in Colombia who gains insight into Revolution; he examines a strange relationship between a young lady and her older diamond hunting mate in Sierra Leone ('Being an American these days, that's sort of like being a walking joke, right?'); he follows a bumbling golf pro whose sad life catches up with him in Myanmar; he takes us back to the turn of the 20th century to uncover a child piano prodigy who is able to play a Fantasy for piano written by a pianist who shared her deformity of having eleven fingers; he deals with a couple who must cope with the husband's 'co-marriage' to a Haitian voodoo goddess; and he obsesses on tales of encounters with the ever-popular Che Guevara. With each story he transports us wholly to the place of action and the interstices of the minds of the character he paints. Though this reader has not been to Haiti, Sierra Leone or Myanmar to check the reality of Fountain's prose descriptions there, the world of music for the piano is close enough to have profound respect for his writings about piano technique and music history and Vienna. Fountain MAKES us believe his stories, tales that are more like histories than fiction, so well drawn are they. Here is a writer of inordinate gifts. We can only hope he is busy at work crafting a novel to see how well his brief stories can be transported into extended form. Ben Fountain is most assuredly an author to watch! Highly recommended. Grady Harp, September 06

The excellent reviews received by this collection led me to attend my first author's reading. I enjoyed Fountain's wonderfully crafted language which I appreciated even more in a second reading. Even more enjoyable and compelling, whether intended or not, was the moral complexity and ambiguity confronting the antagonists in each story. Our market-dominated American culture delivers information in simplistic bite sized pieces, which is especially dangerous when a similar approach is followed in national and international affairs. In contrast, Fountain achieves an elegance in descibing the inherent complexity and contradiction of individual Americans' however well intended interventions in the world. Nonetheless, he does not take the easy route of dismissing those involvements as naive, arrogant or futile. I was left hoping such insight would permeate our international relations. But mostly, it was a great read!