For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

I was not familiar with this writer when I ordered this book. This was an example whereby the overwhelming number of positive reviews caught my attention and I took a chance. I'm glad I did. The author is witty, urbane, with a very gimlet-eyed view of the world that we inhabit. Title story is about a rabbi who wants to cheat on his wife and goes to get permission from his head rabbi. Has a twist (and twisted) ending that made me laugh out loud; not an easy thing to do with me. Recommended.

I have never been a big fan of short stories. Once in a while something makes me read a book of them and with only rare exceptions the genre doesn't do much for me. Well, something made me read this book and I loved every single story.I can't rave enough to people about this book and I can't wait for Mr. Englander's next offering. I will rush to read anything he ever writes. This is a terrific book! While it is a realistic depiction of various aspects of the Jewish condition, all the stories are set into imaginatively far-fetched and amusing vehicles, in differing locales and eras, and all are brilliant renditions wrought with a delicious mixture of both humor and pathos. There isn't a weak link in the entire collection of nine stories.

Nine short stories, surprising for the beauty of the language and for the very particular style, always suspended between the magic atmsophere of Yiddish fables and the realistic concreteness which characterizes most of North American novelists. A really beautiful book, whose deep suggestion reminds some paintings by Marc Chagall (see especially the second tale). It is a pity that the Italian translation is not adequate.

(....) Nathan's stories are universal, even as they are set in an Orthodox Jewish world. As long as we're throwing out writing workshop cliches, how about "the more particular you make your stories, the more general they become." The 27th Man is a story about writing, all writers everywhere. The title story is about marriage and failure, certainly a universal theme. And in terms of the dialogue, Nathan captures this world's speech rhythms dead-on. This book is clearly above such an attack. In fact, it is the true success of the book that brings about such blatant displays of jealousy.

Sure, Englander has a flavor-of-the-month quality about him. He's been relentlessly promoted in the press, and judging from the photo on the book jacket, he is one gorgeous dudestud. But this is one dudestud who can write! His stories are finely wrought miniatures that illuminate the lives of the characters. That he happens to write about the Orthodoxy is besides the point. The criticisms I have read about him engaging in character assassination of the hasidism are ridiculous - he is merely a writer telling a story. His goal is to get at the emotional truth which underlies a situation - not to insult anybody's religion.

These are wonderful stories, I found myself reading them slowly and carefully, they were too clever and emotionally involving to do otherwise. I have to take issue with the reader who criticizes Englander for writing about people he has not been (a department store Santa, a Park Avenue gentile) etc. Crazy - the day writers only write about what they have been is the day fiction stops being exactly that, fiction, and becomes memoir, or worse, plain reportage. Whatever interesting experiences Englander has had in his private life I'm glad he has taken the time to let his imagination run free and become a storyteller. Stories - that is why we read fiction isn't it? I don't believe Michael Ondaatje was a pilot in the Second World War either, but fortunately he wrote The English Patient regardless. I thought Englander's stories were quite wonderful, and the women in them lovingly and touchingly rendered. Englander hasn't been a woman in his life either, but thank god he didn't hesitate to write The Wig or The Last One Way, or we would have been deprived of reading about Ruchama's stiffling marriage and Gita's desperate bid for freedom from her brutal husband.