Other Electricities: Stories

For those wishing to visit the Keweenaw Peninsula, I would suggest reading Ander Monson's short but dense Other Electricities. It is a complex yet fascinating collection of stories or vignettes composing the gestalt of Michigan's UP. Sometimes direct, sometimes poetic, though always ethereal, Other Electricities deals with the hardness of living in a place as cold, bleak, and beautiful as upper Michigan. Monson expertly expresses the weirdness and hardship through a formidable cast of characters which, while representing the whole of a small community, actually resembles that of a family. It is a place where the only guarantee is that every winter at least one snowmobile rider will succumb to the ice, where a father, perched in his attic will become obsessed with speaking code into his radio throughout the night. A place where an abandoned schoolbus forms a hideout for a disaffected teenager, taking his confusion out on stray cats. Where a weary snowplow worker reminisces over uncles dying in saunas and cousins holding up banks in the heart of winter, looking forward to nothing more than her stretch of the road. Where a schoolteacher is helpless to watch both the demolition of her school and her students. Other Electricities is about a community of people and what they do to survive in an unacommodating environment. It's about the often unfortunate interconnectedness of their lives told from a stream-of-consciousness point of view. Beautifully written and imagined, it's an incredibly deep work, ominous like the lake surrounding the region it so coldly affects.

Monson's stunning stories move `from a world of hard but sparse facts to a storyscape of soft, fulfilling fictions.' He writes with distinctive whimsy and obsession, earning moments of inevitable, surprising beauty. At the center of everything is the `radio amateur,' a meditative youth in Michigan's upper peninsula, whose father is withdrawn into a world of ham radio, whose mother has vanished, and whose older brother is armless and aphasiac. Around him gather stories of friends and town-folk that center on absence, loneliness, energy, causation, and magic. `Everything in Michigan is due to saws or mines or bombs or Vietnam.... There's something unnatural, unbalanced, like an equation. Something to be righted. Solved.' Monson's prose is always charged and arresting as he plays with post-modern structures as deftly as Stuart Dybek, William Gass, and the hypertext innovator, Michael Joyce.

NOT LIKE EGGERS, please. but wondrous & complex. like snow in your living room, like snow in your heart. AM, u r very awesome.

Much like a bedroom window, luminous if a book ever was; relentless, romantic, and dreamy. Like a secret scribbled on torn notebook paper. Reminiscent of Dave Eggers, if you enjoyed "staggering genius" then you should check this out.

A handful of times in your life you pick up a book that you know almost immediately is destined to be in that small cluster of books you consider personal touchstones. This is one. It's so fearless, so exhilaratingly creative, so completely inhabited, and captures the feel of life so well it's almost a living, breathing thing in and of itself. If aliens landed on earth and asked me for a book that portrayed midwestern life in a small town, my first impulse would probably be to give them Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. However, if they wanted to know what that life felt like in all its quietest, loneliest and most intense moments, I'd give them this one. Monson is a genius. This book is a flat-out masterpiece.