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Us
"Michael Kimball is a hero of contemporary fiction." —Sam Lipsyte A husband wakes up to find his wife has had a seizure during the night. His wife is rushed to a hospital where she lies in a coma. By day, the husband sits beside his wife and tries to think of ways to wake her up. The husband sleeps in the chair next to his wife's bedside dreaming that she will wake up. He wants to be able to take her back home. Michael Kimball is author of The Way the Family Got Away , Dear Everybody , and the forthcoming Ray .
200 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2011
13 people are currently reading
785 people want to read
About the author
Michael Kimball
49 books40 followersMichael Kimball's third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, will be published in the UK, US, and Canada this year. His first two novels, THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), have both been translated into many languages.
He is also responsible for the art project Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) and the documentary film, I Will Smash You.
He is also responsible for the art project Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) and the documentary film, I Will Smash You.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews
May 30, 2011
one day, i started following michael kimball on twitter. the next day, i got an email from him, asking me to come read a few stories for his reading series in baltimore. i said yes, went to baltimore with some books and met him before the reading. i guess this is a disclaimer because the minute i met this guy, i knew he was an incredible person. i ended up getting my copy of Us in exchange for buying him a soda and an order of bacon cheese fries and we spent the whole night talking about everything. not bad.
before i finally cracked open Us, i'd read a few reviews about it being heartbreaking and moving. i guess there's no real review to prepare you for what goes on here - the story of a man and woman as they're both basically dying. the majority of the story is told from the man's point of view, with snippets of the wife's thoughts and the input from kimball himself, since this is largely based on his grandparents' lives and the death of his grandmother.
the sentences here are so precise as to be scalpels:
"we found ways to make our days longer. we followed the sun around our house - from our bedroom and the bathroom in the morning, to the kitchen through noon, the living room through the afternoon, and the dining room for evening."
this sentence seems simple enough, but in the context of the story, it's enough to make your heart crack a little bit in your chest.
the thing that struck me, largely, throughout this book, was how often our love stories are often death stories, how much we're all really hoping for when we love someone else and choose that person until we're dead. it wasn't easy to stomach. it wasn't easy to look at directly. but the tightness of the sentences got me through it, made me go forward step by step, made me not as afraid.
michael kimball is a rare thing. michael kimball is a great person and goddamn incredible writer. this book is a rare thing. it is one of the saddest books i've ever read and also one of the most beautiful.
before i finally cracked open Us, i'd read a few reviews about it being heartbreaking and moving. i guess there's no real review to prepare you for what goes on here - the story of a man and woman as they're both basically dying. the majority of the story is told from the man's point of view, with snippets of the wife's thoughts and the input from kimball himself, since this is largely based on his grandparents' lives and the death of his grandmother.
the sentences here are so precise as to be scalpels:
"we found ways to make our days longer. we followed the sun around our house - from our bedroom and the bathroom in the morning, to the kitchen through noon, the living room through the afternoon, and the dining room for evening."
this sentence seems simple enough, but in the context of the story, it's enough to make your heart crack a little bit in your chest.
the thing that struck me, largely, throughout this book, was how often our love stories are often death stories, how much we're all really hoping for when we love someone else and choose that person until we're dead. it wasn't easy to stomach. it wasn't easy to look at directly. but the tightness of the sentences got me through it, made me go forward step by step, made me not as afraid.
michael kimball is a rare thing. michael kimball is a great person and goddamn incredible writer. this book is a rare thing. it is one of the saddest books i've ever read and also one of the most beautiful.
June 23, 2011
Recently, while driving to work, I ran over two animals. The first was a red squirrel and the second was a gray squirrel. The red squirrel was just a little critter. Every red squirrel I’ve ever seen is just a little critter, not much bigger than a big mouse, but they’re fierce and aggressive around the larger but still relatively small gray squirrels.
I don’t enjoy killing animals. When I do kill an animal, it’s accidental, mostly. I still swat mosquitoes pretty quickly and I still smash black ants when I catch them on my desk. I used to kill insects all the time when I was a kid, with no real understanding of the difference between life and death—alive one moment and a smudge on the cement the next.
Now that I’m somewhat older (I’m getting deeper into my 30’s) I find that I’m much more aware of that invisible line between life and death, breathing and not breathing, feeling and numbness or nothing at all. The awareness of that line hurts sometimes. And that hurt is a bottomless black thing. It’s sadness. It’s the end of something being something. It’s a furry little red squirrel running across the street, clear of my car and then suddenly cutting back in a fit of indecision, oh I forgot my snack, and then it’s the end of that furry red squirrel with a wet popping sound beneath my tire. And then it’s me pounding my steering wheel, wondering why, why did that stupid mothergrabbing red squirrel have to cut back under my tire?
The gray squirrel was just as bad, leading another gray squirrel out from the edge of a green lawn. The following squirrel stopped at the curb when he saw my car coming, and the leading squirrel, who looked like he was fit to move past my churning wheels just in time, simply stopped, and then looked at me just before I popped him under my tire, too.
And maybe this death was worse than the first, but it’s hard to say. The death of the red squirrel was a blur of confusion, and the death of the gray squirrel was more like a suicide. And his friend at the edge of the lawn watched him die. Brutal. Wrenching. Man oh man.
I wanted to turn around and go home. It wasn’t going to be a good day, not with two deaths on my hands before most people have their breakfast. I needed to stop driving so I could hit some kind of re-set button but I also needed to get to work. I tried to convince myself that I’d done all I could do—with the exception of coming to a complete, screeching stop—to avoid killing them. I certainly didn’t want to kill them, and when I saw them coming into the street I thought for sure they had me beat.
And they did.
But it was their time to go, to pluck the invisible string between this world and the next, to offer me the assist in the string plucking. I’m not sure I had a choice but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
That morning I was nearly finished with Michal Kimball’s Us. I planned on finishing it when I got home at the end of the day. I made it home without killing anything else, at least as far as I know. I could’ve killed some flies or something, some ants. All in all, though, it turned out to be an okay day. Nothing else terrible happened. I made it home, I finished the book.
And it killed me. I played the role of the red squirrel cutting back underneath the tire. I played the role of the gray squirrel stopping in the road to meet my death with chin held high. I became road kill, doomed to be flattened and spread along the blacktop until the ants and the bugs and the birds carried and pecked me away.
In truth, though, Us didn’t really kill me. Instead, it played the song that’s played on that line separating breath and not breath, which, I suspect, is more potent than death because it’s death experienced while living, it’s shoving your face into death and then jerking back out, gasping, cheeks dripping.
Kimball’s Us played the single note, actually, that that string can play. And damn what a note it is. And damn I can’t think of many writers (or any off the top of my head) who have even dared to play that note. I mean, how could they? Why would they want to? What living person can convey something that only those on the very edge of that line can know/feel, when being on that edge means sacrificing so much, especially something so indulgent as writing? And should a writer attempt to convey such a thing, how could they even dream of conveying it with any semblance of honesty? How could they pull it off?
Michael Kimball is a rare, rare writer, a writer whose empathy knows no limits. He holds the note of loss and his voice never cracks, not even for a moment. Kimball’s personal narration is interspersed in self-contained blocks throughout the book, co-mingling or co-existing, rather, with the voice and story of his nameless narrator. Kimball’s pull-backs are refreshing as they act to offer a slight reprieve from the hard sadness of the narrator’s expression, but they also act as manifestations of another hard sadness, a similar hard sadness, the one that inspired the book. In this way, the text, as a whole, is a muse to itself, which is where the hope lies. It’s that universe within a universe, or the hint of a universe within a universe, that keeps bubbling up in the books I’ve been reading lately. To me, that feeling, that sense of the circular, is what all writers strive to give their readers and themselves but it’s something few writers convincingly achieve.
Kimball has achieved that here with seeming ease. The words rise off the page like smoke, and the story blazes like a firework in the darkness, a firework bound to leave lasting tracers once the powder has burned clean.
The story of Us begins at the end of a wife’s seizure in the bed she shares with her husband, a seizure that cripples her consciousness. From there we move to the hospital for her awakening and her recovery, and from there we move back home, nervously, where there are no doctors or nurses should things go wrong, should another seizure (or something worse) grip her during the night.
Kimball’s narrator uses short, declarative sentences to tell us his story in a simple voice that conveys very difficult things easily, like how he tried to drive himself home from the hospital, how they slowed their time down, how they practiced for her death, how love can accumulate between two people.
Anyone who’s ever dealt with or experienced, even peripherally, the anxiety that comes along with serious illness or impending death (although after reading this book I’m reminded that we’re all going to die, each and every one of us) knows how consuming it can be. In order to move forward or to, at worst, maintain, everything in one’s life is reduced and compartmentalized, and the language of Us reflects this concept perfectly. Take, for example the chapter How I Rubbed Her Wrinkles Out in its entirety:
“I would rub her back and her arms and her legs and her feet. My hands could rub the wrinkles out of her skin and make her feel younger, so that she could stay alive longer. We were trying to stretch the rest of our lives out.”
In Us, Kimball announces, reminds, sings, paints, carves, and whispers that all things are temporary, impermanent, fleeting. I like to believe he’s also telling us to make hay while the sun shines, and to love, give, comfort, go, and, hopefully, as he’s already done early in his career, leave something resonant behind.
I don’t enjoy killing animals. When I do kill an animal, it’s accidental, mostly. I still swat mosquitoes pretty quickly and I still smash black ants when I catch them on my desk. I used to kill insects all the time when I was a kid, with no real understanding of the difference between life and death—alive one moment and a smudge on the cement the next.
Now that I’m somewhat older (I’m getting deeper into my 30’s) I find that I’m much more aware of that invisible line between life and death, breathing and not breathing, feeling and numbness or nothing at all. The awareness of that line hurts sometimes. And that hurt is a bottomless black thing. It’s sadness. It’s the end of something being something. It’s a furry little red squirrel running across the street, clear of my car and then suddenly cutting back in a fit of indecision, oh I forgot my snack, and then it’s the end of that furry red squirrel with a wet popping sound beneath my tire. And then it’s me pounding my steering wheel, wondering why, why did that stupid mothergrabbing red squirrel have to cut back under my tire?
The gray squirrel was just as bad, leading another gray squirrel out from the edge of a green lawn. The following squirrel stopped at the curb when he saw my car coming, and the leading squirrel, who looked like he was fit to move past my churning wheels just in time, simply stopped, and then looked at me just before I popped him under my tire, too.
And maybe this death was worse than the first, but it’s hard to say. The death of the red squirrel was a blur of confusion, and the death of the gray squirrel was more like a suicide. And his friend at the edge of the lawn watched him die. Brutal. Wrenching. Man oh man.
I wanted to turn around and go home. It wasn’t going to be a good day, not with two deaths on my hands before most people have their breakfast. I needed to stop driving so I could hit some kind of re-set button but I also needed to get to work. I tried to convince myself that I’d done all I could do—with the exception of coming to a complete, screeching stop—to avoid killing them. I certainly didn’t want to kill them, and when I saw them coming into the street I thought for sure they had me beat.
And they did.
But it was their time to go, to pluck the invisible string between this world and the next, to offer me the assist in the string plucking. I’m not sure I had a choice but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
That morning I was nearly finished with Michal Kimball’s Us. I planned on finishing it when I got home at the end of the day. I made it home without killing anything else, at least as far as I know. I could’ve killed some flies or something, some ants. All in all, though, it turned out to be an okay day. Nothing else terrible happened. I made it home, I finished the book.
And it killed me. I played the role of the red squirrel cutting back underneath the tire. I played the role of the gray squirrel stopping in the road to meet my death with chin held high. I became road kill, doomed to be flattened and spread along the blacktop until the ants and the bugs and the birds carried and pecked me away.
In truth, though, Us didn’t really kill me. Instead, it played the song that’s played on that line separating breath and not breath, which, I suspect, is more potent than death because it’s death experienced while living, it’s shoving your face into death and then jerking back out, gasping, cheeks dripping.
Kimball’s Us played the single note, actually, that that string can play. And damn what a note it is. And damn I can’t think of many writers (or any off the top of my head) who have even dared to play that note. I mean, how could they? Why would they want to? What living person can convey something that only those on the very edge of that line can know/feel, when being on that edge means sacrificing so much, especially something so indulgent as writing? And should a writer attempt to convey such a thing, how could they even dream of conveying it with any semblance of honesty? How could they pull it off?
Michael Kimball is a rare, rare writer, a writer whose empathy knows no limits. He holds the note of loss and his voice never cracks, not even for a moment. Kimball’s personal narration is interspersed in self-contained blocks throughout the book, co-mingling or co-existing, rather, with the voice and story of his nameless narrator. Kimball’s pull-backs are refreshing as they act to offer a slight reprieve from the hard sadness of the narrator’s expression, but they also act as manifestations of another hard sadness, a similar hard sadness, the one that inspired the book. In this way, the text, as a whole, is a muse to itself, which is where the hope lies. It’s that universe within a universe, or the hint of a universe within a universe, that keeps bubbling up in the books I’ve been reading lately. To me, that feeling, that sense of the circular, is what all writers strive to give their readers and themselves but it’s something few writers convincingly achieve.
Kimball has achieved that here with seeming ease. The words rise off the page like smoke, and the story blazes like a firework in the darkness, a firework bound to leave lasting tracers once the powder has burned clean.
The story of Us begins at the end of a wife’s seizure in the bed she shares with her husband, a seizure that cripples her consciousness. From there we move to the hospital for her awakening and her recovery, and from there we move back home, nervously, where there are no doctors or nurses should things go wrong, should another seizure (or something worse) grip her during the night.
Kimball’s narrator uses short, declarative sentences to tell us his story in a simple voice that conveys very difficult things easily, like how he tried to drive himself home from the hospital, how they slowed their time down, how they practiced for her death, how love can accumulate between two people.
Anyone who’s ever dealt with or experienced, even peripherally, the anxiety that comes along with serious illness or impending death (although after reading this book I’m reminded that we’re all going to die, each and every one of us) knows how consuming it can be. In order to move forward or to, at worst, maintain, everything in one’s life is reduced and compartmentalized, and the language of Us reflects this concept perfectly. Take, for example the chapter How I Rubbed Her Wrinkles Out in its entirety:
“I would rub her back and her arms and her legs and her feet. My hands could rub the wrinkles out of her skin and make her feel younger, so that she could stay alive longer. We were trying to stretch the rest of our lives out.”
In Us, Kimball announces, reminds, sings, paints, carves, and whispers that all things are temporary, impermanent, fleeting. I like to believe he’s also telling us to make hay while the sun shines, and to love, give, comfort, go, and, hopefully, as he’s already done early in his career, leave something resonant behind.
February 9, 2015
Nobody writes like Michael Kimball. Nobody.
The plot isn't what makes this book. It's simple. We have an old couple nearing the end of their lives.
What makes this book is the voice. I've never read anything like it. Michael Kimball disappears. The text on the page disappears. And all that's left is the voice of this character, this frightened old man who just wants his wife to stay with him, stay alive with him and stay at home with him.
The book is simple. What it has to say is simple. It's the way the book says it. That's how it gets in your head, travels down to the middle of your chest and breaks your heart.
-Peter
The plot isn't what makes this book. It's simple. We have an old couple nearing the end of their lives.
What makes this book is the voice. I've never read anything like it. Michael Kimball disappears. The text on the page disappears. And all that's left is the voice of this character, this frightened old man who just wants his wife to stay with him, stay alive with him and stay at home with him.
The book is simple. What it has to say is simple. It's the way the book says it. That's how it gets in your head, travels down to the middle of your chest and breaks your heart.
-Peter
June 28, 2014
I see very well why some may have struggled with or even given up on this book. In fact, I saved it from the recycle bin myself. (Well, actually, it was just my husband deciding to turn it in at the Used Book Counter for store credit, but that is recycling.) He had read another book by this author and found it frustrating and "flat", as some criticized this book for being. The author does write in a rather stilted manner - "I looked at the book. I picked the book up. I read the book's pages. I closed the book. I put the book down.", etc. An entire novel of that could be irritating, I imagine. What worked about that style for this particular novel is that the methodical, regimented, robotic prose lent the feeling of foggy, disoriented, world-shifting-off-its-axis confusion that comes with sudden loss and consuming grief.
The emotions felt authentic, visceral. A very interesting choice of storytelling to weave the story of a long, loving marriage brought to an end by the death of a spouse, with that of a younger man thinking back upon, trying to make sense of, and confronting the fear of loss in his own life.
Poignant. Absolutely worth pushing past any initial apprehension or discomfort. The payoff is worth the effort.
The emotions felt authentic, visceral. A very interesting choice of storytelling to weave the story of a long, loving marriage brought to an end by the death of a spouse, with that of a younger man thinking back upon, trying to make sense of, and confronting the fear of loss in his own life.
Poignant. Absolutely worth pushing past any initial apprehension or discomfort. The payoff is worth the effort.
May 16, 2012
Us is a gutsy little book. Kimball’s 184 page novel begins as a step by step account of a husband’s life as it is remade by his spouse’s seizure. A quarter of the way through, Kimball presents a chapter in new voice, a plea from the comatose wife. Soon another voice is added, that of the couple’s grandson who is meticulously imagining his grandparents’ last days in order to understand the strength of their love. Although these storylines might have been hard to sustain alone, together they even each other out. Kimball performs an incredible balancing act by switching between these concurrent narratives, a difficult feat to pull of in any novel and especially impressive in one so short.
May 16, 2022
This novella, despite its competence, and the universal cheering of critics on the front pages, is a book of no great importance. It handles its theme with respect, and Kimball does a good job detailing the mental anguish of a husband as his wife is taken to hospital goes into a coma, awakes to return home, and then slowly declines. What works against that picture is the portrait of the husband, a large hole in the text we know about thanks to the narration of a grandchild, and the lack of distinction between those two male voices. What Kimball has come up with isn't ambitious enough.
April 12, 2011
I think that I love this book more than any of my other books. I had more fun writing Dear Everybody, but writing Us changed me in fundamental way. The novel was first published in the UK, South Africa, and Australia in 2005. The Spanish translation came out last fall and there is an Italian translation in the works. I couldn't be happier that it is now getting its American release with Tyrant Books.
August 17, 2011
This is a terrifying and very sad book. A husband and wife are in bed together one night when the husband wakes up to his wife shaking and not responding to him.
Things go downhill from there.
Michael Kimball, who wrote the excellent Dear Everybody, a novel written in the form of letters left behind by a man who commits suicide, uses his ear for speech to translate into text a book that finds power in simple sadness.
Take, for example, this portion towards the beginning:
I didn't want to lose my wife. I wanted to see my wife lying down in a hospital bed. I wanted to see my wife breathing again. I wanted to see her get up out of bed again. I wanted to see her get up out of our bed again. I wanted my wife to come back home and live there with me again.
Kimball has a really subtle style, a way of saying things that makes the reader really sympathize with the narrator.
To get picky:
I pulled her eyelids up, but her eyes didn't look back at me, and her eyelids closed up again when I let go of them.
A lot of writers would have left off with ..."but her eyes didn't look back, and her eyelids..." but Kimball is a writer who makes lots of little important choices that make his books great.
True to form, Kimball also experiments with the structure, interspersing his own memories of the deaths of his grandparents into the story at hand. I'm not really sure why...but something that would normally be impossible to pull off works, and I'm more interested in the fact THAT it works than HOW for the time being.
Great book, definitely one of Pete's Top of 2011.
Now, it has to be noted that there was, unfortunately, a dream sequence in this book. As prompted by a friend earlier in the week, I would like to take a moment to express how irritating I find dreams in works of art and why I think they don't belong there.
For starters, I don't believe that dreams have much meaning, or certainly not hidden meaning that we need to mine from deep within the shitty folds of our dumb brains. Most of my dreams are fairly pedestrian, involve reasonably familiar scenarios and characters, and don't really make for much exciting interpretation.
Example: Dream where I am spooning some girl from high school, then I get up to go to work.
Interpretation: Though I don't think about that person often, there she was. And in the dream I got up to do exactly what I do five out of every seven days, so it would be more unusual to me if I weren't going to work.
It's my guess that brief thought will give you all the context you need for 90% of your dreams, and the other ten percent can be chalked up to your brain just doing whatever the fuck it wants.
That said, I know that not everybody feels that way. Lord knows we've all hung out with some fool who had a dream that his grandma died, and then it turned out his grandma died. Unless you're in a really bad movie, the death was on accident and not to somehow make people believe the kid was a dream psychic, and I have to believe that this was random chance.
Math: if you dreamt that your grandmother died once every month, and on one of these nights she died, assuming that you are 27 years old, your dreams were correct .3% of the time, which is a pretty shitty average. If you do that same math a different way, dreaming something different every night for a year, one of those dreams would come true. Thinking about it that way, that you dreamt SOMETHING every night, it wouldn't be that much of a shock that one dream came true. Except that the brain is a pattern-seeking machine, and it has a tendency to really highlight the shit out of the times it's right and let go of the times it's wrong.
Therefore, some idiot has a dream that comes true once, and I have to hear about it constantly. Yet I don't call them every single day to ask them what the previous night's dreams held and to remind them that those didn't come true, and also I don't butt in to point out that even though the grandma death was prophesized, there was not a bengal tiger with bananas instead of claws involved as there was in the dream.
That's my feeling on real world dreams and why they aren't interesting, particularly. If you think I want to hear about your dreams, try this first: Start by telling me the most fucked-up dream you've ever had. If I'm interested in that, I might, MIGHT listen to some others. But start with the gold.
Back to books.
I want to put this question in your head: Why?
Why, in a story that is a complete fabrication, does there need to be a dream? A made up story within a made up story?
Every single thing on the page is made up, so why does there have to be something that appears EVEN MORE made up?
I have some common reasons this happens, patterns if you will:
-Dreams are a shortcut to expressing mood in a book without actually doing the heavy lifting of, I don't know, writing a book. Instead of using factors outside the character, or painting the character as exhibiting a certain mood, the writer can just say, "That night he dreamed of a black snake. It was swallowing him whole, and as the snake's mouth covered his own mouth and nose he stopped breathing and saw nothing."
-Dreams are a way of allowing a character to do something out of character or express a repressed feeling. The corporate drone eviscerating his boss and cooking the entrails in a skillet. That way, the character can do something awful, but we don't have to risk readers finding a strong dislike for a character. Because the last thing you want is for a character to evoke strong reactions.
-Dreams are a way for writers to feel like they can cut loose and get a little sloppy with their words. If it doesn't make sense, it's fine. It's a dream, it's not supposed to make sense. I really dislike that logic. It goes against the entire purpose of writing, which is to make someone understand something, whether it be an action or an emotion or whatever. But a sentence like, "He broke through the tallgrass walls and fell bellyfirst out of a thick, blue membrane of sleep and into a different world, a world where his feet were his feet but also part of everything else" is just annoying. It's like hearing someone describe, badly, what it's like to drop acid.
-Dreams are, in some of the more egregious cases, used to solve mysteries in the book. A detective-type will be looking something over for hours, and it’s only when he has a dream about the papers flying out the window and rearranging themselves on the ground that he figures out the code. That, my friends, is complete bullshit and you know it.
-Worst case scenario, the dream is put in front of the audience as reality, and it's only after the dream is over that we find out It Was All a Dream. This is a completely idiotic way to tell a story. First, how does your audience know to trust you? A real person would never say, "Here's what happened to me in real life yesterday" and the proceed to tell you a dream. It's a completely false presentation, and your audience should not trust you afterwards. Second, it undoes all your hard work. Famously, in Super Mario Bros. 2, the game ending shows Mario in bed and after he wakes up it turns out that the entire game, all those turtle shells and radishes and all that bullshit, was all a dream. THEN WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU JUST JUMP IN THE VERY FIRST PIT IN THE GAME, WAKE UP, AND GET THE EXACT SAME MOTHERFUCKING ENDING!?
Here, in another list-y format, are some more reasons I really hate the use of dreams in all formats of fiction:
-You never know where you stand with a dream because rarely does the dreaming character say anything about the dream in particular or express it fully to another character. Therefore, the reader now knows something that other characters may potentially know and may not, for all intents and purposes, exist at all in the fictional universe. If a fictional character cannot or does not remember a dream, it becomes a complete waste of time, no different than if a writer wrote a chapter and then followed it up with, "Just kidding, ignore that chapter, let's move on."
-On that same note, setting the tone with a dream is sort of like being a lawyer and asking a question that you know will be overruled. You didn't get the answer, but the jury can't just pretend they never heard it, and they can't help but speculate. A dream puts a seed in someone's brain, but it's not earned.
-I want to see characters do shit. I don't want them to dream about stabbing someone. I want them to stab someone. Or have sex with someone, or wreck their car, or do whatever the hell it is this book has been promising me so far. A novel is entirely an exercise in "What would happen if..." so you might as well make it worthwhile. There was a famous writer who suggested a technique that I remember as "Snake in a Drawer." The idea is that you throw something incongrous into the story and see what happens. Not something impossible, a pirate doesn't show up out of goddamn nowhere, but maybe someone opens a dresser drawer and there's a snake inside. Cue action. Take the snake out of the dream and put him in a drawer. Get out of my dreams, get into my car, damn it.
-I understand that dreams can be used to try and avoid cliche, using a dark dream instead of a dark sky, but the dreams end up falling back on cliche anyway. The language of dreams is less universal than the language of, um, language, and a dream has to be a lot more pre-explained and pre-loaded with what we already know in order to make any sense.
Okay, it's out of my system.
There's a time and a place for dreams, sure. Certain genres, certain types of books, can pull it off. I'm not a fan of hallucinations in any kind of media, but Fear & Loathing would not make a whole lot of sense played straight. Nightmare on Elm Street has to be the way it is, and it works because the distortion between dreams and reality is the whole point, not a throwaway scene. There's a scene in the terribly dated Empire Records where a character has a hallucination that he's at a GWAR concert being eaten alive by a giant plant, and it's funny because the character is watching himself on the TV and the audience sees his expression change as things go south.
In summation, dreams are a very specific tool in media and should not be used as a swiss army knife to solve whatever problems may arise.
Things go downhill from there.
Michael Kimball, who wrote the excellent Dear Everybody, a novel written in the form of letters left behind by a man who commits suicide, uses his ear for speech to translate into text a book that finds power in simple sadness.
Take, for example, this portion towards the beginning:
I didn't want to lose my wife. I wanted to see my wife lying down in a hospital bed. I wanted to see my wife breathing again. I wanted to see her get up out of bed again. I wanted to see her get up out of our bed again. I wanted my wife to come back home and live there with me again.
Kimball has a really subtle style, a way of saying things that makes the reader really sympathize with the narrator.
To get picky:
I pulled her eyelids up, but her eyes didn't look back at me, and her eyelids closed up again when I let go of them.
A lot of writers would have left off with ..."but her eyes didn't look back, and her eyelids..." but Kimball is a writer who makes lots of little important choices that make his books great.
True to form, Kimball also experiments with the structure, interspersing his own memories of the deaths of his grandparents into the story at hand. I'm not really sure why...but something that would normally be impossible to pull off works, and I'm more interested in the fact THAT it works than HOW for the time being.
Great book, definitely one of Pete's Top of 2011.
Now, it has to be noted that there was, unfortunately, a dream sequence in this book. As prompted by a friend earlier in the week, I would like to take a moment to express how irritating I find dreams in works of art and why I think they don't belong there.
For starters, I don't believe that dreams have much meaning, or certainly not hidden meaning that we need to mine from deep within the shitty folds of our dumb brains. Most of my dreams are fairly pedestrian, involve reasonably familiar scenarios and characters, and don't really make for much exciting interpretation.
Example: Dream where I am spooning some girl from high school, then I get up to go to work.
Interpretation: Though I don't think about that person often, there she was. And in the dream I got up to do exactly what I do five out of every seven days, so it would be more unusual to me if I weren't going to work.
It's my guess that brief thought will give you all the context you need for 90% of your dreams, and the other ten percent can be chalked up to your brain just doing whatever the fuck it wants.
That said, I know that not everybody feels that way. Lord knows we've all hung out with some fool who had a dream that his grandma died, and then it turned out his grandma died. Unless you're in a really bad movie, the death was on accident and not to somehow make people believe the kid was a dream psychic, and I have to believe that this was random chance.
Math: if you dreamt that your grandmother died once every month, and on one of these nights she died, assuming that you are 27 years old, your dreams were correct .3% of the time, which is a pretty shitty average. If you do that same math a different way, dreaming something different every night for a year, one of those dreams would come true. Thinking about it that way, that you dreamt SOMETHING every night, it wouldn't be that much of a shock that one dream came true. Except that the brain is a pattern-seeking machine, and it has a tendency to really highlight the shit out of the times it's right and let go of the times it's wrong.
Therefore, some idiot has a dream that comes true once, and I have to hear about it constantly. Yet I don't call them every single day to ask them what the previous night's dreams held and to remind them that those didn't come true, and also I don't butt in to point out that even though the grandma death was prophesized, there was not a bengal tiger with bananas instead of claws involved as there was in the dream.
That's my feeling on real world dreams and why they aren't interesting, particularly. If you think I want to hear about your dreams, try this first: Start by telling me the most fucked-up dream you've ever had. If I'm interested in that, I might, MIGHT listen to some others. But start with the gold.
Back to books.
I want to put this question in your head: Why?
Why, in a story that is a complete fabrication, does there need to be a dream? A made up story within a made up story?
Every single thing on the page is made up, so why does there have to be something that appears EVEN MORE made up?
I have some common reasons this happens, patterns if you will:
-Dreams are a shortcut to expressing mood in a book without actually doing the heavy lifting of, I don't know, writing a book. Instead of using factors outside the character, or painting the character as exhibiting a certain mood, the writer can just say, "That night he dreamed of a black snake. It was swallowing him whole, and as the snake's mouth covered his own mouth and nose he stopped breathing and saw nothing."
-Dreams are a way of allowing a character to do something out of character or express a repressed feeling. The corporate drone eviscerating his boss and cooking the entrails in a skillet. That way, the character can do something awful, but we don't have to risk readers finding a strong dislike for a character. Because the last thing you want is for a character to evoke strong reactions.
-Dreams are a way for writers to feel like they can cut loose and get a little sloppy with their words. If it doesn't make sense, it's fine. It's a dream, it's not supposed to make sense. I really dislike that logic. It goes against the entire purpose of writing, which is to make someone understand something, whether it be an action or an emotion or whatever. But a sentence like, "He broke through the tallgrass walls and fell bellyfirst out of a thick, blue membrane of sleep and into a different world, a world where his feet were his feet but also part of everything else" is just annoying. It's like hearing someone describe, badly, what it's like to drop acid.
-Dreams are, in some of the more egregious cases, used to solve mysteries in the book. A detective-type will be looking something over for hours, and it’s only when he has a dream about the papers flying out the window and rearranging themselves on the ground that he figures out the code. That, my friends, is complete bullshit and you know it.
-Worst case scenario, the dream is put in front of the audience as reality, and it's only after the dream is over that we find out It Was All a Dream. This is a completely idiotic way to tell a story. First, how does your audience know to trust you? A real person would never say, "Here's what happened to me in real life yesterday" and the proceed to tell you a dream. It's a completely false presentation, and your audience should not trust you afterwards. Second, it undoes all your hard work. Famously, in Super Mario Bros. 2, the game ending shows Mario in bed and after he wakes up it turns out that the entire game, all those turtle shells and radishes and all that bullshit, was all a dream. THEN WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU JUST JUMP IN THE VERY FIRST PIT IN THE GAME, WAKE UP, AND GET THE EXACT SAME MOTHERFUCKING ENDING!?
Here, in another list-y format, are some more reasons I really hate the use of dreams in all formats of fiction:
-You never know where you stand with a dream because rarely does the dreaming character say anything about the dream in particular or express it fully to another character. Therefore, the reader now knows something that other characters may potentially know and may not, for all intents and purposes, exist at all in the fictional universe. If a fictional character cannot or does not remember a dream, it becomes a complete waste of time, no different than if a writer wrote a chapter and then followed it up with, "Just kidding, ignore that chapter, let's move on."
-On that same note, setting the tone with a dream is sort of like being a lawyer and asking a question that you know will be overruled. You didn't get the answer, but the jury can't just pretend they never heard it, and they can't help but speculate. A dream puts a seed in someone's brain, but it's not earned.
-I want to see characters do shit. I don't want them to dream about stabbing someone. I want them to stab someone. Or have sex with someone, or wreck their car, or do whatever the hell it is this book has been promising me so far. A novel is entirely an exercise in "What would happen if..." so you might as well make it worthwhile. There was a famous writer who suggested a technique that I remember as "Snake in a Drawer." The idea is that you throw something incongrous into the story and see what happens. Not something impossible, a pirate doesn't show up out of goddamn nowhere, but maybe someone opens a dresser drawer and there's a snake inside. Cue action. Take the snake out of the dream and put him in a drawer. Get out of my dreams, get into my car, damn it.
-I understand that dreams can be used to try and avoid cliche, using a dark dream instead of a dark sky, but the dreams end up falling back on cliche anyway. The language of dreams is less universal than the language of, um, language, and a dream has to be a lot more pre-explained and pre-loaded with what we already know in order to make any sense.
Okay, it's out of my system.
There's a time and a place for dreams, sure. Certain genres, certain types of books, can pull it off. I'm not a fan of hallucinations in any kind of media, but Fear & Loathing would not make a whole lot of sense played straight. Nightmare on Elm Street has to be the way it is, and it works because the distortion between dreams and reality is the whole point, not a throwaway scene. There's a scene in the terribly dated Empire Records where a character has a hallucination that he's at a GWAR concert being eaten alive by a giant plant, and it's funny because the character is watching himself on the TV and the audience sees his expression change as things go south.
In summation, dreams are a very specific tool in media and should not be used as a swiss army knife to solve whatever problems may arise.
May 19, 2016
"Nobody told me that grief feels like fear." So says a young Michael Kimball in one of the memoirish-auto fictional sections that punctuates and animates this tale of final loss, and it is a line that catches the dark, fragile threads that make up the novel. Kimball writes in language absent rhetoric; there is nary an adjective or adverb. The only recurring exceptions are slowly, sticky and stiff, which emphasize the agonizing time warp one enters once death is acknowledged as near. I was reminded of Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button, which in a certain sense, is neither a fantastical tale nor a metaphor. Having watched the slow passing of someone near to me, I can attest that is an extreme process of imposed infantilization, and it renders all parties involved terrified and helpless. To present this reality nakedly is an act of bravery and Kimball manages it beautifully. A hard, cold, broken thing.
April 16, 2015
The story that is found in Us is one that is not new but the way that it is told is what makes this novel something amazing. A man wakes up to find that his wife isn’t breathing, and realizing she had a seizure in the middle of the night, the husband must come to terms with what his life will be like without her. Kimball uses sparse and simple sentences to tell an accurate tale of what one man’s grieving feels like. The clean prose found in the novel reads in such a way that makes the reader feel the shock and the desperation of the man waiting for his wife to wake up or to die. The work is an emotional tale of grief, acceptance and the power of love and companionship.
Review by Kate Cook
Review by Kate Cook
October 13, 2016
We talk about death in my household a lot, especially since the early passing of my future spouse is a very likely calamity at which we occasionally plan.
Yet I couldn't and didn't think of that as I was gripped by this beautifully sparse novel, detailing the pathetic and painfully familiar and immediately understandable gestures and minute actions by which the narrator attempts to, in turns, capture, then extend, then conjure from nothingness, the life of the ghostly and then expired wife that he loved.
I don't know how else people would deal with such excavating grief other than by filling up one's suddenly literalized world view with solemnly significant and ultimately petty acts of resistance against death, and then the most incremental steps toward acceptance.
Yet I couldn't and didn't think of that as I was gripped by this beautifully sparse novel, detailing the pathetic and painfully familiar and immediately understandable gestures and minute actions by which the narrator attempts to, in turns, capture, then extend, then conjure from nothingness, the life of the ghostly and then expired wife that he loved.
I don't know how else people would deal with such excavating grief other than by filling up one's suddenly literalized world view with solemnly significant and ultimately petty acts of resistance against death, and then the most incremental steps toward acceptance.
June 12, 2011
This book is a lot lot lot about love and also a lot about death. This book is beautiful. It shows love at the end of things and, to me, it seems to be a truer love. A love that is at the end of its long. It reminds us that love is not just the big things about a person, but is oftentimes mostly the little things about a person. I think it's all of these little things that Michael Kimball shines his light on for us made me moved the most.
There are so many parts in the book that moved me deeply. Parts that made me feel like crying. So many beautiful little lines that just sliced perfectly and made me be still.
Thank you Michael Kimball for this book.
There are so many parts in the book that moved me deeply. Parts that made me feel like crying. So many beautiful little lines that just sliced perfectly and made me be still.
Thank you Michael Kimball for this book.
October 22, 2011
It kept breaking my heart till the end. So many brilliant little turns -- I love how the even-numbered parts (the autobiographical things) completely change how you think about the book... Disarm you in some way... And oddly make the book more about the husband and wife by telling you about people outside their story -- people from Kimball's life and Kimball himself. Just read it, you'll see.
February 4, 2014
This is a painful, beautiful little book. It felt like someone was pressing their thumb into my heart.
May 9, 2023
Was immediately transported to old, familiar reading territory of early aughts (post?) postmodernist, Eggersian style when I saw the self-consciousness of the table of contents. Actually sooner, when I read the self-referential epigraphs prior. The deliberately simplistic style of the narrator’s voice (he’s broken down by his grief, almost to the state of a child, etc) also felt like it harkened to that era somehow. I always manage to read the copyright page of a book, occasionally before starting, but usually about fifteen pages or so in when I realize I’m missing context for when/where/by what house it was published. Even before thinking to do that with Us, I could FEEL that it was 2005 and the author a five-to-fifteen-years-shy-of-middle-aged white dude.
Don’t get me wrong, I was a teenager in the 2000s, I was caught hook, line, and sinker by Eggers, DFW, et al, but with so many telltale signs here so early on, and as a slightly more world weary adult (ha), I was definitely concerned that the lovely concept of Us would be super impeded on by too heavy of a postmodernist hand. Was glad to find no sign of pages-long footnotes, and due to the ultra simple writing and length, it was over in a couple short hours, before I could get too sick of how stylized it was.
I did manage to completely misinterpret the chapters from the author’s point of view. Because of my hard and fast rule of only reading the first sentence or two of any blurb, combined with the ambiguity of two separate first person male voices telling the same story, I had myself fully convinced that the chapters in bold-type (CK’s perspective) were just the husband separately reminiscing about his childhood memories and familial deaths - ie his own Grandfather Kimball. To be honest I enjoyed the concept significantly more when I thought it was entirely from the husband’s point of view. I realized at some point in the book that it was supposed to be somehow from the authors’s perspective, like maybe that he had superimposed himself into a hypothetical future of his own marriage? Or created around himself an entirely fictional marriage and its end? I didn’t know exactly but I just thought it was odd and interesting and moving, which it still is, but in a different and maaaaybe arguably a tiny bit questionable fashion?
I guess I was a little put off by the insertion of the author in his grandparents’ intimate story, not just literally, in the narration, but in his fabrication of the details and perspective. I can’t help but feel like there’s something slightly exploitative in his taking it upon himself to create his own iteration of their story. Still, it was pretty beautiful, and I did get something out of reading it.
Don’t get me wrong, I was a teenager in the 2000s, I was caught hook, line, and sinker by Eggers, DFW, et al, but with so many telltale signs here so early on, and as a slightly more world weary adult (ha), I was definitely concerned that the lovely concept of Us would be super impeded on by too heavy of a postmodernist hand. Was glad to find no sign of pages-long footnotes, and due to the ultra simple writing and length, it was over in a couple short hours, before I could get too sick of how stylized it was.
I did manage to completely misinterpret the chapters from the author’s point of view. Because of my hard and fast rule of only reading the first sentence or two of any blurb, combined with the ambiguity of two separate first person male voices telling the same story, I had myself fully convinced that the chapters in bold-type (CK’s perspective) were just the husband separately reminiscing about his childhood memories and familial deaths - ie his own Grandfather Kimball. To be honest I enjoyed the concept significantly more when I thought it was entirely from the husband’s point of view. I realized at some point in the book that it was supposed to be somehow from the authors’s perspective, like maybe that he had superimposed himself into a hypothetical future of his own marriage? Or created around himself an entirely fictional marriage and its end? I didn’t know exactly but I just thought it was odd and interesting and moving, which it still is, but in a different and maaaaybe arguably a tiny bit questionable fashion?
I guess I was a little put off by the insertion of the author in his grandparents’ intimate story, not just literally, in the narration, but in his fabrication of the details and perspective. I can’t help but feel like there’s something slightly exploitative in his taking it upon himself to create his own iteration of their story. Still, it was pretty beautiful, and I did get something out of reading it.
March 8, 2018
A repetitive, narrative thrum from a man whose wife has just had a seizure. The whole thing reads like someone improvising a mantra about how their grief and hope develop and tangle in real time. It's broken up into short chapters and then several sections from there, including brief sections dedicated to Kimball's own experiences with love and death in broad-yet-specific terms.
There's a real dedication to the form that comes full circle for me. I thought it was going to be a draining gimmick: all the sentences are "I did this" and "She did that" and other slight variations of that simple idea. The simplicity and duration are what save it. There's a childlike feel to how the story develops, almost as if the narrator has been stripped of their experience and knowledge and is resorting mentally to a time before their love was full and realized. It's beautiful when taken on the whole, especially considering I'm almost always a dick about wanting sentences that good outside their functionality.
Based on every description of this book, including my own, I should have disliked it or at least dismissed it. I'm glad I didn't. This was a fast, consuming read that played out like an extended feeling, whatever that means to you.
There's a real dedication to the form that comes full circle for me. I thought it was going to be a draining gimmick: all the sentences are "I did this" and "She did that" and other slight variations of that simple idea. The simplicity and duration are what save it. There's a childlike feel to how the story develops, almost as if the narrator has been stripped of their experience and knowledge and is resorting mentally to a time before their love was full and realized. It's beautiful when taken on the whole, especially considering I'm almost always a dick about wanting sentences that good outside their functionality.
Based on every description of this book, including my own, I should have disliked it or at least dismissed it. I'm glad I didn't. This was a fast, consuming read that played out like an extended feeling, whatever that means to you.
August 20, 2017
Jeez louise--so bare & sad, so hushed & heart-sore. Reader: tears galore. Text: tears mostly subtext. Kimball's interludes--brief autobiographical chapters breaking the book's direct detailing of a loved one's (elderly wife) slow, fatal decline from her caretaker's perspective (elderly husband)--serve as much appreciated narrative shifts, allowing this reader some emotional easing, some cardiac breathing room, as the subject is so emotionally immediate & taut, dangerously so if not for Kimball's gifted handling, his skill at precise detail & pared-away style.
N.B. Above written (nearly) immediately after finishing (after hugging sleepy wife & expressing 12 flowing oz of syrupy verbal sentiment over time's cruel habit of passing & its hanger-on, our consequential mortality). That is to say, there is little distance between this review & the last page.
N.B. Above written (nearly) immediately after finishing (after hugging sleepy wife & expressing 12 flowing oz of syrupy verbal sentiment over time's cruel habit of passing & its hanger-on, our consequential mortality). That is to say, there is little distance between this review & the last page.
February 16, 2017
Couldn't really get into this one. My local bookstore, Green Apple, loves it so I gave it a try. I wanted to like it because of that, but to me it was just kind of...boring. Not written all that well. It's about a old man getting ready to basically say goodbye to his wife as she is dying in a hospital. It seems like a million sentences in a row start with "I did this..." and "I did that..." and "I did..." and it just gets a little too repetitive. No dialogue at all. I think I would have liked this book a lot more if I was in a good relationship right now, but I'm not so that might have factored into myself not enjoying this one. Oh well, maybe will pick up again in a few years and give it another shot.
December 25, 2018
This is the first of Kimball’s books I read. I devoured it in one sitting, outdoors at a coffee shop, my coffee growing cold as I wiped tears from my eyes. This book acquainted me with my own mortality in a new and deeply intimate way, and taught me about a love I had never—at that time in my life—even imagined existed. Kimball has since become one of my absolute favorite authors.
He writes about tragedy and loss head-on. No irony, no trickery, no temporary departures to higher ground. His novels tell the stories of endings and aftermaths and collateral damage—the stuff that happens after most novels end. He goes for it. His sentences are clean and luminous. He tells the truth.
He writes about tragedy and loss head-on. No irony, no trickery, no temporary departures to higher ground. His novels tell the stories of endings and aftermaths and collateral damage—the stuff that happens after most novels end. He goes for it. His sentences are clean and luminous. He tells the truth.
December 14, 2023
I would have given this a higher rating, I quite liked it. The pacing of the book is great. It was stressful, the pages were flying by and so was the time left in her life.
But Kimball lifts and paraphrases a C.S. Lewis line from A Grief Observed:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
And Kimball:
“Nobody told me that grief feels like fear.” (p 124 in my version)
That said, I once listened to a researcher on a podcast talk about how musicians, writers, people who create etc often inadventently recycle material they once heard, it’s just how the human brain works. It’s too bad that it’s a worse version of the line.
But Kimball lifts and paraphrases a C.S. Lewis line from A Grief Observed:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
And Kimball:
“Nobody told me that grief feels like fear.” (p 124 in my version)
That said, I once listened to a researcher on a podcast talk about how musicians, writers, people who create etc often inadventently recycle material they once heard, it’s just how the human brain works. It’s too bad that it’s a worse version of the line.
December 5, 2018
5.1/10
Though the writing is disciplined, Michael Kimball’s Us, a novel on an aging couple preparing for death and the mental anguish that comes with it, is like the hit NBC show, This is Us. It feels like Kimball and others have perfected the algorithm for sadness. Its cynicism for trying to evoke an emotional response is its least accomplished aspect so much so it seems convinced it has something to say, which only sullies its rudimentary achievements with self-satisfaction.
Though the writing is disciplined, Michael Kimball’s Us, a novel on an aging couple preparing for death and the mental anguish that comes with it, is like the hit NBC show, This is Us. It feels like Kimball and others have perfected the algorithm for sadness. Its cynicism for trying to evoke an emotional response is its least accomplished aspect so much so it seems convinced it has something to say, which only sullies its rudimentary achievements with self-satisfaction.
June 9, 2019
Weird but readable
I almost didn't finish this but couldn't stop reading it. Not recommended if you just suffered a death of a loved one. So simple, so bleak and depressing but it was good.
I almost didn't finish this but couldn't stop reading it. Not recommended if you just suffered a death of a loved one. So simple, so bleak and depressing but it was good.
September 17, 2021
I tried to get into the story, but the way it was written was too stilted and robotic. This style of writing was probably done intentionally to communicate what it's like to go through the motions of grief. Just not my style.
August 8, 2018
hard to see the pages with tears in my eyes
November 12, 2020
touching
April 15, 2011
Read 4/9/11 - 4/9/11
5 Stars - Highly Recommended / The Next Best Book
Pgs:184
Michael Kimball has blown me away with his upcoming release Us - a beautiful, heart-wrenching novel about a husband who wakes up to find that his wife is not breathing.
Though Us is a fairly quick read, it packs a lasting punch. Cutting straight to the emotional core of each moment, Kimball uses sparse sentences and first person narration to work his spell on the reader.
The subject matter is one that most of us have had to deal with -whether the death of a beloved pet, grandparent, close friend, perhaps even a parent. In some cases, those we lost were taken from us quickly, unexpectedly. In others, we had time to make our peace and come to terms with their inevitable passing. In no case has it ever been easy.
Us strips this husband's experience with death down into 7 parts, which I find to be similar to some of the phases of grief - Denial: the refusal to believe his wife could die. Bargaining: the belief that his actions and thoughts can exert a certain control over her ability to remain alive. Acceptance: soaking up what time they have left together. Depression: the inability to change out of his funeral clothes or wash her smell off of her dirty laundry, and the sad act of dressing up a lamp in his wife's clothing.
If nothing else, Us will force you to remember to appreciate the people you love, because you never know when you might wake up to find them no longer there.
Here is an excerpt from the novel, on which the book trailer below is based on:
How I Danced With the Floor Lamp
I pulled one of my wife's dresses off a hanger in her closet and pulled it down over the length of a floor lamp. I pulled on a hat of hers down over the lampshade. I glued a pair or her shoes down onto the base of the floor lamp and waited for the glue to dry. I plugged the floor lamp into an outlet in the living room, turned the floor lamp on, and her head lit up.
The dress was floor length and it had long sleeves. I held onto the cuff of one long sleeve of her dress with my palm and fingers and tucked the cuff of the other long sleeve into my waistband at the small of my back. I placed my other hand behind the long stand of the floor lamp just above where the base of her spine would have been if the floor lamp were my wife.
I waited for the music to start playing in my head. I pulled the floor lamp up against my body and felt the heat form the light on my dace. I tipped the floor lamp back with my one arm and leaned over with her. I stood back up and spin the floor lamp away from me along the edge of its round base and along the length of my arm and the long sleeve of her dress. The base of the floor lamp made a scraping noise against the hardwood floor and so did my shoes.
I could see myself dancing with her on the living room walls. I could see the shadows of us dancing ont he walls all the way around the living room.
Many thanks to Michael Kimball and his publishing company, Tyrant Books, for making this book available for review. Us will release on May 10th, 2011.
View the book trailer on my blog -
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
5 Stars - Highly Recommended / The Next Best Book
Pgs:184
Michael Kimball has blown me away with his upcoming release Us - a beautiful, heart-wrenching novel about a husband who wakes up to find that his wife is not breathing.
Though Us is a fairly quick read, it packs a lasting punch. Cutting straight to the emotional core of each moment, Kimball uses sparse sentences and first person narration to work his spell on the reader.
The subject matter is one that most of us have had to deal with -whether the death of a beloved pet, grandparent, close friend, perhaps even a parent. In some cases, those we lost were taken from us quickly, unexpectedly. In others, we had time to make our peace and come to terms with their inevitable passing. In no case has it ever been easy.
Us strips this husband's experience with death down into 7 parts, which I find to be similar to some of the phases of grief - Denial: the refusal to believe his wife could die. Bargaining: the belief that his actions and thoughts can exert a certain control over her ability to remain alive. Acceptance: soaking up what time they have left together. Depression: the inability to change out of his funeral clothes or wash her smell off of her dirty laundry, and the sad act of dressing up a lamp in his wife's clothing.
If nothing else, Us will force you to remember to appreciate the people you love, because you never know when you might wake up to find them no longer there.
Here is an excerpt from the novel, on which the book trailer below is based on:
How I Danced With the Floor Lamp
I pulled one of my wife's dresses off a hanger in her closet and pulled it down over the length of a floor lamp. I pulled on a hat of hers down over the lampshade. I glued a pair or her shoes down onto the base of the floor lamp and waited for the glue to dry. I plugged the floor lamp into an outlet in the living room, turned the floor lamp on, and her head lit up.
The dress was floor length and it had long sleeves. I held onto the cuff of one long sleeve of her dress with my palm and fingers and tucked the cuff of the other long sleeve into my waistband at the small of my back. I placed my other hand behind the long stand of the floor lamp just above where the base of her spine would have been if the floor lamp were my wife.
I waited for the music to start playing in my head. I pulled the floor lamp up against my body and felt the heat form the light on my dace. I tipped the floor lamp back with my one arm and leaned over with her. I stood back up and spin the floor lamp away from me along the edge of its round base and along the length of my arm and the long sleeve of her dress. The base of the floor lamp made a scraping noise against the hardwood floor and so did my shoes.
I could see myself dancing with her on the living room walls. I could see the shadows of us dancing ont he walls all the way around the living room.
Many thanks to Michael Kimball and his publishing company, Tyrant Books, for making this book available for review. Us will release on May 10th, 2011.
View the book trailer on my blog -
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
April 5, 2016
Our narrator is an old man. Exactly how old is never made clear; he can still drive but he’s also frail and sometimes gets confused. At first I actually thought the narrator had learning difficulties—and perhaps he does but that’s never made clear—because of the clipped and precise way he tells his story. This has put off some readers. For example Goodreads reviewer Mary writes: “The narrator felt too reduced to a six-year-old child in the style Kimball chose, which I realize helps to create vulnerability, but also subtly diminished my ability to take the narrator seriously.” I agree the style of writing is very deliberate and it does feel a little contrived, at times, as if he’s twisting the man’s natural phraseology to make a point. I think the reviewer in Time Out Chicago got where Kimball was coming from when he wrote, “The sentences and even paragraphs simulate the stunned but dutiful response to the suffering of a loved one: short, raw and somewhat elliptical, wrapping themselves around the small tasks at hand and the larger questions constantly raised.”
The man’s wife has had a seizure and is rushed off to hospital. At first it looks like she’s not going to make it. She ends up in the Intensive Care Unit and for days the old guy hangs around wishing she’d come back to him. Amazingly she pulls through but it’s obvious her seizure’s taken its toll on her. She gets to go home but both her husband and she know that their time together is limited. I’m not sure I’ve read anything as poignant and painful as this since Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows which tells the story of an old couple clinging to each other after a nuclear attack on Britain by the Soviet Union. Death is a process. There are tick boxes: No circulation—check! No respiration—check! No brain activity—check! But there are more than a few people walking around with a pulse who’re already dead inside. Because their reason for living is no longer there. And it becomes abundantly clear from the very start of this book that that’s what this couple are to each other. So it’s a book about death and dying but more importantly it’s a book about love.
It goes without saying that this is a sad book—it’s a terribly sad book—but it’s a book that will go right over the heads of some people. I’m fifty-six and my wife is sixty-eight and I can picture me in this situation in the future. I’m not sure the seventeen-year-old me would’ve been able to project himself that far into the future. There are times it veers towards the maudlin and I could feel the shadow of Mitch Albom lurking in the background but I don’t think Kimball ever gets overly sentimental; this is a practical couple and their love is expressed in practical ways. No one weeps or sobs. The old guy cries once. But there are no histrionics. Just one terribly futile gesture involving a suitcase which I won’t spoil for you that I have to say did get to me.
You can read my full review on my blog here.
The man’s wife has had a seizure and is rushed off to hospital. At first it looks like she’s not going to make it. She ends up in the Intensive Care Unit and for days the old guy hangs around wishing she’d come back to him. Amazingly she pulls through but it’s obvious her seizure’s taken its toll on her. She gets to go home but both her husband and she know that their time together is limited. I’m not sure I’ve read anything as poignant and painful as this since Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows which tells the story of an old couple clinging to each other after a nuclear attack on Britain by the Soviet Union. Death is a process. There are tick boxes: No circulation—check! No respiration—check! No brain activity—check! But there are more than a few people walking around with a pulse who’re already dead inside. Because their reason for living is no longer there. And it becomes abundantly clear from the very start of this book that that’s what this couple are to each other. So it’s a book about death and dying but more importantly it’s a book about love.
It goes without saying that this is a sad book—it’s a terribly sad book—but it’s a book that will go right over the heads of some people. I’m fifty-six and my wife is sixty-eight and I can picture me in this situation in the future. I’m not sure the seventeen-year-old me would’ve been able to project himself that far into the future. There are times it veers towards the maudlin and I could feel the shadow of Mitch Albom lurking in the background but I don’t think Kimball ever gets overly sentimental; this is a practical couple and their love is expressed in practical ways. No one weeps or sobs. The old guy cries once. But there are no histrionics. Just one terribly futile gesture involving a suitcase which I won’t spoil for you that I have to say did get to me.
You can read my full review on my blog here.
March 13, 2013
Book: Us
Author: Michael Kimball
Published: May 2011 by Tyrant Books, 184 pages
Date Read: April 2012
First Line: "Our bed was shaking and it woke me up afraid."
Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 4/5 houses with all the lights left on, so the ambulance knows where to find you in the dark
Review: Get ready for all the tears.
An unnamed husband wakes up to his wife having a seizure. She is whisked away to the hospital, where they tell him she might not wake up. He doesn’t give up. He brings in all the things from her bedroom, so when she wakes up, she won’t feel out of place. He records the sounds of their house – floorboards creaking, faucets being turned on and off – and plays them for her, so she’ll remember and come back to him. He sleeps in the empty bed next to her. He waits, and he waits, and he waits, and he never gives up, because he can’t imagine his life without her.
In alternate chapters, a man remembers the people in his life who have died, and tries to put their lives in perspective, and to make sense of the slow stupidity of death.
Everyone reading this has, no doubt, gone through a tragedy in their life of some sort. Looking back on it, did you marvel at some of your behaviors, as if they were being performed by someone else? Like you were operating in a fog? Wonder how you managed to get through the event, why you did things this way and not that way, how, when a human is tested, their actions are often not what you’d expect?
That’s what I thought of, when reading this book. How, when faced with the illness and death of a loved one, how we’re often on autopilot. How disaster, when it strikes in the middle of the night, causes us to react in strange ways. How the lack of sleep makes us hollow and empty shells of people. How the grief starts to slip into the cracks and change us.
Also, I thought about love. Especially the love between two people who’ve spent a lifetime together, and who know each other’s shorthand, and who can’t imagine life without one another. How far you’d go for that person, who’s become, over the years, an extension of you. How your life would change, were they to no longer be there. How you’d be willing to change your life, to get them to stay.
I really loved this book. It’s a very quick read – I finished it in one day. The last stretch was in the breakroom at work, and I was blinking away tears. We’re not to show emotion at work. WE ARE MEANT TO BE ROBOTS. So my coworkers were not overly impressed with the crying. I passed it off as allergies. Yay for reading this in springtime!
Excellent little book. Kimball’s great with emotion and realism and pain and the truth behind a lifetime of love. Highly recommended.
(Originally published at Insatiable Booksluts)
Author: Michael Kimball
Published: May 2011 by Tyrant Books, 184 pages
Date Read: April 2012
First Line: "Our bed was shaking and it woke me up afraid."
Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 4/5 houses with all the lights left on, so the ambulance knows where to find you in the dark
Review: Get ready for all the tears.
An unnamed husband wakes up to his wife having a seizure. She is whisked away to the hospital, where they tell him she might not wake up. He doesn’t give up. He brings in all the things from her bedroom, so when she wakes up, she won’t feel out of place. He records the sounds of their house – floorboards creaking, faucets being turned on and off – and plays them for her, so she’ll remember and come back to him. He sleeps in the empty bed next to her. He waits, and he waits, and he waits, and he never gives up, because he can’t imagine his life without her.
In alternate chapters, a man remembers the people in his life who have died, and tries to put their lives in perspective, and to make sense of the slow stupidity of death.
Everyone reading this has, no doubt, gone through a tragedy in their life of some sort. Looking back on it, did you marvel at some of your behaviors, as if they were being performed by someone else? Like you were operating in a fog? Wonder how you managed to get through the event, why you did things this way and not that way, how, when a human is tested, their actions are often not what you’d expect?
That’s what I thought of, when reading this book. How, when faced with the illness and death of a loved one, how we’re often on autopilot. How disaster, when it strikes in the middle of the night, causes us to react in strange ways. How the lack of sleep makes us hollow and empty shells of people. How the grief starts to slip into the cracks and change us.
Also, I thought about love. Especially the love between two people who’ve spent a lifetime together, and who know each other’s shorthand, and who can’t imagine life without one another. How far you’d go for that person, who’s become, over the years, an extension of you. How your life would change, were they to no longer be there. How you’d be willing to change your life, to get them to stay.
I really loved this book. It’s a very quick read – I finished it in one day. The last stretch was in the breakroom at work, and I was blinking away tears. We’re not to show emotion at work. WE ARE MEANT TO BE ROBOTS. So my coworkers were not overly impressed with the crying. I passed it off as allergies. Yay for reading this in springtime!
Excellent little book. Kimball’s great with emotion and realism and pain and the truth behind a lifetime of love. Highly recommended.
(Originally published at Insatiable Booksluts)
May 10, 2011
First of all, I want to share with you why I wanted to read Michael Kimball’s Us so desperately. I watched this heart felt and bone gripping book trailer:
Upon watching this trailer, how could you not want to know more and read Us? I was instantly intrigued and curious. I may be slightly biased. Why? Because I am known for over sympathizing with widowed males. I tend to develop fantastical and lavish stories of how it must be triumphant that they make it through life without their wives. So obviously, I would be drawn to Kimball’s story.
Us casts the reader into a husband and wife’s struggle, where they must cope with the death and the dying of a loved one. As the wife slowly passes away, the reader is introduced to Kimball’s methodically sharp sentences, which reveal how the husband copes with his wife’s death and how his love succeeds death. Eventually, in several bolded typeface parts, the reader engages with the grandson’s perspective of his grandfather’s grief. All seven sections powerfully reveal the many layers of grief and lasting love.
I give Kimball’s Us five shots of espresso because the potency of the novel kept me from taking a moment to stop. I even walked to and from school in order to keep reading the novel. Kimball’s novel has given me the coffee shakes that will last for a very long time. As cliché as this sounds, Us moves you, rattles you, and shakes your spirit as a human who can potentially love. Both perspectives of the grandfather and grandson expand the value of the human experience and the possibility to love beyond one relationship across generations. Us reminded me of the value of life and the potential to love beyond death. I, however, feel that if I say anything more, then I will undermine the beauty of Kimball’s novel. I will leave you with one plea: read this magnificent novel.
Upon watching this trailer, how could you not want to know more and read Us? I was instantly intrigued and curious. I may be slightly biased. Why? Because I am known for over sympathizing with widowed males. I tend to develop fantastical and lavish stories of how it must be triumphant that they make it through life without their wives. So obviously, I would be drawn to Kimball’s story.
Us casts the reader into a husband and wife’s struggle, where they must cope with the death and the dying of a loved one. As the wife slowly passes away, the reader is introduced to Kimball’s methodically sharp sentences, which reveal how the husband copes with his wife’s death and how his love succeeds death. Eventually, in several bolded typeface parts, the reader engages with the grandson’s perspective of his grandfather’s grief. All seven sections powerfully reveal the many layers of grief and lasting love.
I give Kimball’s Us five shots of espresso because the potency of the novel kept me from taking a moment to stop. I even walked to and from school in order to keep reading the novel. Kimball’s novel has given me the coffee shakes that will last for a very long time. As cliché as this sounds, Us moves you, rattles you, and shakes your spirit as a human who can potentially love. Both perspectives of the grandfather and grandson expand the value of the human experience and the possibility to love beyond one relationship across generations. Us reminded me of the value of life and the potential to love beyond death. I, however, feel that if I say anything more, then I will undermine the beauty of Kimball’s novel. I will leave you with one plea: read this magnificent novel.
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