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How To Get Along With Women
A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi''s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where - for better or for worse - we see ourselves for what we truly are.
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2012
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164 people want to read
About the author
Elisabeth de Mariaffi
9 books129 followersElisabeth de Mariaffi is the author of a new collection of short stories, How To Get Along With Women (Invisible Publishing, 2012).
Her poetry and short fiction have been widely published in magazines across Canada, and she's one of the wild minds behind the highly original Toronto Poetry Vendors, a small press that sells single poems by established Canadian poets through toonie vending machines.
Elisabeth works as Marketing Coordinator for Breakwater Books, and is currently based in St. John's, where she lives with the poet George Murray and their combined brood of four children -- making them CanLit's answer to the Brady Brunch.'
Her poetry and short fiction have been widely published in magazines across Canada, and she's one of the wild minds behind the highly original Toronto Poetry Vendors, a small press that sells single poems by established Canadian poets through toonie vending machines.
Elisabeth works as Marketing Coordinator for Breakwater Books, and is currently based in St. John's, where she lives with the poet George Murray and their combined brood of four children -- making them CanLit's answer to the Brady Brunch.'
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 30, 2013
If there were awards for best book titles, this would be a serious contender. The only problem with such a snappy and sassy title - assuming one can indeed call it a problem - is that it immediately raises expectations.
After a bit of a bumpy start with "Dancing on the Tether", I was quickly won over by the stories that followed. "Kiss Me Like I’m The Last Man On Earth" and "He Ate His French Fries in a Light–hearted Way" were both fantastic pieces that had me waging an internal war between lingering over the prose, or allowing myself to be borne away by the riveting current of the story.
At about the halfway point of this collection, the structure and voice of the stories veered off in a more writerly direction. I feel rather plebian in describing the effect as becoming more distant and less accessible, but such was my impression. I began to struggle in finding any point of connection.
Of course, that all serves to say more about my preferences as a reader than de Mariaffi's skill as a writer, so take it with a grain of salt.
After a bit of a bumpy start with "Dancing on the Tether", I was quickly won over by the stories that followed. "Kiss Me Like I’m The Last Man On Earth" and "He Ate His French Fries in a Light–hearted Way" were both fantastic pieces that had me waging an internal war between lingering over the prose, or allowing myself to be borne away by the riveting current of the story.
At about the halfway point of this collection, the structure and voice of the stories veered off in a more writerly direction. I feel rather plebian in describing the effect as becoming more distant and less accessible, but such was my impression. I began to struggle in finding any point of connection.
Of course, that all serves to say more about my preferences as a reader than de Mariaffi's skill as a writer, so take it with a grain of salt.
December 16, 2013
The short stories in this collection read like assignments for a fiction-writing workshop. I like the fact that the author is willing to experiment with language and structure, but some of these things can become distracting to the reader (for example: the lack of quotation marks when characters are speaking). Maybe this type of book simply isn't my thing. PS The title was great. I would have loved a collection of short fiction tied to that theme.
September 19, 2013
I reviewed the collection for Briarpatch magazine:
http://briarpatchmagazine.com/article...
How to Get Along With Women is a finely written collection exploring the ways our identities, our most intimate relationships, and our experiences can be shaped by the world we inhabit, a world mapped by dynamics of power. De Mariaffi’s insights pierce deepest when she brings the reader close to the heart of her characters.
http://briarpatchmagazine.com/article...
How to Get Along With Women is a finely written collection exploring the ways our identities, our most intimate relationships, and our experiences can be shaped by the world we inhabit, a world mapped by dynamics of power. De Mariaffi’s insights pierce deepest when she brings the reader close to the heart of her characters.
September 6, 2012
A self-assured debut collection of short stories, focusing on female relationships and the power struggles that come along with them, whether these are romantic relationships or female friendships. Elisabeth de Mariaffi has such a keen eye for detail and a killer ability for getting into the minds of her characters.
Full review to come in Quill & Quire.
Full review to come in Quill & Quire.
October 7, 2013
Two stars for how much I actually enjoyed the collection (only 'The Astonishing Abercrombie!' did I really like), but three for the obvious craft and skill, which I could admire, even if most of these stories failed to connect with me on an emotional level.
October 21, 2013
I aligned myself with another researcher. We held meetings after hours and made lists and lists of questions. In partnership, we created a new study that would follow the men from their formative, pre-man years. This was to be our life’s work. My partner took charge of the Centre for Specimen Generation. It was her job to sweep the men’s holes for tissue, sample the tissue for DNA, fill our test tubes with nutritive agar. We built glass enclosures, fifteen per lab, and incubated the bodies as if they were our own babies. Sturdy volunteers pushed the tiny pre-men out from between their legs.
Predictably, we divided into factions. My research team argued for an increasingly close relationship with the men. Authenticity, we said, depends on empathy. We held a naming ceremony, carried their photos in our wallets.
Some believed the intimacy of this process compromised the study as a whole. These dissenters were removed from the project.
Are we field researchers? the outgoing Chair screamed, and she watched as the Maid Brigade cleaned out her desk—their blue uniforms, their embroidered name tags. I straightened my white coat and stood firm. The lab, I told my loyal colleagues, can be whatever you want it to be. The lab can be the field.
***
A sinister naivety drives much of Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s first published collection of short fiction, How to Get Along with Women. The twelve stories contained within offer a mostly monochromatic spectrum of broken families and tepid, fucked up relationships punctuated by Mariaffi’s sparse, economical prose.
Many of the stories focus on desired relationships that, for one reason or another, can’t or shouldn’t be. “Dancing on the Tether” introduces us to Zelda, her mother Mary, and Tim, Mary’s ex who Zelda wants to fuck, because he’s a stand-up guy who doesn’t beat dogs or command more respect than he deserves. The two young friends in “Kiss Me Like I’m the Last Man on Earth”—a girl and a boy—engage in a game of war that affords their lesser demons opportunity to rise to the surface. “He Ate His French Fries in a Light-Hearted Way” details the unconventional friendship between Del, a thirty-plus-year-old gay man dying of AIDS, and a teenage girl half his age, who, when she departs for university to find herself, abandons the one person to ever mean a damn thing to her.
“Field Work” is far and away the most playful entry in the collection—arguably the only playful entry. The story revolves around scientists—all women—observing the men of the future, who are all quite tiny and, well, useless, having shrunken over time because they were simply no longer needed. Interestingly enough, as much as the story works to knock men down a peg or two, it also serves as a brief indictment of the ways in which women are just as susceptible as men in painting the opposite gender’s worth in broad, stereotypical strokes.
Similar to “Field Work,” “Everything Under Your Feet” showcases a more imaginative, image-focused side of Mariaffi’s writing. The story introduces us to Lydia, who upon finishing school sets out to make her mark on the world, only to settle in the very same place she runs out of gas. She begins running up the side of a nearby mountain every day, determined to do something more worthwhile with her life than becoming just another factory drone (preferring, as she repeats the same actions day in and day out, to be a drone of a different colour). Lydia is certainly the most developed and intriguing character in the collection.
Contrary to the inventiveness and intrigue of these two entries in the collection, however, the stories “Super Carnicería,” “Jim and Nadine, Nadine and Jim,” and the titular “How to Get Along with Women” feel academic and isolated. The latter in particular is a bird’s eye view of a relationship over an extended period of time, told in short vignettes. Reading the story I felt like a voyeuristic neighbour peering in the living room or bedroom window of a couple, and each time I looked in it was another day, or another season, but my connection to the people inside was fleeting and without emotional resonance.
By the end of the collection I felt unexpectedly worn out by Mariaffi’s writing. As much as “Field Work” and “Everything Under Your Feet” are the stand-out stories within this collection, the remaining entries all fell into that unfortunate grey category of “just not all that interesting.” And unfortunately, like at least three other short fiction collections I’ve read this year, How to Get Along with Women saves its weakest for last with “You Know How I Feel.” It’s difficult not to feel at least a little let down when that happens.
Unfortunately, Mariaffi’s disaffected tone overwhelmed the content of her stories for me. So many of the characters within the stories were maudlin and without purpose that it was at times frustratingly dull; it seemed to me while reading the book as if the author were disinterested in her own characters, who mostly lacked distinctive voices of their own. Part of this can be boiled down to the sparseness of Mariaffi’s language, which was often punctuated to its detriment. Another element of this, going part and parcel with the aforementioned, is the stylistic decision of not using quotation marks to denote dialogue. This is a personal thing but worth mentioning as I find when confronted with this decision I often feel as if I’m being held at an emotional distance by the author through their employment of a stylistic device that hampers comprehension and increases the prevailing monotone voice.
How to Get Along with Women has received a tremendous amount of praise since its release, even landing a coveted spot on this year’s Giller Prize longlist. Unfortunately, like Lynn Coady’s recent collection Hellgoing (which was also nominated and subsequently made the shortlist), I simply didn’t feel enough of an emotional connection to any of the characters or stories within this collection.
Predictably, we divided into factions. My research team argued for an increasingly close relationship with the men. Authenticity, we said, depends on empathy. We held a naming ceremony, carried their photos in our wallets.
Some believed the intimacy of this process compromised the study as a whole. These dissenters were removed from the project.
Are we field researchers? the outgoing Chair screamed, and she watched as the Maid Brigade cleaned out her desk—their blue uniforms, their embroidered name tags. I straightened my white coat and stood firm. The lab, I told my loyal colleagues, can be whatever you want it to be. The lab can be the field.
***
A sinister naivety drives much of Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s first published collection of short fiction, How to Get Along with Women. The twelve stories contained within offer a mostly monochromatic spectrum of broken families and tepid, fucked up relationships punctuated by Mariaffi’s sparse, economical prose.
Many of the stories focus on desired relationships that, for one reason or another, can’t or shouldn’t be. “Dancing on the Tether” introduces us to Zelda, her mother Mary, and Tim, Mary’s ex who Zelda wants to fuck, because he’s a stand-up guy who doesn’t beat dogs or command more respect than he deserves. The two young friends in “Kiss Me Like I’m the Last Man on Earth”—a girl and a boy—engage in a game of war that affords their lesser demons opportunity to rise to the surface. “He Ate His French Fries in a Light-Hearted Way” details the unconventional friendship between Del, a thirty-plus-year-old gay man dying of AIDS, and a teenage girl half his age, who, when she departs for university to find herself, abandons the one person to ever mean a damn thing to her.
“Field Work” is far and away the most playful entry in the collection—arguably the only playful entry. The story revolves around scientists—all women—observing the men of the future, who are all quite tiny and, well, useless, having shrunken over time because they were simply no longer needed. Interestingly enough, as much as the story works to knock men down a peg or two, it also serves as a brief indictment of the ways in which women are just as susceptible as men in painting the opposite gender’s worth in broad, stereotypical strokes.
Similar to “Field Work,” “Everything Under Your Feet” showcases a more imaginative, image-focused side of Mariaffi’s writing. The story introduces us to Lydia, who upon finishing school sets out to make her mark on the world, only to settle in the very same place she runs out of gas. She begins running up the side of a nearby mountain every day, determined to do something more worthwhile with her life than becoming just another factory drone (preferring, as she repeats the same actions day in and day out, to be a drone of a different colour). Lydia is certainly the most developed and intriguing character in the collection.
Contrary to the inventiveness and intrigue of these two entries in the collection, however, the stories “Super Carnicería,” “Jim and Nadine, Nadine and Jim,” and the titular “How to Get Along with Women” feel academic and isolated. The latter in particular is a bird’s eye view of a relationship over an extended period of time, told in short vignettes. Reading the story I felt like a voyeuristic neighbour peering in the living room or bedroom window of a couple, and each time I looked in it was another day, or another season, but my connection to the people inside was fleeting and without emotional resonance.
By the end of the collection I felt unexpectedly worn out by Mariaffi’s writing. As much as “Field Work” and “Everything Under Your Feet” are the stand-out stories within this collection, the remaining entries all fell into that unfortunate grey category of “just not all that interesting.” And unfortunately, like at least three other short fiction collections I’ve read this year, How to Get Along with Women saves its weakest for last with “You Know How I Feel.” It’s difficult not to feel at least a little let down when that happens.
Unfortunately, Mariaffi’s disaffected tone overwhelmed the content of her stories for me. So many of the characters within the stories were maudlin and without purpose that it was at times frustratingly dull; it seemed to me while reading the book as if the author were disinterested in her own characters, who mostly lacked distinctive voices of their own. Part of this can be boiled down to the sparseness of Mariaffi’s language, which was often punctuated to its detriment. Another element of this, going part and parcel with the aforementioned, is the stylistic decision of not using quotation marks to denote dialogue. This is a personal thing but worth mentioning as I find when confronted with this decision I often feel as if I’m being held at an emotional distance by the author through their employment of a stylistic device that hampers comprehension and increases the prevailing monotone voice.
How to Get Along with Women has received a tremendous amount of praise since its release, even landing a coveted spot on this year’s Giller Prize longlist. Unfortunately, like Lynn Coady’s recent collection Hellgoing (which was also nominated and subsequently made the shortlist), I simply didn’t feel enough of an emotional connection to any of the characters or stories within this collection.
December 21, 2017
A short story collection on the Giller LongList and I usually like short stories but these abandoned me somehow. I enjoyed the characters but struggled with the style and the absence of a thread to hold as I went through each story.
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August 12, 2015http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2013/0...
Review by Yutaka Dirks
The 11 stories in Elisabeth de Mariaffi's debut story collection, How to Get Along With Women, take place in locales as diverse as Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and Marseille, France. The stories are intimately linked to their particular settings; in each, de Mariaffi explores how the characters' actions are shaped by their geographical, historical or political place in the world.
The 10-year-old protagonist of "Kiss Me Like I'm The Last Man On Earth" lives in north Toronto and grew up overhearing stories about the Second World War told by her Hungarian refugee grandmother and her Jewish neighbours. With her young Latvian Jewish neighbour, she creates a prisoner-of-war camp in his family's basement, and the game spirals disturbingly out of control. The story vibrates with a nauseating energy, an unsettling meditation on the use of power by those who don't understand it and the far-reaching legacy of war.
De Mariaffi has crafted a brilliant character in the precocious small-town boy in "The Astonishing Abercrombie!" -- a "quality youngster" with a "sunny disposition," despite having taken it upon himself to care for his father and younger brother when his mother disappears one night. "What Peteyboy likes to do when Mama is gone is get up into a tree and watch down the road to see is she coming back yet," says the stoic child about his younger brother.
Read more here: http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2013/0...
Review by Yutaka Dirks
The 11 stories in Elisabeth de Mariaffi's debut story collection, How to Get Along With Women, take place in locales as diverse as Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and Marseille, France. The stories are intimately linked to their particular settings; in each, de Mariaffi explores how the characters' actions are shaped by their geographical, historical or political place in the world.
The 10-year-old protagonist of "Kiss Me Like I'm The Last Man On Earth" lives in north Toronto and grew up overhearing stories about the Second World War told by her Hungarian refugee grandmother and her Jewish neighbours. With her young Latvian Jewish neighbour, she creates a prisoner-of-war camp in his family's basement, and the game spirals disturbingly out of control. The story vibrates with a nauseating energy, an unsettling meditation on the use of power by those who don't understand it and the far-reaching legacy of war.
De Mariaffi has crafted a brilliant character in the precocious small-town boy in "The Astonishing Abercrombie!" -- a "quality youngster" with a "sunny disposition," despite having taken it upon himself to care for his father and younger brother when his mother disappears one night. "What Peteyboy likes to do when Mama is gone is get up into a tree and watch down the road to see is she coming back yet," says the stoic child about his younger brother.
Read more here: http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2013/0...
March 15, 2013
de Mariaffi does a lot of things really well here, most notably layering emotional TNT and building tension as the reader waits for it to go off, tentatively turning pages. But often the explosion never quite happens, or it fizzles and smokes and chokes and is never quite resolved. Something like that. But she's a very skilled writer, some kind of expert in the frail human psyche. Best gems included "Kiss Me Like I'm the Last Man on Earth" and "The Astonishing Abercrombie!"
July 20, 2016
Stories with deeply flawed (immature? selfish?)characters who lack insight and tend to behave in ways that hurt others and/or themselves. Many stories left me with a pit in my stomach -- they were that good ("good" as in true to life). Reminded me of "Hellgoing" by Lynn Coady, although, I think this is a better collection. The writing is stellar, by the way.
February 7, 2013
Reading this book is like grappling with a skilled, but sexy fighter: you'll come away exhilarated, sweaty, and more-than-likely punched in the balls. Really sharp stuff, and a very original voice for Canada.
October 13, 2013
Excellent collection of short fiction -- a smart, surprising voice, memorable writing with narrative and turns of phrase that at times just blew me away. I can't wait to read whatever Elisabeth writes next. Highly recommended!
December 13, 2012
I loved this book so much I wanted to give it six stars instead of just five. So I carved a new star into the screen of my computer.
October 4, 2013
Some of the stories in this book were deeply inspiring while others left me downright confused by their placing in this book.
February 15, 2014
Wasn't my cup of tea.
October 29, 2014
Excellent. Loved the flow and language. I like the curtness of her writing and her people.
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August 23, 2016A book of short stories
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews