Hymns To Millionaires

by Soren Gauger

Hymns to Millionaires is Canadian native Soren A. Gauger's first collection of stories. Taking as his raw materials the treatment of the fantastic found in Borges and Kis, the misanthropic musings of Gombrowicz and Bernhard, and a literary understanding of philosophy, Gauger's stories are formally challenging yet very funny. They often deal with the chaotic fragmentation of the individual, who is mindful of both society and literature, while exploring the blank spaces implicit somewhere behind the narrative.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this because a writer friend recommended it after reading one of my stories. A fantastic ex-pat prose style a la Nabokov and all your favorite non-western Europeans in translation, always arch, always clever yet never actually funny (LOL), chockfull of willful disorientation of the reader and purposefully, almost too carefully overwritten passages -- one character secures an encyclopedia but the author seems to have internalized a thesaurus, not that there's anything wrong with that. Found myself zoning out and fighting the impulse to skim or skip or quit. At first I thought this guy writes stories the way I write stories except his prose is shinier but then they seemed like prose performances, like exercises in aerodynamic faux euro excellence, which was interesting at times when he hit upon details like blond hairs beneath a scandinavian's knee, but in general, I wasn't so engaged by the stories and found them to have the same texture. Gauger is an extraordinary stylist but maybe a little too sly or and opaque for me, despite his shiny sentences. Here's his self-critique embedded in a story: "His narrative style is distinguished by a wildly ungovernable meandering from the proper subject of the tale, until, just when the hapless listeners have forgotten the story's aim, the narrative chaotically veers to one side, that is, to the beginning's conclusion, leaving all involved to massage their necks from the rude jolt." But here's a nice paragraph: "In the slippery lamplight Odessa's architectural peculiarities came to life. Its gargoyles squirmed fiendishly. The buildings seemed fluid and were always shifting about on you when they occupied the periphery of your vision. A file of Orthodox Jews swept by muttering almost inaudibly, like a murder of crows. Or were they only the shadows of lampposts." All in all, recommended for readers who like North American writers who do a very good job writing like central and eastern Europeans.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

perhaps surprisingly good for a work with so much formal, narratorial exhibitions

[Paul G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such great prose. Writer for the 21st century