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Bewildered: Stories
This is a world of secret-sharers, a noisy world full of unimaginable silence,” claims one of the characters in this compelling debut collection. The ten stories in Bewildered examine small world disruptions—mistimed infatuations, devastating diagnoses, the realizations inherent in loss. Characters look up from what they assumed were ordinary lives amazed to discover where they find themselves.
Familiar landscapes—city streets, coastal towns emptied of tourists, suburban neighborhoods—are backdrops for unfulfilled dreams: the luckiest man alive arouses the suspicions of those he most wants to befriend, a grieving lover invites herself into another’s life, a young girl discovers her tea leaves reveal nothing as life-altering as those of her friend, the straying husband pays a debt for his and his son’s obsessions.
The stories ask: Can you live any way forever? What links them is what links all of us: the desire to belong, the need to heal, the fear of what happens next.
Familiar landscapes—city streets, coastal towns emptied of tourists, suburban neighborhoods—are backdrops for unfulfilled dreams: the luckiest man alive arouses the suspicions of those he most wants to befriend, a grieving lover invites herself into another’s life, a young girl discovers her tea leaves reveal nothing as life-altering as those of her friend, the straying husband pays a debt for his and his son’s obsessions.
The stories ask: Can you live any way forever? What links them is what links all of us: the desire to belong, the need to heal, the fear of what happens next.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
184 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2014
239 people want to read
About the author
Carla Panciera
5 books20 followersAuthor of One of the Cimalores (Cider Press, 2005); No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press, 2010); Bewildered (The University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 20, 2015
I picked up this book because it was written by my high school English teacher! Even though it's been 25 years since I sat in her classroom (I can't believe it's been 25 years!?!) there's still a little bit of that funny sense of intrigue when thinking about a teacher outside the context of school.
Anyway, I enjoyed this collection. Sometimes, the passage of time seemed palpable. There's a sense of loneliness as characters take stock of their lives and realize they are not at all where they thought they would end up. There's a woman whose husband has early-onset Alzheimer's, a man single again after feeling compelled to leave his wife after an affair. Some characters are at a crossroads, while others have already passed one and wonder if they really took the best path after all. In many ways, these stories are more about the characters themselves than what happens to them.
Most of the stories feature relationships and families, and a reflective reader might find themselves wondering, "Why, or how, do people get into the relationships that they get into?" and thinking about how relationships evolve.
The material was not particularly heavy, but I oftentimes felt like the writing had a weight to it, a kind of deliberateness.
For me, "Singing Donkeys, Happy Families" and "It Can't Be This Way Everywhere" felt the most familiar, as I saw some of my own personal experiences reflected in those stories. Yet, the stories I liked best - that I would rate 5 stars individually - were "Fine Creatures of the Deep" and "On Being Lonely and Other Theories." They both had that "so this is how everything comes together" type quality that I like in storytelling.
Anyway, I enjoyed this collection. Sometimes, the passage of time seemed palpable. There's a sense of loneliness as characters take stock of their lives and realize they are not at all where they thought they would end up. There's a woman whose husband has early-onset Alzheimer's, a man single again after feeling compelled to leave his wife after an affair. Some characters are at a crossroads, while others have already passed one and wonder if they really took the best path after all. In many ways, these stories are more about the characters themselves than what happens to them.
Most of the stories feature relationships and families, and a reflective reader might find themselves wondering, "Why, or how, do people get into the relationships that they get into?" and thinking about how relationships evolve.
The material was not particularly heavy, but I oftentimes felt like the writing had a weight to it, a kind of deliberateness.
For me, "Singing Donkeys, Happy Families" and "It Can't Be This Way Everywhere" felt the most familiar, as I saw some of my own personal experiences reflected in those stories. Yet, the stories I liked best - that I would rate 5 stars individually - were "Fine Creatures of the Deep" and "On Being Lonely and Other Theories." They both had that "so this is how everything comes together" type quality that I like in storytelling.
March 6, 2023
This collection is a marvel of lives upended, desires rerouted, charms rediscovered, passions reignited or piffled out. The people who populate these stories might not be anyone you know and might be everyone you have ever met. Human response to change, to wonder, to the recognition of failure is a mutable, unpredictable thing, but these stories make those responses truthful, understandable. There are few novels I’ve read that have moved me as much as some of these short stories did. Highly recommended.
January 1, 2017
Most of the stories in this collection center on loss in some way, and as such have a kind of emotional heft that can be appreciated. The writing tends toward the succinct, which can at times be off-putting, but when Panciera gets going, the manner is effective.
In "All of a Sudden" Panciera paints the contours of a friendship from grade school into high school, showing how something so meaningful at one age can become something else at another, as we outgrow our various concerns. This is a sad story about the loss of friendship, even as other friendships take its place.
"No Sooner" revolves around a woman who dreams of having affairs while her husband is away from her. Despite her reservations about her in-laws and vice versa, however, she knows how good she has things with the husband she's chosen, even as her sister is watching her own marriage break apart.
The title story is deservedly just that, one of the best in the collection. It recounts the tale of a man who somehow just happens to end up in the right places at the right times. With no real plan in life, but with hard work and dedication, he's ended up well liked and very successful, as well as well married. Or at least, that's how it looks from the outside. Bewildered by his success, he is also bewildered by his seemingly crazy wife, who he both loves and find annoying. Her frequent tantrums with little warning finally, one day, result in her leaving him. What to do is next is not so easy to know, especially for one who has had so many things just work out sans plan.
"It Can't Be This Way Everywhere" is about a woman who is tending to a prematurely aging husband, one who has Alzheimer's, even as she tends to small children and her own work. The discovery of feral cats in their garage lends her the opportunity to teach the children about responsibility and for her to see both the ways that her husband is still strong and the ways that he no longer is.
The very short "Having Your Italy" is a meditation on the ways in which moments in a relationship fade with time, even as we attempt to cherish them.
"Weight" involves a woman dealing with the loss of her partner of many years by spending time with a new man and her brothers. Another story about loss, "Fine Creatures of the Deep," involves two women, neighbors, who despise one another with seeming no explanation. Both lose children. One cannot have another and has replaced it with a dog. In an effort to make peace, she makes soup each day for her neighbor. Do we make such sacrifices, show such love, for another person or for ourselves?
"End of Story" is about a man whose wife has cheated on him and who, as a result, has left the marriage for a younger woman. His recovery from the marriage has not gone well, however, and his pull back into it is something less than satisfactory. The love we had cannot be brought back to what it once was after such damage. I found this one of the more affecting story.
"Singing Donkeys, Happy Families" is about a woman with a crush on a man whose social network is largely a set of hippi families that do child activities together. The woman's attempt to fit into this group lead to strains with her daughters and husband.
"On Being Lonely and Other Theories" is also about infidelity and how such infidelity can destroy the lives of everyone around. Jon Olvey is a cop who is having an affair with his son's schoolteacher whose literal run-in with a dog brings the affair to the community's attention, including his son's, his wife's, and his boss's.
In "All of a Sudden" Panciera paints the contours of a friendship from grade school into high school, showing how something so meaningful at one age can become something else at another, as we outgrow our various concerns. This is a sad story about the loss of friendship, even as other friendships take its place.
"No Sooner" revolves around a woman who dreams of having affairs while her husband is away from her. Despite her reservations about her in-laws and vice versa, however, she knows how good she has things with the husband she's chosen, even as her sister is watching her own marriage break apart.
The title story is deservedly just that, one of the best in the collection. It recounts the tale of a man who somehow just happens to end up in the right places at the right times. With no real plan in life, but with hard work and dedication, he's ended up well liked and very successful, as well as well married. Or at least, that's how it looks from the outside. Bewildered by his success, he is also bewildered by his seemingly crazy wife, who he both loves and find annoying. Her frequent tantrums with little warning finally, one day, result in her leaving him. What to do is next is not so easy to know, especially for one who has had so many things just work out sans plan.
"It Can't Be This Way Everywhere" is about a woman who is tending to a prematurely aging husband, one who has Alzheimer's, even as she tends to small children and her own work. The discovery of feral cats in their garage lends her the opportunity to teach the children about responsibility and for her to see both the ways that her husband is still strong and the ways that he no longer is.
The very short "Having Your Italy" is a meditation on the ways in which moments in a relationship fade with time, even as we attempt to cherish them.
"Weight" involves a woman dealing with the loss of her partner of many years by spending time with a new man and her brothers. Another story about loss, "Fine Creatures of the Deep," involves two women, neighbors, who despise one another with seeming no explanation. Both lose children. One cannot have another and has replaced it with a dog. In an effort to make peace, she makes soup each day for her neighbor. Do we make such sacrifices, show such love, for another person or for ourselves?
"End of Story" is about a man whose wife has cheated on him and who, as a result, has left the marriage for a younger woman. His recovery from the marriage has not gone well, however, and his pull back into it is something less than satisfactory. The love we had cannot be brought back to what it once was after such damage. I found this one of the more affecting story.
"Singing Donkeys, Happy Families" is about a woman with a crush on a man whose social network is largely a set of hippi families that do child activities together. The woman's attempt to fit into this group lead to strains with her daughters and husband.
"On Being Lonely and Other Theories" is also about infidelity and how such infidelity can destroy the lives of everyone around. Jon Olvey is a cop who is having an affair with his son's schoolteacher whose literal run-in with a dog brings the affair to the community's attention, including his son's, his wife's, and his boss's.
May 4, 2016
Received this book through Goodreads First Reads Giveaway.
2.5 stars
So, having read Einstein's Beach House: Stories by Jacob M. Appel, I've been taking a lot of interest in short, surrealistic stories. When I received a copy of your book, I was somewhat in a good mood.
However, the themes in this book are uncannily similar to each other, while the endings, all of them, was not satisfying at all. Even though every story starts with a great deal of details from the beginning, they don't make much of an impression on readers like me. To be more specific, they are somewhat tasteless. Although I appreciated the author using multiple POVs. That was challenging and somewhat creative at the same time, which explains that 0.5 stars.
About the characters, I thought that they were supposed to evoke some kind of nostalgia and loneliness (by reading other users' reviews). In reality, none of that happen to me. They were bland, as I have previously mentioned. Although, Panciera has potential and I could see her becoming a best-selling author in the future.okay maybe not since surrealism isn't exactly a hit here in the us.
P/S - On the design of the dust cover: Please do not add the title's shadow. The headtitles on each chapter was beautifully designed, this should've been, too.
2.5 stars
So, having read Einstein's Beach House: Stories by Jacob M. Appel, I've been taking a lot of interest in short, surrealistic stories. When I received a copy of your book, I was somewhat in a good mood.
However, the themes in this book are uncannily similar to each other, while the endings, all of them, was not satisfying at all. Even though every story starts with a great deal of details from the beginning, they don't make much of an impression on readers like me. To be more specific, they are somewhat tasteless. Although I appreciated the author using multiple POVs. That was challenging and somewhat creative at the same time, which explains that 0.5 stars.
About the characters, I thought that they were supposed to evoke some kind of nostalgia and loneliness (by reading other users' reviews). In reality, none of that happen to me. They were bland, as I have previously mentioned. Although, Panciera has potential and I could see her becoming a best-selling author in the future.
P/S - On the design of the dust cover: Please do not add the title's shadow. The headtitles on each chapter was beautifully designed, this should've been, too.
October 12, 2016
The characters in Panciera's stories walk tightrope lives in which odd characters don't notice their oddness but the ever-astute narrators are utterly aware of theirs. It's an upside down world, Panciera's, and it tells the truth. Life, like the stories and the characters that people this exquisite collection, is bewildering and thrilling. It knocked me off balance and I loved every minute.
June 8, 2015
Although the subject matter sometimes repeated itself, this is the kind of book that once you get started, you can't put down. Mesmerizing and dark, I was sad when it was over.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews