Real to Reel

by Lidia Yuknavitch

With an intelligence that scalds every pretense and surface, Lidia Yuknavitch's camera pans across subjects as varied as Keanu Reeves and Siberian prison laborers. She zooms in on drug addiction, crime, sex of all flavors, trauma, torture, rock and roll, and art, all the while revealing untried angles and alien shapes. She traces the inner lives of characters teetering on edges-death, birth, love, understanding-but never flinching at the spectacle of their violent descent. This collection represents a verbal cinematographer at her best as she captivates the reader with a prose style that is mesmerizing and fluid, deep and dangerous.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2003

About the author

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, and the novel Dora: A Headcase, Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her nonfiction book based on her TED Talk, The Misfit's Manifesto, is forthcoming from TED Books.

She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impressive engagement with cinematic techniques, language, and themes, and a virtuosic dismantling of narrative structure, these short fictions often preoccupied with language qua language, being qua being, form qua form. Yuknavitch's style, alternately lyrical, disjunctive, and paratactic, is a marvel.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am puzzled by my reaction to this book. At times in awe of how words can be used. Thrown and enamoured with the unexpected physicality. Both smitten with and SO frustrated by this author. (the thought I keep coming back to: Is it possible to rawly capture something this fully while lacking this much self awareness?). But what ever it is, I feel when reading Yuknavitch, and feel strongly...so I’m in.

[Tiah]

– It doesn't matter what one chooses or doesn't choose in life. Certain stories override any will you may or may not have. Certain stories write us. – 'Scripted'

– Then she looks at the bar mirror which is him. They look at each other like that for a long minute. Then she pitches her drink in his face and leaves. It is unbelievably overdramatic. The words "hyperbole pick-up-sticks-fuck" knock around in her skull like dice in a cup in her leaving, though he doesn't know this precisely. He knows this dully. – 'Shooting'

– A woman as common as a sentence stretches herself out naked before them. – 'Chair'

– Without language everything returns to its object status. Imagination returns. Wonder. Huge. Violent. Like a child's. – 'Signification'

– I look at my hands and they remind me of these pages on which I have written so many words to no one. Who would take my story into their life? No one. In that nothing is my face. A face which is only the trace of a woman whose name you will never speak, whose house you will never enter. The wife of an image. –

[Roy Kesey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very cool collection. Some truly beautiful hardcore reaches in language. “Scripted” in 3 columns is very smart. “Shoot” has all kinds of great meta tricks, including a paragraph that is simply a great long run of definitions for the title with no other commentary, no pointing. “Siberia” (the novella-in-stories that closes the book) has some of my favorite long stretches.

A favored passage:

"And if there is water there let it be from a river. And if there is peace let it be from silence and forgetting. From the slow settle of dust on a house worn down, on a history lost, on a woman buried quietly into geography. And if there is memory let it be disjointed and nonsensical, let it disturb understanding and logic, let it rise like birds or hands into the blood blue bone of the sky, whispering its nothing beyond telling. (…) Let someone lose the captions to all of the photographs; let them pile into new logics and forms that outlive us."
- “Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image” (6. Representation)

[J.I. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the worst thing about this collection of stories is that some of them feel so tightly tied together that you begin to read the whole thing as a novel in stories, as everything interconnected, and then something comes along that completely breaks this, and you realize that you weren't reading a new chapter that gave some new insight into the protagonist, you were reading something different. Of course, this is also the strength of this collection, that they seem to feed on each other, building a kind of claustrophobic feeling of intimacy and insight, and then they pull away and leave you cold.

Some stories feel completely fresh and alive and painful, others feel a little dull. Luckily it is more the former than the latter. Really though, if you are looking for insightful fiction that pushes things, that experiments in form or in narrative, but always, always brings us back to the mind and its difficult relationship with the body, you can do no better than Lidia Yuknavitch, and barely any better than this collection.

[Elizabeth Metzger]

I'm in and out of this book because that seems to what it does. Like Thalia Field's work I'm pushed in and out, and that's fine. I just set it down for a while.

I recently saw Yuknavitch present during an AWP panel titled Quantum Narratology (thank you, Lance Olson & FC2). The panel was by far the best thing to happen at this year's AWP, and Lidia's piece was moving, funny, smart, i don't know. All these dumb adjectives seem reductive to what she made for us that day. Maybe I can't talk about it yet. Let's just say it made me & a friend bolt to the FC2 table and buy her books. Fantastical.

[Lorra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay - a couple of great stories, but I find that despite Lidia's amazing writing ability, the short stories are devoid of a lot of character - the characters are usually nameless and I really don't care about them - the driving force of the stories is language alone, and even though it's beautiful, it's not quite enough to keep me going.

When she gets it right, it's REALLY right, though. The book has some great moments, but I really prefer her memoir.

[Julene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book of experimental shorts. I jumped around a lot in this book The most moving piece was "Chair" that is all about different chairs, but the last chair evokes a particular harsh childhood memory. I heard her read this one and talk about writing it, that was of far more interest, as it is often for me. To hear a writer read their own work and talk about it has it's own power.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

very very good innovative short stories...

[seemsbleak · Rating 3 out of 5]

self-plagiarism isn't a crime breh

[Jason Arias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially enjoyed the potency of 'Blue Movie' and 'Chair'.