Other Electricities and Vacationland
make NPR's Morning Edition Recommended Summer Reading List;
see link for excerpts and reviews: [link]
[link to archived mp3; rt click to download]
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[Mark Schone, New York Times Book Review,
06/26/05]
Monson opens with a chart, closes with an index
and pocks the intervening text with radio wiring diagrams as he merges
metaliterary form with a grim subject (kids falling to their deaths
through the ice of a frozen lake) in a poetic, startling, even funny
collection of linked stories. As bored locals run laps inside the
wintry cage of Upper Michigan and his occasional narrator mourns an
ex-flame who went into the water on prom night, Monson turns this
lost corner of America into the setting for a unique brand of mudroom
Gothic. There's a diver reciting the procedures for recovering the
dead, a cop reminding himself of the right way to notify the next
of kin, and a catalog of the temperatures at which different items
freeze. The funniest list identifies the things a woman must do to
lessen her chances of being murdered: ''Do not go on dates with men.
Do not go on dates with men who drive. . . . Do not spend time with
any kind of men at all.'' The drumbeat of particular words -- snowmobile,
sauna, Superior, meth -- roots the reader in a very specific place,
and Monson is its loving curator. Sometimes glimpses of a whole new
world break through the ice, making you wish for a longer, linear,
uninterrupted visit.
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[Lucia Silva, bookseller, First Cut Books, on
NPR, 07/06/05]
There is a radio station that plays out into the
ether, a station that streams static and snow, a place where there
are no days and only memories of days, where unreceived sound waves
sent out to the dead unfold from their concentric circles and lap
against snow-packed, icy shores, it's playing Ander Monson's stories
and poems every day at 3 a.m.
You could either think of Other
Electricities as interconnected stories, or a novel made up of
stories, and then Vacationland as their footnotes. Or appendix.
Or some other vital organ belonging to the same whole. Really, the
collections work very much as an album of requiem and elegy, parcels
of obsession and sorrow, slices of regret and forewarning, where snow
and electricity and radio waves store the bits and make them beautiful,
like the way slow dust gets stuck in the light of warmer climates,
swimming delicately in a haze just outside of everything else. The
weather of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in Monson's stories is
less a setting than it is a factor by which everything is multiplied,
or a looming and obvious unknown for which we are always solving.
The ones who are gone left through the ice on prom night with the
radio on, or have misjudged the freeze of the ice or the intent of
their boyfriends, they are cancerous from the mines, they are disappeared
in the way one imagines disappearing through the water, mysterious
and mythical, always floating somewhere on the edges, the tragedy
embroidered by the stories told about it afterwards.
Accompanied by diagrams of electrical circuits with love notes attached,
the stories and poems are marked by language that drives on hard and
fast to the last lines, like car wheels over the rhythmic bumps on
the highway they push on, the lyricism and force made all the more
swift by the clean-swept writing, by the thru-line that draws like
a fine-point arc that connects through the center of each piece.
I should like to never, ever be done
reading either one of these books.
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[Publisher's Weekly: Starred Review, April
2005]
Monson's inventive collection illuminates the barren
landscape of Michigan's snowbound Upper Peninsula with a glittering
mosaic of short stories, lists, instructions, poetic obituaries and
illustrations of radio schematics. His interconnected vignettes flash
across a region that is "now in some ways a place only for ghosts
and tourists," revealing a small town cast of characters defined
by shared loss. The ice—frosting the roads, crusting Lake Superior—exerts
an inexorable pull on these people, spinning their minivans, swallowing
their snowmobiles, claiming young and old and drunk and sober. While
they mourn the disappeared and deceased, their self-destructive impulses
battle deeply rooted survival instincts that flourish despite impoverished
and circumscribed lives. Artful metaphors resonate throughout: snow
is sustenance and death. Radio waves displace language and imply an
unbridgeable gap between people. Liz, a drowned high school student,
embodies needlessly lost youth. Monson alternates more narrative pieces
with second-person instructive messages, such as "Instructions
for Divers: On Retrieval," about extracting wrecks from the lake,
that evoke with immediacy a harsh existence. In "Big 32,"
a catalogue of descending temperatures and their corresponding events,
Monson writes that at –11 degrees, "tears freeze complete,
nosehairs froze twenty degrees ago; so crying will get you nowhere."
Monson's is an original new voice, and this poignant, lyrical collection
conjures a powerful sense of place.
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[Booklist: May 1, 2005]
In an exceptionally poetic fiction debut, Monson
charts the losses and grief of a small Upper Michigan Peninsula community,
an icily beautiful and pitiless place where boredom is as fatal as
the blizzards. The death of high-school senior Elizabeth, who drowns
when she drives out onto the ice on prom night, causes much soul-searching
on the part of her fellow students, the vice principal, and a chemistry
teacher who collects vintage cleaning products. Monson gauges their
sorrow and quests for order and solace in an assemblage of haunting
short stories, wry litanies, imaginary obits, and prose poems. This
cathartic scrapbook ultimately records a constellation of deaths,
including a murder, all linked by the tender musings of Monson's melancholy
and thoughtful central narrator, a young man whose mother has died,
whose brother is disabled, and whose father has withdrawn into the
attic with his ham radio, summoning voices from the ether. By finding
poetry in electricity, radio waves, and weather, Monson illuminates
the power that drives people to acts both deadly and life affirming.
--Donna Seaman
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[Martha Kinney in the April/May 2005 Bookforum]
Show me your environment and I will tell
you who you are. —Boris Pasternak
A raw, incantatory whirlwind, Ander Monson's Other
Electricities depicts a remote northern Michigan town that is
pelted by ice, frozen, and illuminated by the Paulding Light—a
local phenomenon wherein shifting points of light appear on the horizon
with no apparent source. This is pre-mall sprawl; it is a place where
nature is still big and men struggle to overcome the isolation of
winter nights. In a series of interrelated vignettes, prefaced by
a character flowchard, Monson combines basic science with elements
of legend, story, and a sense of place. Radio schematics punctuate
the chapters, accompanied by stranded lines of poetry that linger
like random transmissions, meditations on distance. The result is
a wonderful tension—"the weather [as] a system of surprise."
This town is a skeleton, a former mining
community depleted of its minerals and drained by the resultant loss
of jobs. Lacking direction and worn down by the brutal weather, characters
drift along in their circular thoughts. Some are maimed (an armless
aphasic boy, a one-armed shop teacher); others are haunted by memories
of those who have died (a murdered girl, cancer victims, and teens
who had nothing better to do than drive their cars onto the ice and
sink). In Michigan, Monson writes, "Everything...is due to saws
or mines or bombs or Vietnam." Even the land itself is damaged:
"The hills surrounding the town are riddled with shafts like
holes in the body."
Monson's boook is an elegy for a stranded
generation often lost to fantasy. In the title story, a recent widower,
obsessed with pirate radio, holes up in his attic whispering codes
to strangers in the storm. Hovering outside, his two sons plus into
the phone line with alligator clips and listen in. They desire to
understand not only the physical but the emotional weather of the
town, as if both were decipherable through invisible airwaves.
In spite of this desolate landscape,
Monson's stories possess a spectral beauty. His lyric prose exists
in the energized synapse between fiction and poetry and inhabits a
place not yet defined, between the overcrowded modern world and the
small town. Electrified and awkward, often incandescent, "It's
a perfect kind of silence. So much snow coming down."