Deb Olin UnferthRezensionen

I read one of these stories in an earlier journal and was intrigued by the swerve. I have respect for this writing and think that earlier story and a few others are quite good. The rest I can do without. I always expect a range of reaction from myself for short story collections, so I don't mind weak pieces. I rate based on my favorites and how I react to the tone and throughline. In this case I found it depressing in a way that didn't resonate with me.
DNF/skipped around

The NY Times Book Review made this book sound controversial and interesting. It wasn't. Not at all. Flat characters, slow, and we knew the motivations of perhaps one of them. I am in complete agreement with Pari's review , who must be a big fan of American Graffiti: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/6cac9bde-4762-41c2-8b76-264eba949940

One of the most original novels I have ever read: about a girl named Janey and a heist of chickens (900,000) from a relatively small-scale egg farm in Iowa. It’s also about dysfunctional families, about not fitting in, about toxic waste dumps and the rest of the economic blights that typify our current dispensation. It is a funny and sad, well written tale of urgent things, told in a slightly off-hand way, never with its hair on fire, even though it could be. I enjoyed it.

Sparkling writing. I stayed with this girl the brilliant concise descriptions, the ability to write equally well about love and comedy.

Using an omniscient narrator with brief chapters, the reader gets to see all aspects of the biggest chicken heist of almost a million chickens, on not even the largest egg farm in Iowa. I feel that the omniscient narrator was the way to go here, but at the same time you can't really delve into any of the characters here very well. The book starts with Janey and I liked the thoughts on the different versions of her, how each choice can so hugely make a life veer off course. Janey becomes an auditor at egg farms because her mom knew someone who does the same work. Then her boss happens to pick up one chicken wandering down the road. It all unravels from there. But then we move to the perspective of undercover animal rights investigators before the heist, then the farmers, security guards, park rangers, etc, then far into the future for a brief moment, which was interesting. I wonder how ridiculous a book fully from the perspective of the chickens would have been?! But this book is not that and I liked it well enough.

As much as I enjoyed reading the story of a woman whose perspective is not seen often in graphic novels, I couldn't help yelling at the end "YOU DON'T RELEASE NON NATIVE SPECIES INTO THE CITY LIKE THAT ESPECIALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES"

I tried to read...because I love raising chickens and the story outline on the back page was intriguing. Didn't get past the first chapter.

Barn 8 starts with the central character of a teenage girl, Janey, full of all hat teenage angst and I thought I may be reading a YA novel, don’t get me wrong, I’ve read YA novels that were above my pay grade and simply brilliant. I have also read “literature” that would be called shite if it was penned by anyone else.

So the young girl gets off to a bad start which only gets worse, rapidly and dramatically. In no time at all she is somewhere else entirely living in a place and way that was inconceivable just weeks prior.

In this new place she discovers what she calls “the new Janey” which also carnates “the old Janey”. Sometimes she wonders what the old Janey would doing now, in that old life that previously she found detestable but now, the new Janey realises, was actually pretty bloody good. You get the drift.

So really you have this young girl thrown into a completely different situation that she is unprepared for in almost every way and like it or not, adulthood is unfairly foisted on her too. And not just adulthood, but a disappointingly bland, low expectation type of adulthood that she had not even susoected could exist.

Somewhere in all this she falls into the footsteps of her dead mother and meets a pivotal character that brings the whole thrust of the novel into being.

Set somewhere in the mid-west (I think, but not being American cannot say with accuracy). If not geographically in the mid-west it is certainly in the spiritual and cultural mid-west where not much changes, and while the horizon may be huge the options for the living is nowhere near as panoramic. Sameness, blandness, low self-expectations and a few old hippies.

I guess you could call this a coming of age story and in some ways it is but it is something else again. It is slightly fantastic but not unrealistically so but definitely has a lot going on.

I have no idea why I picked it up but I’m glad I did.

Well, this was possibly one of the strangest books I've ever read. All-told, I'm not a tremendous fan. It was scattered and told from too many POV over too many time periods and back and forth and and and. . . . Still, I'm glad I read it—it's good to switch things up occasionally, right?½

Barn 8 was overall a very fun and engaging read. The waxing poetic about chickens was so good and deeply weird. In terms of waxing poetic on the natural world the only way that I can compare it - it was like Richard Powers The Overstory but Chickens. I really wish there was more story / chapters from the pov of Bwuaaak. Barn 8 centers around the broken characters that make up loose group of animal rights activists whose lives line up to a singular event: Chicken Heist. Free the chickens from the farm. Along the way Deb Olin develops interesting and quirky characters from a wildly refreshing third-person angle. The novel is so original and well written and just a joy to read. Its a given you have got to be on the side of animals to enjoy this one. I cant really see someone coming from the other-side of the aisle really enjoying this book unless they are very open minded. But who cares what they think. The chickens don't. Deb Olin's Barn 8 Is fun, philosophical and beautiful.

Quirky and wholly original.

Can’t tell if this is magical realism or reality, but that’s appropriate when you’re talking about babysitting a strong willed and unpredictable bird. Not a loon, a parrot. Art gets the job done but nothing epic.

Of the memoir subgenre "college students go to exotic places and wacky/frightening hijinks ensue," I did prefer [b:Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven|4757303|Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven|Susan Jane Gilman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255603235s/4757303.jpg|4822089]. But this is interesting if a bit scattershot.

Of the memoir subgenre "college students go to exotic places and wacky/frightening hijinks ensue," I did prefer [b:Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven|4757303|Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven|Susan Jane Gilman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255603235s/4757303.jpg|4822089]. But this is interesting if a bit scattershot.

Memoir with an impossible-to-describe but perfectly pitched voice, will remind everybody what it is like to be 18-years-old and lost.

Quote: "One morning I looked out the window and a huge tank stood in front of our house. It took up the whole street. So the FMLN ran away and the army moved in. They put a missile launcher in the window and my mother dusted it every day. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘stop dusting that thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s dusty.’ Still, she dusted. And she tidied. All day she went around the living room, putting the grenades into little rows and folding the soldiers’ clothing. They never lived anywhere so clean."

Quirky and elegantly written, VACATION is a typical McSweeney’s book. The story is a combination of the banal and the odd; a simple tale of an unraveling marriage that takes a sharp detour into the surreal.

The convoluted plot can be difficult to follow but Unferth’s beautiful prose – by turns bleak, deadpan, haunting and cynical – makes reading a pleasure. Observations like “the house was the muted color of a people dominated by the landscape, people who just wanted to get something down that won’t blow away” or “a man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were trapped in air and light” are examples of Unferths’ writing at its best. But six competing narrative voices and the increasingly improbable progress of the plot can be frustrating.

A short synopsis:

Several years before the start of VACATION, the protagonist Meyers discovers that his wife has developed an obsession with another man, a stranger. She follows this stranger wherever he goes, all the while telling her husband that she’s busy with work. What she doesn’t realize is that Myers spots her lies immediately and begins to follow her while she follows the stranger: and, for many months, that’s how the couple spend their evenings. Myers is unable to confront his wife about her bizarre behavior, and she is unable to admit it.

When the stranger moves away, Myers hopes their marriage will return to normal. But instead, they continue to drift apart. As divorce seems imminent, Myers decides to take revenge on the stranger he blames for the alienation of his wife’s affections. And while his wife has no idea who the man was, by an extraordinary coincidence Myers does: they went to college together, his name is Gray, and they were loosely acquainted.

VACATION opens as Meyers arrives at Gray’s doorstep. He finds the house empty and the mailbox full; his old friend is away. After a short email exchange, Meyers learns that Gray has planned a trip to South America and Meyers arranges to rendezvous with him on Corn Island in Nicaragua. He heads south to the tropics immediately.

It’s very odd that Gray, who hardly knows Meyers, isn’t more alarmed to see this figure from his past pop back into view and invite himself to Nicaragua. Although Gray himself isn’t aware of it, he has a massive brain tumor that has begun to affect his ability to think and act rationally. His doctor has contacted his ex-wife with the news, and she is desperately trying to locate him, but with no success – perhaps because it never occurs to her to send him an email asking what he’s up to.

Meyers is severely injured in an earthquake immediately upon his arrival in Nicaragua. He breaks several ribs and one arm, and has to spend most of his ready cash on hospital bills. Meanwhile, he’s been fired from his job due to his unexplained absence and the news has reached his wife – who, angered by her husband’s erratic behavior, cancels all his credit cards and leaves Meyers without any means to buy a return ticket home.

Completely stranded, Meyers uses the sixty dollars he has left to make his way cross-country to the largely deserted but beautiful Corn Island. Meanwhile, in the brief time Gray’s been gone his illness has escalated dramatically. He tries to make his way to Corn Island, but he dies – delirious and lost in Panama – before he can make it.

Meyers arrives on Corn Island and Gray isn’t there. He realizes that his wife has abandoned him, that he will probably never be able to exact his revenge, that he has no job, and no way to return to the United States. He commits suicide rather than face such a bleak future.

Meyers’ wife, stony-hearted until this point, mysteriously thaws. She knows her husband is headed to Corn Island and decides she’ll meet him there. Of course, she doesn’t arrive until after he’s died. When she asks the locals, they tell her they’ve never seen Meyers – though they all have, and do remember – and so his wife leaves in defeat, none the wiser.

Like another reviewer wrote, this book is more about its subtitle and less about the title itself. I think I would have enjoyed it more had the opposite been true, but given Unferth's motivations for being in Central America, maybe that's not so much the case. And that, I guess, is probably my issue with the memoir in general-- she captures being 18 and in a kind of obsessive love very, very well, perhaps because she hasn't entirely moved on from that stage of her life per the memoir. Unfortunately, those things don't make for a very likable narrator, which I found myself struggling with as a reader at times. This said, there are moments of real beauty and wisdom in her narrative as well; they're just somewhat rare.

The novel offers that incredibly satisfying form of narrative arc in which characters' paths converge and diverge in unexpected ways, here across a thematically unified landscape of isolation, of "following from a distance," of wilderness. Meditative yet punchy prose explores the depressions and strange drives of stranded individuals. Witty introspective descriptions and dialogue.

When Deb Olin Unferth was 18, she fell in love with George, a fellow student, who was rather rebellious, and bit strange. Being in love, it seemed young Deb would do anything for her boyfriend. She changed her religion from Jewish to Christian, to her family’s dismay, and followed George on his journey to ‘foment’ the revolution in Central America.

The naiveté of youth leads Deb to somewhere she is totally unprepared for, and the often treacherous journey to Nicaragua leaves an impression on her that remains to this day. From reading the memoir, it seems that some twenty years after her venture into this unknown territory, she is still deeply affected by that trip. Indeed she made a journey back to Nicaragua after ten years and then continued to visit the places she’d been to in her youth for years, as if the country had some kind of hold on her.

This book is one woman’s story about how love can make people do the strangest things, and also how first love can leave its mark for a lifetime. It appears, from reading the book, that the author retains a deep curiosity about her ex-fiancé, George (he proposed whilst they were on the road and they broke off the engagement soon after. They lost touch a few years after returning home).

On their trip to join the revolution in 1987, Deb and George find jobs and get fired, sleep in spider-infested hotels, get very ill, get robbed many times, and almost drown at sea. There are very interesting stories about their adventure told in a humourous and sentimental way by the author.

The book is very well written, and kept me interested. It’s quite thought-provoking and insightful in parts.

Reviewed by Maria Savva as a reviewer for Bookpleasures.

This is the hilarious and moving true story of how a woman named Deb and her boyfriend George randomly decided to travel to South America to join the revolution. When they arrived in South America, they had no idea which revolution to join, nor did they even have any concrete reason for joining. What they wanted was to be involved in something bigger than themselves, and their altruistic natures led them to believe that this something was the revolution. Traveling through South America in a wayward fashion, they go from Mexico City to Nicaragua to El Salvador, bumbling their way along and getting themselves into alternately comic and frightening situations. It seems that Deb and George’s help is not wanted, and though they try to become involved in any way they can, they are quickly fired from their jobs as revolutionaries and sent packing. But there’s more to the story than that, because Deb isn’t sure she wants to be with George anymore, and though she’s strangely obsessed with him, she sometimes can’t stand him. As the two bump along, becoming increasingly ill due to poor sanitary conditions, they also find themselves at an emotional crossroads. Chasing the revolution with zest and zeal, both Deb and George will find themselves in the most unlikely places, and find that the revolution taking place inside themselves is much larger than the one they are running through the jungles to find.

One of the things I love best is when a book manages to be genuinely funny without trying too hard. This was that book. While I was reading, I was laughing and snorting with glee because Deb Unferth has a way of just laying it all out there and sharing the ridiculous and absurd along with the poignant and thought-provoking. From the very first sentence, I knew this was going to be a book I was going to love, and I wasn't wrong at all. It was a relatively fast and short read but I enjoyed every second of it, and of Deb and George’s journey.

First off, I should mention that when Deb and George set off for their journey into revolution, they were both rather young and didn’t have the support of their parents. They basically left college and ran away to South America to be revolutionaries. I’m not sure they even knew what a revolution was or why one would join up to fight in one. As they make their way towards and away from some very scary destinations, they find themselves participating in some strange ways: Like building bicycles for the revolution, or minding children who are caught in the war zone. It’s almost like they’re attracted to and called by bizarre enterprises, and of course, being so young, they think they are the height of coolness and altruism by doing these strange things. Of course these jobs don’t last long, and soon they are fired from their jobs as revolutionaries and on the road looking for another gig. But the problem is that during this time, most all of the revolutions are just starting to wind down. When they join the Sandinistas, they find that most of the time they are on duty, they are really scrounging for food or trading things on the black market (things they had agreed that they would never do.)

In addition to their hunt for the revolution, Deb and George are having problems of a different sort. Deb is sort of clingy and is always hanging all over George and letting him make all the decisions. This bothers her on one level and satisfies her on another, so she’s always at war with herself. George, meanwhile, is a strange duck and has a lot of incongruous behavior and ideas that make him unpopular with both the natives and the other revolutionaries. He’s one of those quiet guys, and though he has good intentions, his quietness seems to be hiding a whole lot of crazy. The relationship antics that pepper the pages of Revolution are wildly funny and weird but also somehow strangely sad. As Deb and George make their way from country to country, I could see their relationship deteriorating bit by bit. Deb doesn’t hold back about how she’s both in love with George and annoyed to death with him. All of this pressure comes to a head when they finally agree to head home, and things go from bad to worse in the relationship department.

The last parts of this book intermingle some of the singular and weird scenes from the couple’s stint in various revolutions and Deb’s attempt, many years later, to track down George. It seems she is a little obsessed with him and does some strange things to find him. Like repeatedly calling a private eye to track George down, and pretending to be a different person each time she calls (she obviously didn’t fool the private eye, of course). The whole book is delivered in Deb’s deadpan style, and I couldn’t help but get caught up in the bizarre humor of this couple who were sort of good-hearted bumblers. It was uncanny how unprepared these two were for life as revolutionaries, and just how young they appeared, both in terms of their relationship and their mission. I felt sorry for them a lot of the time but I was also overjoyed with the humorous way that Unferth tells her story.

I had a great time with this book, and as it was such a fast and enjoyable read, I’m hoping to read it again soon. This was another book that I followed my husband around the house reading passages out of, and even he was shaking his head and laughing. If you’re looking for something light and comical, this is the book for you. It tells a most implausible story in a very comic way and keeps you guessing as to what will eventually befall Deb and George. It was one hell of a fun read and unlike anything I have read before. Highly recommended!

I was not at all disappointed by the sweeping and genuine portrayal of her time in South America. I was a huge fan of her eccentric novel debut, and will continue to recommend this to others just as fervently has her novel and stories. Excellent.

I love Unferth's fiction and her writing in this memoir did not disappoint. However, I could not help but feel that Unferth and her boyfriend were foolish to traipse off to El Salvador and Nicaragua to join in the revolutions. It seems like a very ill-advised and naive thing to do, and I had very little sympathy for them when they encountered difficulties along the way. I did enjoy the writing, though.

I’ve had very good luck with nonfiction so far this year, including Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, and now Deb Olin Unferth’s book Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. I loved every moment of this all-too-short book (a very fast 200 pages). It’s exactly what a memoir should be: entertaining, thoughtful, smart, funny, self-reflective, and even self-critical, with exactly the right kind of self-absorption, the kind that manages to say interesting things about the writer but also about a whole lot more. It tells the story of how during her freshman year in college in the 1980s Unferth met and fell in love with George, an unusual young man, a Christian with counter-cultural leanings. The two of them dropped out of school to go to Central America and join the revolutions fomenting there.

The book is extremely well-written. I’ve been trying to put into words exactly what I like about its style, and it’s been hard. Somehow Unferth manages to say a lot more than just what’s on the page. Her sentences are short and simple, with hardly a word wasted. She’s great at moving towards a larger meaning, hinting at it, and then leaving you to take the final leap. I usually prefer a more maximalist, wordy style, but this version of minimalism worked for me because it managed to say more than it seemed to. The book is written in short chapters, sometimes only a page long, each telling a story or vignette or exploring an idea. It holds together as a coherent whole, but the short chapters give it a fractured feeling that somehow makes everything more believable. It’s not a seamless narrative, but instead the chapters offer glimpses of or angles into the story. It’s a method that doesn’t promise to fit everything together neatly, because such a thing is impossible.

Read the rest of the review at Of Books and Bicycles