Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

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Slesvigers will burst into song with no provocation whatever, their affinity for music roughly on a par with the wretchedness of their singing. The way he looked, blanched and wide-eyed, he could have been facing a wild dog instead of a good-looking woman. So Djarf, whose wife was a sour, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. In my glass-half-empty moments, I feel like this continues until consequences accumulate to a critical point and progress has to be stopped to deal with the overflow.

Any man that touches her, or says anything unkind, it will really be something different, what I’ll do to him. Tower has a great deal of formal skill, he knows how to tell a story well, develop his characters, leaves much to the reader to divine, and blasts through the checklist that you’d find in any good creative writing class. Con ese humor negro tan descarnado, con esa sensibilidad para captar la esencia de la desesperación de sus personajes, lo que consigue el autor es, al tiempo que destapa sus flaquezas y sus miedos, subrayar su belleza brutal y primigenia.The final story, the one which this book takes its title from, is the one most people will have heard about or already read, the one about the Vikings. And you might think it was a good thing, that Gnut had found a woman who would let him love her, and if she didn’t exactly love him back, at least she would, in time, get to feeling something for him that wasn’t so far from it. Yes, I, Stephen M of goodreads, empathizer with the lowest of the low—am I a bad person for IDing with Humbert Humbert? The nine stories in the collection are the products of much careful observation, writing, and re-writing, and that shows in their craftsmanship.

My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he, too, was giving it some thought. It didn’t make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. But I suppose it's still better than the other phrase I could use: “Whoa-ho-ho, hello, daddy issues!

PS: I've just realised that the title to this might seem like the ultimate comment on what goodreads has done to itself. Except for the last two stories, "On the Show" and titular piece about Visigoths going through the motions of raping and pillaging, there's a fairly similar approach: we're invited into these people's domestic lives through their pitch-perfect verbs (what verbs! If you want stories that will actually disturb you, rather than just make you feel slightly bleak about humanity's prospects, it'd be better to read. It was a lovely place, and I hoped there would still be something left to enjoy after we got off the ship and wrecked it up. As every other review of this book points out, Tower's style is brilliant but there is so little substance it feels like having perfume for dinner.