Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hempel is able to draw out various minutiae. In her centering of each story around the presence or absence of this minutiae, we can find the root of this story as in principle, the driving force behind the actions of the characters. While at times, the characters may encounter the minutiae as periphery to a different activity not in the story, each story works as a collection constructed of the minutiae which in repetition becomes its own difference. Literally, the story takes on a life of its own, a certain plateau, a consistency of that minutiae that then becomes, as a collection, “reasons to live”.
Despite the easy language, at times I found it difficult to get a grasp on certain stories. For me, I would be able to read at most 3 or so stories before I had to put this down and do something else. Otherwise the abstract relevancy started to get lost. I think other readers may be able to appreciate Hempels attention to detail, at times, humorous, witty or provocative. She definitely is able to draw a thin line, weaving each story together as its own “reason”, bringing to characters as a unique slice of “living” as we know them and ourselves in different and new ways.
Truly this is a great example of how short stories can inhabit new spaces, in ways that epics or novels cannot. Each of this is, I felt, at times, a burst of meditation. It brings to light a fact; we can find in anything we do, a particularity to how we construct a situation. We can find ourselves different in how we know ourselves and how we subsist depending on what our attention covers. Interesting to show these meditations in these little funny stories.
