Joe Meno (1)Recensioner

Ostensibly these are supposed to all be noir stories. They are not. In some cases, they read as excerpts or first chapters... Some are really well written and, as usual, a collection of short stories is a great way to sample new and new-to-you authors.

I am puzzled by 1) why they said these were noir stories, and 2) why they said they were "classics" of that sub-genre.

Noirs are about people who realize that following the program will never get them what they crave. So they cross the line, commit a crime and reap the consequences. Or, they’re tales about seemingly innocent people tortured by paranoia and ass-kicked by Fate. Either way, they depict a world that’s merciless and unforgiving.

If the guy gets the girl at the end? Not noir. If you are telling me a slice-of-life, or hard-times story? Not noir.

This is possibly the worst book i've ever read. I made it halfway through and just can't want to finish it.

I received this book from LTER. Hard book to read, I actually picked it up a few times before committing to finish it. It’s very well written, but quite sad. Great character development, and really gives you a sense of the immigrant experience in Chicago.

The title is not a lie. This novel illustrates how difficult it is to escape the cycle of poverty. It's heart-wrenching, but I'm glad I read it. I kind of missed the main character for a few days after I finished the story. I really didn't want to leave his side. Bonus points for a main character with a disability. Read if you like classical music.

This book does a great job of describing Chicago. I've never been to Chicago myself but I imagine that if you are a Chicago native you would be able to follow Joe Meno's narrative down the streets, through the parks, to the hospitals, and schools. You'd know the neighborhoods he describes and you'd say "Yeah, that's it." I found some of the characters here unbelievable and couldn't fully get into the story after a while because my brain was just thinking "it wouldn't happen like that" but it's an interesting story and in the end gives out a message of hope and happy endings.

Aleks, the narrator, chronicles the downward spiral of his once prosperous immigrant family using musical terms and scores that have resonated with him throughout his life. He and his sister Isobel are finally able to rise above their unfortunate circumstances and claim a victory of sorts showing the strength of the love they have for each other. Compelling prose and character portrayal.

Other of Meno’s books have hit me harder, or I’ve just been in a different place when I’ve read them and been more receptive. No fault to the writing or ideas; I empathized most with the toddler, and I don’t even like children. Maybe we’re both frustrated, being stuck with hapless adults.

This novel is about so many thing: music, hearing loss, dysfunctional families, and mostly how history affects lives. Aleks is a 20 year old of Bosnian, Polish, Croatian descent. He was a talented musician but struck at an early age with hearing loss. He experiences the world through music and silences. He lives in poverty with his quirky family (including a 4 year old niece who also has hearing loss) whom he loves and protects. All are overpowered by the tragic history of their ancestors. Yet they try to get by with their (sometimes) meaningless jobs, which often dip into illegal ways to stay afloat. Their story is tragic, but subtle humor sneaks in, as do rays of hope. Meno's prose is engaging and good. His characters are quirky and interesting. One paragraphs seemed to sum up the relationship of their lives with their history: (While watching a TV soccer match) "We sit in silence and watch men in very tight shorts run after a spheroid for ninety minutes, never scoring a goal. The game ends in a zero-zero tie. All at once I understand why Eastern Europeans prefer this sport to all others. Maybe it is the tedium, the sense the players are merely trying to survive, that no one is supposed to be having any fun, and the best you can hope for is a draw." I recommend this book! It would be great for book club discussion.

I received a free copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, in exchange for an honest review. The book tells the story of an Eastern European family (and particularly siblings Aleksander and Isobel) growing up on the far Southside of Chicago -- where they were confronted with challenging family dynamics and a neighborhood they never exactly fit into. The author has an absolutely wonderful way with words, and his voice brings the characters to life in ways an average narrative approach could not do. "The circumstances of our ridiculous-sounding names and the fact that all of us had been reared by well-meaning pseudo-intellectuals to appreciate books and music made us strangers on our block and in our neighborhood." Even when they are making stupid or merely misguided decisions, you'll still find yourself rooting for them, hoping against hope that they'll manage to figure things out. Loved it.½

Although this seems like a bleak story of an Eastern European family coming of age in Chicago and confronting a series of family hardships, it unfolds with humor and hope and sensitivity. The main characters are siblings Aleksander, Isobel, and Daniel - quirky, talented, poor, scrambling after something good to finally happen in their lives without much assistance from older family members. I loved the relationship between Alek and his niece, Jazzy. Music and learning to communicate with hearing loss are integral to this novel. This is a comedy/tragedy with this great quote toward the end:
"Everything important is part of some larger tragedy, the beautiful failure of all human beings struggling against their own mistakes."

Joe Meno's latest novel, BOOK OF EXTRAORDINARY TRAGEDIES, is a meditation on family and success. The narrator, Alek Fa, is an amazing character struggling through everyday life in failing Chicago. Raised by well-meaning pseudo-intellectuals, he excelled at classical piano as a child. However, he's now dealing with inherited deafness, dependent siblings and absentee parents. Money is a constant problem and Alek wonders if it is his fate to be cursed by history, by the place and situation from which his family came. Bittersweet and quirky, you'll love the characters, but wish life wasn't so hard. Thanks to Akashic Books and Library Thing for the ARC½

Well... This was my first Meno book, and I will definitely be searching out his others. I won this book through LibraryThing, and it's easily the best book I have won. Meno has the wonderful ability to make the reader care about all of his characters on a deep level. I will not forget this book for a very long time.

Read this as part of the Early Reviewers program...Well developed characters who end up going through a lot more that initially expected. But were they characters that this reader really cared about? Not really. Each has their own set of specialized chaos and it doesn't always mesh with each other or citizens in Chicago. I'd give it about 3.5 stars out of 5.

Can't believe I almost quit this book. Really wasn't feeling it at first. Thankfully, I stuck with it and all of a sudden, it clicked and I could read it in the way it was intended. Superb writing. Sure, it's depressing and pessimistic, but you can't help root for these characters even though you know nothing is going to go right. And yet, there's still hope somehow, there's still progress, there's still sweet moments, and a quote or a thought from someone's head will hit so hard, it will linger.½

Everything we think is important or unique about ours lives means nothing in the face of history. Even our tragedies are entirely ordinary.

It’s been a while since I’ve read something that moved me the way “Book of Extraordinary Tragedies” has. I feel like I know quite a bit about author Joe Meno, as well, because Aleks has such depth and nuance that must come from the author having a personal relationship of his own with both the characters hearing loss as well as his life in the south side of Chicago.

… the moments in between history where all the living happens, the moments that almost always get forgotten, where all the exceptional tragedies and invisible triumphs actually occur.

The story is horribly sad, yet hopeful, and the prose simply gorgeous. I found myself highlighting passage after passage. I can’t wait to share this treasure with others, and will be buying multiple copies of this beautiful story as gifts. I’m headed off to find more of Meno’s books now!

Everything important is part of some larger tragedy, the beautiful failure of all human beings struggling against their own glorious mistakes. It's at the moment of weakness when people are most profoundly human, the one experience everyone has in common.

I received an ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program

I had a hard time finding something not to like about this story. I haven't read Meno before but now I must. The story follows a family through tragedy, heartbreak, and everyday issues yet finished highly uplifting. I found myself relating to and enjoying all the characters which doesn't happen often. Their flaws and strengths are presented with such a prose you can't help but root for them. Great story that I'm glad I read.½

An engaging and diverse collection of noir literature, though almost none of it is of the hard-boiled detective variety I'd been expecting. I do wish, however, that Chicago had a greater presence in some of these.

And for my own future reference, some authors introduced that I'd like to explore in future: Harry Stephen Keeler, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Hugh Holton.

I have sort of a thing about fiction author Joe Meno. Years and years ago, a friend gave me his short story collection Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, and I loved it (and much later, after a reread, reviewed it here). On the basis of my liking that book, I more recently read his novel The Great Perhaps, which I liked much less (reviewed here). Meno for me is much like Richard Powers, in that I think there's a lot of potential there but he fails to live up to it, so far, more than he lives up to it. Having recently read and not much liked Powers's Gain, I'm on the brink of giving up on him. After reading the first few stories of Meno's collection Demons in the Spring, I began to fear I had reached the same breaking point with his work. The jury's still out.

Meno's short stories are quirky, often outlandish, and I like that. But in this collection, they seem very uneven. Some of the stories seemed half finished and some simply not good. I felt at times as if I was reading unrevised workshop material, and I occasionally thought Meno was doing the cutesy, quirky thing without the literary punch that earns you the right to play such games. These stories I found myself reading hurriedly, just hoping to get to the next (and hoping it would be a better story).

But there were some stories that I liked, some of them very much. As in Bluebirds, Meno writes often of loneliness, of people just trying to peer through the murk of their alienation and make a connection with somebody. Among them, we meet in "Miniature Elephants are Popular" the sad man made happy at last by the possession of a tiny elephant whom, for the sake of helping another person, he drives to a bad end. Here Meno may pull a bit too much of the cutesy-pie business, but ultimately the story redeems it.

In "I Want the Quiet Moments of a Party Girl," we meet a not-terribly-likable couple who endure a tragedy and find a way through it. It's a rare dip for Meno into something resembling realism, and he does it pretty well. It occurs to me only now that he ends the story in the way certain types of thematically similar movies that make me want to wretch tend to end, but here, with these characters, it seemed a good ending.

"The Architecture of the Moon" is a fanciful piece in which all nighttime light (including that produced by the moon and stars) is extinguished, the city reconfigures itself at random, and people wander around lost at night. The main character of the story speaks with his wandering father on the phone nightly, often trying to guide him homeward. It's easy enough to read this as a story about Alzheimer's and a son working to shepherd an afflicted parent through the confusing mess of it all, though it could also just be a fanciful story. There's a simple tenderness and innocence about it that I found very appealing.

In "The Unabomber and My Brother," Meno treats us to an unlikely juxtaposition of his burn-out brother and the Unabomber. It's another story that has a soft, unexpected landing at the end, and I thought the Unabomber tie-in and the way in which Meno handles an emotional finish in a weird emotional-and-yet-still-detached way was pretty nice.

It's hard to read "Oceanland" without hearing echoes of George Saunders's various stories about theme parks in which he depicts sorrow among the shabby ruins of tourist destinations designed to -- and of course failing horribly to -- provide pleasure. Saunders does it better, but I thought this one was ultimately pretty satisfying.

Until I read the last line or two of "Iceland Today," I wondered what the point was. It's a funny, fictitious history of Iceland in which we learn all sorts of zany facts. It's the kind of little sidebar I'd expect to read nestled in almost as a sort of set piece within one of the sorts of sprawling encyclopedic novels I tend to be fond of (as, e.g., a student term paper). But however much I chuckled while reading it, I couldn't quite figure out why Meno had written the thing or put it in a collection instead of on a blog. He punches you in the gut with the point at the very end of the piece, and I'm ambivalent about how he handled it. This story I regard as a curiosity, neither exactly a failure nor exactly a success.

Meno finishes strong with "Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush," which has sort of a Juno vibe to it. It's easy enough to envision the main character played on the screen by the ever-baffled, eager-to-please, neurotic screw-up type best given life in recent years (and in Juno) by Michael Cera. This story manages to be both delightful and sort of sad, which I suspect is pretty hard to pull off.

The stories I've not commented on here generally left me cold or frustrated.

I made a note at one point that Meno dwells a lot in this collection on architecture and city-planning type topics. We also see action at several art schools, and if ever there was a collection about family members betraying or disappointing one another, this is it (though we do also see the occasional redemption). Of the collection's title I can make little sense, though the wry dual-meaning (are the demons in the season or in the water?) I suppose is cute. Each story had accompanying illustrations by a different artist (hence, perhaps, the preoccupation with art schools, though the artists Meno portrays are almost all wretched folk), and some portion of the proceeds from sales of the book is being donated to 826Chicago, a branch of the student writing outreach organization Dave Eggers founded.

On the basis of this book, I'm still a little unsure how I feel about Meno's work. I loved Bluebirds so much that the two things I've since read and found at best uneven have left me leery. Maybe he wrote just the one outstanding book. Do I dare risk the disappointment of buying others and confirming that maybe to be true (as, so far, I seem to have done with Powers)?

This review is posted on both my personal account and the account for Crossroads Public Library.

“The only thing all men have in common with one another is their inherent capacity to make mistakes. But there is wonder in the attempt, knowing we are all destined to fall short, but forgoing reason and fear time and time again so deliberately.”

This is my favorite book, but I haven't read it in six years. Not for any deliberate reason, just that it's words were imprinted on my heart and I haven't needed to revisit them in a while. But now I'm a little older, a little closer in age to Billy, and feeling just as directionless and beaten by a world that can be cruel for no reason as he did. This book hurts - but there's hope at the end.

I've been skimming through this book again lately, and I still love Meno's style.

Miniature Elephants Are Popular is one of the saddest things I've read. As sad even as that episode of Futurama with Fry's dog.

Between Everything and Nothing
The Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal and the Quest for Asylum
By: Joe Meno
This is a book I requested from the publisher and the review is voluntary.
This story is so tragic from the very beginning. How the land of their birth betrayed them all the way through the process of trying to get asylum. From the the money hungry cops in Central America, the inhumane and rigged immigration system in America, to finally having to brave the elements to try to get to Canada and everything inbetween. They both would have been killed in their home country and almost died trying to make their way to freedom. It was an emotional trip with these men and an embarrassing one when it came to how they were treated in America. They were not criminals but treated like they were. The difference in how Canada and America treated these men were like day and night! How shameful our system is! So tragic! This really is a must read book!

It's okay, pretty lite across the board.

Heartfelt and offbeat-
a very insightful look into family dynamics-
sort of reads like David Foster Wallace lite-
great use of a variety of writing styles without being gimmicky-

Bicycles and Hipsters and a bit of absurdism rolled into a book. I really wasn't expecting to like this book as much as I did... my guess is it's because of all the hipsters I deal with on a daily basis.

Bad, bad, bad. And worse - boring. Reads like stuff written by a high school student who got too much encouragement in English class and not enough criticism. Or someone who thought his journals were really deep. Too much time spent describing outfits and physical features and not enough time making the main characters relatable. I didn't finish it. It gets two stars because at least it used proper grammar and sentence structure. But otherwise terrible.