A review by gorecki
Pastoralia by George Saunders
3.0
Saunders is a master of exaggeration. Take Pastoralia for example with its mundane, everyday, boring things turned 180° and magnified until they seem crazy. There is a man with a dead-end job in a Stone-Age themed amusement park where people pretend to be cavemen and cavewomen. There is another one leading the uneventful life of a male exotic dancer forced by the ghost of his aunt to show his boy parts to women frequenting his bar. And there are also klutzes, scatterbrains and people trying to figure out “who’s been crapping in their oatmeal”. Add a pinch of Saunders to any of these and there you have it - the boring and everyday parts of our world turned upside down into outrageous, nonsensical absurd stories. Dead-end jobs, monotonous lives, people stuck between, all start sparkling with a coat of uncomfortable mix of laughter and pity. Anyway, you get the idea!
I don’t generally like satire. There is usually something about it that just seems to float by me and leave me detached. I’m there, I’m present and smiling, but it’s an absent kind of smile. Not because I don’t get the joke, more because it doesn’t really evoke too many emotions in me. That said, though, Saunders is the only author I keep going back to for more of it. Good man, George!
I don’t generally like satire. There is usually something about it that just seems to float by me and leave me detached. I’m there, I’m present and smiling, but it’s an absent kind of smile. Not because I don’t get the joke, more because it doesn’t really evoke too many emotions in me. That said, though, Saunders is the only author I keep going back to for more of it. Good man, George!