What the sort-of blurb tells us:
“The Book of Other People is just that: a book of other poeple. Open its covers and you’ll make a whole host of new acquaintances. Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds present the constantly diverging writing life of Jamie Johnson; Hari Kunzru twitches open his net curtains to reveal the irrepressible Magda Mandela (4:30 a.m. in her lime green thong); Jonathan Safran Foer’s grandmother offers cookies to sweeten the tale of her heart scan; and Dave Eggers, George Saunders, David Mitchell, Colm Tóibín, A. M. Homes, Chris Ware, and many more each have someone to introduce to you, too.
With an introduction by Zadie Smith and brand-new stories from over twenty of the best writers of their generation from both sides of the Atlantic, The Book of Other People is as dazzling and inventive as its authors, and as vivid and wide-ranging as its characters.”
Meeting new people…on paper.
(An introvert’s dream coming true)
Humans are social animals. However, most often we don’t know much about the other, whether it is the elderly lady sitting outside the same café every day, chain-smoking and reading the paper (rain or shine), the artist and his stout dog, or the student sitting in the grass reading a book. The Book of Other People shares a glimpse into the lives of various characters, people we could’ve passed by just a few minutes ago. For a short time, we get to know them, find out what they think, feel, fear, love… Meeting new people without actually meeting new people irl? I’m here for it!
Apart from being a book about people, written by people for people, it is also a so-called ‘charity anthology’ to support 826NYC, a non-profit organization that helps “young people write the future.” It’s a collection of characters, most of them presented in short stories, others in comics or other narrative forms. Varying heavily in tone and structure (for obvious reasons, being the collection it is), it received generally positive but also mixed reviews (attentive readers may find most of this trivia on Wikipedia just like I did, because I cannot remember everything..). As far as I can remember, it was rather popular when first published nearly 10 years ago. so I’m once again pretty late to the party.
So many different characters
Different stories bring different voices, perspectives, images, languages, and views. Different stories from different authors create even more multifaceted, colorful, vibrant and creative universes. This is the main reason why I usually don’t read a collection like this all at once, because the different voices and styles can at times be irritating; it ‘feels’ different. And this regular change of tones and spirits is exhausting at times, at least in my little corner of the world. Just when you got accustomed to one character and her specific voice and idiosyncrasies, everything changes. All at once.
These constant changes of settings and the likes don’t bother me when reading a short story collection by one author. This rather special sort of literary exhaustion only occurs to me when reading collections containing a variety of authors. Because starting a new story by a new author of course brings a new ‘feel.’. And one can only take so many new ‘feels’ in one sitting (and reading). Which in itself is a rather trivial — albeit true –—observation, but hey, let’s be trivial.
23 x 23
We meet 23 people in 23 settings, lives, worlds. The authors contributing to this collection were asked to introduce a character, tell the story of one person, no matter how. And like in real life, this can be colorful, complex, vibrant, mundane, flat, interesting, and shitty. Some I loved and some I didn’t like. Some were foreseeable but still good, some graced my quiet evenings with a fine sarcastic tone I loved, some were plain and boring. Of course you meet characters that seem familiar; reading one story I realized that I probably had the phone number of the person I was reading about; even more so, I also encountered characters I simply did not understand.
As an introverted mess of a person, I always assume that not understanding others is solely my fault. I guess it’s the same here. Since I obviously know too little about male adolescence to decipher some codes that may otherwise bring me closer to the story; or don’t know enough about the joys of parenting to understand the even greater joy of taking a weekend off from parenting thanks to a shady houseguest who takes the kid on a roadtrip. And don’t get me wrong, I really think this is ‘my fault’ since one cannot always work with every voice and every style; some things I simply don’t get and that’s okay.
So apart from my intellectual slips and personal tastes, me being the fairness fanatic that I am, I read every story to give it the fair chance to become my favorite. At this point, I will not name any faves or stories I didn’t like, because if everyone who hasn’t read The Book of Other People should have a fair chance to form their own opinion. Besides, everyone has a different taste, so go find your own favorite story (/stories).
Last but not least, reading this book was a sort of personal triumph. I bought it eight years ago, moved it to three different apartments without ever reading a single story and every time I looked at it I thought: “Hey, this sounds soooo interesting, I have to read it on a day off!”
It actually took me three (regular) days, because…life. Nevertheless, finally, I met all the Other People.