In Ordinary Time

By Sharon Mesmer

Book Overview

Fiction. Sharon Mesmer's new collection of short fiction shows a depth of feeling that permeates every story. "Mesmer's evocative poetic language provies refreshingly clear images and clever turns of phrase" - Publisher's Weekly. "Mesmer's quick wit jolts through bitter, cacophonous territory, a classic roller-coaster ride" - American Book Review. Fiction. Sharon Mesmer's new collection of short fiction shows a depth of feeling that permeates every story. "Mesmer's evocative poetic language provies refreshingly clear images and clever turns of phrase" - Publisher's Weekly. "Mesmer's quick wit jolts through bitter, cacophonous territory, a classic roller-coaster ride" - American Book Review.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193123647X
• ISBN13: 9781931236478
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Hanging Loose Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Rice Krispies and soft summer

If you think of the lines and words of prose as a screen, there are two ways of looking at the lines and words of prose. You can either focus on the screen or the view out of the screen. Prose can be seen as either basket weaving (an experience unto itself) or as a window (a means to a new experience.) These two modes of writing fiction are so entrenched in contemporary writing that readers tend not to think about them. Self-consciously literary readers would say they are drawn to a book because they read for characters. A reader for character is excited by the intimate detail in prose where there is time for the characters to trim their nails and inspect the collected dirt and dried skin. To get to know a fictional someone changes how we know other people in the world. The other type of reader can't get past the fact that these so called people in a book are really just gatherings of words. They are excited by a fresh turn of phrase, a way of saying something that changes how we know the world through language. The second section of Sharon Mesmer's new collection of stories, In Ordinary Time, is told in the first person. It is a series of stories about a young woman who grows up in the cracks like a weed in the sidewalk in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. The author, Mesmer, grew up in Chicago. The reader wonders, "Is this really real?" And in asking the question the reader reads for character. The narrator in this section of the book deals with a lot of things: record collections and a childhood house stuffed litter. Mesmer's lyrical catalogue of junk reminded me of Isaac Babel's early stories about growing up in Odessa. "Everything impressed itself vigorously on my soul," Babel wrote in his story "Childhood." "If people talked in my presence about a ship, I remembered the sign board, the shabby gold letters, the scratch on its left corner." Objects in these stories become less things -- two brown lunch bags, in Mesmer's story for instance, with rubber bands containing a deck of old occasional cards -- but lost emotion. Where a cookie might contain a smell that triggers a Proustian reverie, junk in Mesmer's fiction becomes a concrete representation of old emotion. Junk is old emotion. Mesmer evokes loss when these old associations can't be attached to the piles of trash. Mesmer writes: I dig deeper in the trunk and find Marie's and my kid clothes. [...] Looking at those photos of my family I am able to recall moments that I'd forgotten or that I thought were dreams. The particular aura of those times comes back, too, but fleetingly, and I can't hang on to it all. It is in these innocuous cairns of trash where Mesmer begins to bend naturalism to her linguistic purpose. In the final full story, the thinly-veiled autobiographical narrator is left to clean out her parents home after her mother assumes the Paxil nirvana of a rest home. Naturalism boils off and we are left with the alkali crust of concrete language: When I turn on the light for t