My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, by Joseph Skibell
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My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, by Joseph Skibell
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Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, the pleasure in these nonfiction pieces by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives. “As a writer,” Skibell has said, “I feel about life the way the people of the Plains felt about the buffalo: I want to use every part of it.” In My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, his first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays, a suite of intimate stories that blurs the line between funny and poignant, and between the imaginary and the real. Often improbable, these stories are 100 percent true. Skibell misremembers the guitar his father promised him; together, he and a telemarketer dream of a better world; a major work of Holocaust art turns out to have been painted by his cousin. Woven together, the stories paint a complex portrait of a man and his family: a businessman father and an artistic son and the difficult love between them; complicated uncles, cousins, and sisters; a haunted house; and—of course—an imaginary guitar. Skibell’s novels have been praised as “startlingly original” (the Washington Post), “magical” (the New Yorker), and the work of “a gifted, committed imagination” (the New York Times). With his distinctive style, he has been referred to as “the bastard love child of Mark Twain, I. B. Singer, and Wes Anderson, left on a doorstep in Lubbock, Texas.”
My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, by Joseph Skibell - Amazon Sales Rank: #1054233 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.10" h x .80" w x 5.40" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 224 pages
My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, by Joseph Skibell Review “[ Joseph Skibell is] a bit of a wise shaman sharing his gently amusing, offbeat life lessons. There’s something unusually endearing and sweet about the 16 “true stories” in My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things.”—NPR.org “It’s easy to see why a writer blurbing this book describes [Skibell] as a ‘literary Louis CK.’ These shards of life have the feel of the standup performances you might here at New York’s The Moth.”—Toronto Star “[Joseph Skibell] manages to find humor and self-effacing wit even while contemplating his own mortality and possibly defective memory. Skibell discovers that even when writing so-called ‘true’ stories, all lives are filled with imaginary things.”—Atlanta Journal Constitution “This book was like candy to me, the best candy, the kind you find yourself tiptoeing into the kitchen for all night long, trying to sneak one more piece before you're ordered to bed . . . The voice is so beguiling, the tone so sweet and hilarious, you quickly realize that you are in the hands of a master . . . Mr. I. B. Singer, meet Mr. Twain. This is a book to be prized in the way readers prize the work of Charles Portis.” —James Magnuson, author of Famous Writers I Have Known “Humorous and heartfelt . . . Whether the stories are mere snapshots or more extended, [Skibell] writes with a humor that flies under the radar until a joke pops up with a well-timed zing. The emotional core of the stories, though, revolves largely around Skibell’s choppy relationship with his strict father. Skibell looks back on their differences with the emotional maturity that comes with time and distance, and his recollections, both funny and somber, resound with feeling.”—Booklist “Colorful and endearing, the book will appeal to readers who appreciate Augusten Burroughs-style, real-life anecdotal ponderings focused on familial ties and how life's eternal cycle of enchantment and disillusionment somehow sustains us. A memoir/essay collection of consistently heartfelt and enlightening morsels of humanity.”—Kirkus Reviews “When [Skibell] turns quietly to the spaces we occupy in real life . . . a wink of illusion and philosophy can be expected . . . Skibell writes with the insight of a philosopher, conveying his ideas with the beauty of a craftsman.”—ArtsATL.com “Stories? These wise and humane offerings aren’t stories; they’re musical notes, from a master composer. And they swirl and swell and come together and echo one another to create a concerto of love and sadness and warmth and humor that will linger in your memory long after reading, as the best music always does.” —Jeremy Dauber, author of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem “Joseph Skibell’s immense skills as an imaginative and lyrical novelist serve him well in these touching essays about memory and mysticism. You'll laugh and also feel a little bit achy as you hear the voice of an extraordinary storyteller and a wise and witty friend.” —Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky “The brilliant novelist detours from fiction with this collection of 16 essays . . . deeply moving, slyly funny meditations on the limits of memory, the meaning of ghosts, and the value of stories.”—Atlanta Magazine
About the Author Possessing “a gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times), Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic; the forthcoming collection of nonfiction stories My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things; and another forthcoming nonfiction work, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, Story magazine’s Short Short-Story Prize, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction. As director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015, he sang and played guitar onstage with both Margaret Atwood and Paul Simon. A professor at Emory University, Skibell has also taught at the University of Wisconsin and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives mostly in his head.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Compulsively Readable By Pop Bop There are lots of collections of humorous, self-deprecating essays around, many of which are quite entertaining. Certainly, I'll read anything by Nora Ephron, or Calvin Trillin, or Anna Quindlen. Joseph Skibell's stories are in the same general vein, but there's something more at work here that gives the writing a bit more heft.Skibell has a substantial body of fiction already on the shelf. These have been well reviewed and well received books. In this collection, Sidel touches on many of the themes addressed in those books - everything from being a secular Jew to embracing Esperanto to the pitfalls of being a dour intellectual in America - but he does so in his own voice as his own self and without the need to observe all of the conventions required of a novelist. He already is a character, (and his family supplies all of the supporting characters one could want), and he doesn't need a plot. As a consequence he can touch upon matters that interest him, or things he remembers, or issues that draw his attention, or the mundane and amusing complications of family life, without being hemmed in by plot, tension, narrative and the like.What we get, then, is smart, gentle, humane, and sometimes rueful and sometimes edgy observations by a talent who can be funny or dark, antic or restrained, silly or very serious. And because his larger insights are so universal and his view is so generous, we are engaged, entertained, and provoked.For me, some of the bits don't hit the center of the mark and some of the author's concerns don't engage me, but that doesn't really matter because the really good stuff is good and the rest is at least interesting. And I don't really care how much of what he writes is "true" and how much is fictitious. That's really beside the point. It's all in any event interesting and engaging.This is all sounding a bit heavy and pretentious, and that's not my intent. Leave it at this - Skibell writes with wit and energy about the examined life. What he finds is amusing and instructive, forgiving and full of understanding. I'm happy to listen in.Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book. (Anyway, Skibell has a funny bit in this book about how bad he felt when his cousin wrote an over-the-top shilling review on Amazon for another book of Skibell's, and I wouldn't want to make the same mistake.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Eh... Not What I Expected By Sara I received a free advanced copy of this book through LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.I had high expectations for this book, but I found that it often fell short. I was, admittedly, prepared for laugh-out-loud funny. I found that this was not the case. There were a few places that maybe made me smile, but I wouldn't actually categorize the book under humor. There was little that kept me holding on outside of my commitment to finish the book and write a review. I wouldn't say that it was poorly written, or even a bad book, but it just didn't have the interest required for me to really invest myself. I don't think that's a reflection on quality, but more of a reflection on two very different personalities trying to match up. Things that were relevant to the author were not relevant to me and I couldn't really connect. I was just bored.That being said, there were passages that stuck out to me that I went ahead and underlined. I find that any book that I love will have passages in it that really strike me, either for their beauty or for their meaningful insight. I also find that this happens more often in memoirs and personal writing than it does in fiction or other non-fiction. That being said, I expected more profound views in this book than I received. Does a book have to be profound and deep? No, not at all. But that is something that I, myself, look for. This is especially true in, as I said just a second ago, memoir and personal writing. If I am not previously attached to the author, then they need to say something that makes me attached to them. I might read a memoir by my favorite actor and love every second of it because I know them and care about them and want to hear what they say, but when I know absolutely nothing of the author in advance, it is their duty to make me feel attached to them by the end of the book. That just didn't happen for me.I feel that I should point out that this author is Jewish and that comes to light quite often. This is not a complaint, nor a compliment. The reason I want to note it is that I am not all that familiar with Judaism and I often felt lost. I had very little previous information to go off of and often felt confused when there was a lack of explanation or when a Hebrew term was used and not fully explained. It could have been a great learning opportunity for me, but it lacked in that department.Overall, I think I would designate this book as average. It wasn't terrible; it wasn't fabulous. Good enough to finish it, but that's about it. I won't be passing it on to anyone else and I probably won't talk much about it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Good writing, but not as interesting as I wanted it to be. By KathLDK Literogo Award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell explores memory, the creation of a kind of family mythology, and the strange little coincidences of everyday life in this collection of nonfiction short stories. From the time he found Paul McCartney’s phone number, to the mystery of a painting that may be worth millions, or may be by his cousin Jerry, to the strange uncle whose failed money-making schemes fill a barn, they spin the story of a Jewish American family of weirdos, living mostly in Texas."He could never find a place for himself within human society. His appetites were too large; his touch too fierce, his dreams burned too brightly in the furnace of his brain."The stories range from amusing, to disturbing, as the author tries to answer questions of the validity of memory, and how two people might remember the same incident in different ways. He explores how language changes the perception of memory, or how the apparent coincidences may be significant to one person and completely false to another. Some of the stories make Skibell look foolish; this is endearing, as he comes across as somewhat self-deprecating rather than narcissistic (as his grade school teacher may have thought him)."When you’re a child, because you’ve basically just been dropped into it, you imagine that the world you know is permanent. The adults are like mountains and rivers: part of the landscape. You can’t imagine they were ever different from how you first encountered them, you can’t imagine they were ever young once or trim or unmarried."At first I found the stories to be somewhat unimpressive. They’re ordinary stories about ordinary people, and I wondered what made them so special – why was it worth reading about them? However, as the stories come together, the distinction between reality and false memory becomes confusing, and soon it is gone completely. Skibell makes you accept that you can’t always know the truth, and that sometimes coincidences are more than mere random patterns of occurrence. His cast of weirdoes, from his bossy sisters who run his life (and appear to have selective amnesia when it suits them) to his hilariously nonsensical uncle Tiger, to the con man who refuses to get out of his car, are the juicy core of the book."The place was like a Sandplay therapist’s toybox, filled with Jungian archetypes: artists, swamis, gurus, cowboys, Indians, satyrs. I knew a woman who lived in a chicken coop with her three young children. I knew a guy who played his wooden flute all day by the Rio Grande. Victor, a white-haired poet, sold his poems out of a little box under the eaves of the plaza, while Miles, a silent guy with a blond Prince Valiant haircut, practiced tai chi with a wooden sword every morning in the plaza’s gazebo, his muscular thighs bulging in tight tight shorts, no matter how cold it was. Everything in Taos was slightly askew. There was even a mime called Klein the Mime who talked during his act."Skibell’s humor is on point. However, I found that beyond the jokes, the weird characters, the strange coincidences and the unreliability of the narrator’s memory, there didn’t seem to be a huge amount of substance to the stories. At times I was a little bored."I’m aware of the dangers of naiveté. Still, I’ve begun to think that innocence is too often undersold. Yes, children must grow up, but no one wants his kid to be scorched by the fires of Love and Sex and by their ever-present handmaidens, Rejection and Betrayal."When it comes down to it, this is a respectable attempt from a skillful writer. His background in fiction means he knows how to put a good story together, and the characters were memorable and generally entertaining. The exploration of the reliability of memory is an interesting one. However, some parts of the book fell flat and I found myself skimming sections as the point was a little lost on me.
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