Note to self charles yu11/20/2023 No one in this interplanetary fantasy really cares much about anything, and everything turns out fine. “Yeoman” is a tongue-in-cheek space romp. Between before and after, there was supposed to be something big, right?” But other questions fall flat. And then, just like that, it feels like after. “Human for Beginners” is a pleasant reverie about existence: What does it mean to be alive? What questions do we ask the world without expecting an answer? Much of this seems pointlessly unfocused, but once in a while Yu nails a concept perfectly: “My whole life has been all before, before, before, leading up to. The more abstract pieces have their moments too. And then the world blinks twice and my field of vision goes blue and I’m a guy sitting in front of a computer screen and the sandwich cart is in front of my cubicle. To be inside here, feeling what this woman is feeling having done this to him. To be inside here, looking at this man’s face, at the lowest moment of his life, watching him try to keep it together. When I first started at this job, I expected the hardest would be physical pain. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. I get to tell my husband that I have been sleeping with my trainer for the last year. The low-light of the day is when I get to be a woman. “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let us have it for you.” It’s an interesting premise, and although one may argue that most people would not wish to farm out the grief they undergo at funerals, Yu gets some serious depth into other awfuls that his professional bad-day man must undergo: This story tells of workers at computer screens who, for a fee, assume into their own psyches the emotionally unpleasant - and sometimes horrible - experiences of their customers. In “Standard Loneliness Package,” there are islands of poignancy. In the end, the hero becomes a bit like one of sociologist Charles Murray’s prototypes by finding more value in coping with life’s troubles than in seeking happiness in a boring paradise. They deal cheerfully with orcs, lichs, rocs, shambling mounds and the loss of their own limbs. Yes, there are unconnected observations, like “Rostejn fell under the sphere of influence of a powerful mage in the Abjuration school and almost got everyone turned into black pudding.” But that kind of esoteric whimsy seems to fit this tale, which includes endless battles (#256 is the “last battle”) and a leader whose consciousness we share and who has real (or seemingly real) feelings about his band of warriors. “Hero Absorbs Major Damage,” for example, is (I think) a video game come to life, and it has a hero and a plot. Still, in some of these entries (many are not stories at all) I found things to admire. Sometimes there are only a few words on a page.įull disclosure: I am not a fan of abstract fiction. You have a clue to the nature of this work. If I tell you that the title of Charles Yu’s new collection of stories, Sorry Please Thank You, is more appropriately rendered
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