You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

You want to know more than this glimpse, really, but the author is not going to tell you. Here, a man drinks a glass of orange juice 'in a smooth heavy glass' in his nice American home and thinks about a newspaper picture from Iraq, or wherever.

Many of the stories in his book carry with them a distant shadow of war, a refracted global anxiety this is most obvious in 'What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him From His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust'.

In Costa Rica, sex confuses everything, though, as Eggers points out authorially, from time to time: 'This is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love.' On Skye, innocent romance becomes something unsettlingly more brutal. In both situations, Eggers is very good at exploring the disputed territory of a relationship, and deconstructing the meanings we would like to attach to sex. In 'The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water' (Eggers does love his titles), a woman called Pilar goes to visit her old friend, called Hand, in Costa Rica, where she knows abstractedly she will sleep with him, a prospect that fills her, at best, with a sense of curious inevitability. She has only one arm, and he loves her for it. In 'Quiet', a couple who met on a anti-IMF/World Bank march, find themselves incongruously on holiday on Skye. The best two stories in this collection, or at least the two I wanted to finish rather than just occasionally admire, both concern uneasy American relationships in unlikely places. Many of the better stories recreate the odd flavour of his novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, which told of the trials of two recently rich young Americans who travelled the developing world trying to give money away.Įggers is fully at home in the gap between America and the rest of the world. When he actually lets himself write, Eggers can dazzle. In 'There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself', he reheats the experimental novelist's gag of giving you five blank pages. 'Around 8,000 words,' he explains at the outset. In 'Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will not Die Alone', he provides us with the architecture of a tale of a life lived in fear.

His stories are never content to be stories they won't be complicit they feel compelled to let you know that the process of storytelling is just one of the lies we tell ourselves about the world. He writes as if burdened with the unhappy task of telling the truth about the world: someone has to do it and, given his gifts, it might as well be him. Staggering? Yes, I’d say so.To this end, he has created for himself a tone of achingly intelligent disaffection.

You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers