Your Duck Is My Duck audiobook

As with all short story collections, this is rather a mixed bag - some great selections ('Taj Mahal' and 'Recalculating' were the standouts) and a few duds (most notably, the longest story, 'Merge'). This was my first brush with Eisenberg, but on the strength of this, I'd read more.

Engrossing stories. Longer than I’m used to for short stories, but they make great use of their length. So much going on, but all tied together meticulously and naturally. Moving and a pleasure to read.

The past week I have been in thrall to Deborah Eisenberg’s new book of just six stories. I could have finished the book more quickly, but each of the stories in Your Duck is My Duck was so complex, so suggestive of multiple ideas, that I never read more than one story each evening. Then I reread a couple. In fact, I began with the audio version, read by the author and other distinguished voices, but I quickly checked out a library copy so that I could both read and listen. In “Taj Mahal,” for example, there are shifting voices and times, and I appreciated the visual clues – horizontal lines and italics – which guided my reading. In this story about the unreliability of memory, the principal character seemed at first to be the memoirist, but the characters in his memoir took the story away from him. It was unclear whose memories were “right.”I read somewhere that Eisenberg’s stories are as dense as novels. I wish I knew who said that, for I would like to give credit. It is exactly what I kept thinking. They are also stories for someone who does not mind ambiguity.Usually, the premise is simple, and a scene unfolds. Then the story takes a turn, probably darkening. Frequently the real topic is power – political or financial – but the power is unseen, hidden, ominous. A son has a glimpse of a more moral life, but his father holds the purse strings. A simple girl with uncommon imagination is considered “not normal” by a harsh medical system. In other stories, lingering memories and family have a powerful grip.The title of the book is the same as that of the first story. It is from a Zen riddle. A Zen master, his disciple and a duck are trapped in a bottle. The master’s lesson is this: “It’s not my duck, it’s not my bottle, it’s not my problem.” The two artists in this story, a painter and a puppeteer, benefit from the largesse of patrons who have done all manner of bad deeds – desecrating the landscape, uprooting peasants. They are unsure what to do: "It's not so hard to figure out why I'm not sleeping. What I can't figure out is why everybody else is sleeping." Your duck is my duck. We must all take responsibility.I had a rather personal reaction to “The Third Tower,” which may be the case for many readers, because Eisenberg leaves gaps for one to fill in. A teenage girl who resides in a fantasy world but has a remarkable imagination is seen by a harsh physician as having “aberrant cortical activity” and is put through treatment to make her “normal.” But almost immediately her flights of fancy struck me as being much like what I would imagine dementia to be. A beloved relative, in her 90s and on the precipice of losing her grip on reality, told me with sadness and wonder that she was no longer sure what was real and what was a dream. It was a profoundly melancholy moment. What is normal? How do we show kindness to those whose minds are different? Deborah Eisenberg bears witness to a corrupt world but also to a deep humanity. The library book will go back, but fortunately the audio stays on my phone. I will listen occasionally, when my heart can stand it.

Deborah Eisenberg is a master of her craft. I was amazed by how layered and intricate each story was, characters so complex and developed in such a short span of time.These stories achieve depth and meaning which many authors spend a whole novel to achieve, Cross Off and Move On & The Third Tower were two stand outs for me in this collection, both ones I'll be coming back to. A clear choice for the NYT Notable Books of 2018.

I love how she talks about aging and how she writes time

I'm usually not one for short stories. How many writers can put a mini-story - with characters and plots - into the 50 or so pages most short stories run? But Deborah Eisenberg has written six mini-stories that are incredibly readable in her new book, "Your Duck is My Duck". I didn't like all six of the stories; I thought "The Third Tower" was a bit too science-fictiony for my taste. But the others, and most particularly "Recalculating", were tiny gems which were like snapshots into the characters' lives. In "Recalculating", Adam a young man raised on an Iowan farm, discovers an uncle he had never known while going through family pictures. Philip had left the farm early and had moved "away", returning only once. A few years pass and Adam is out of college and beginning his own journey away from Iowa. He hears about his now-famous uncle's death in London and decides to go to his memorial service. The time is the 1980's and Philip's family back home had been told he had died of "pneumonia". Adam's trip to London enmeshes him in Philip's world - a world he finds to his liking. The characters in "Recalculating" are brilliantly drawn; spare but full of life.The other five stories are as well written as "Recalulating". I'm going to look for Eisenberg's backlist.

El libro de cuentos de la escritora estadounidense Deborah Eisenberg (que también es actriz) trabaja de modo conceptual a lo largo de todas sus historias explorando el desfasaje que separa irremediablemente las palabras de los hechos. Para esto se vale de varias voces que construyen cada cuento como una suerte de prisma de varias caras irregulares que delinean el objeto complejo que narran. Trabaja el lenguaje con la premisa wittgensteiniana de que no todo puede ser dicho y se propone realizar un nuevo juego del lenguaje alejando los cuentos del formato tradicional. Libro increíble, no se lo pierdan.

Some really moving stories in this collection - a wee bit of of Mary Robison flavour but maximalised? I liked the passage of time.

I don't know what to make of this book to review it. But I absolutely loved it. It's definitely an excellently written book and Eisenberg is the kind of author who has a strongly independent and characteristic voice. But sometimes (a lot, actually) it crosses over to the difficult territory.The stories, especially if you're just beginning to read them, can feel arduous and make little sense. But once you settle in, you see the rhyme and rhythm of the book and the shorts start to grow on you. The stories don't rely on a last page twist or some big grand moral lesson, but give a beautiful insight about how humans are, and can perceive other humans to be. The stories are about a lot of things and it's on the viewer to decide what we want them to be. There is one about a lonely artist caught in high society, one about a dead Hollywood star's memories being revisited by her daughter, and one that could qualify as a classic coming-of-age. In fact, the entire book could pass off as coming-of-age.E.g., one story, The Third Tower, explores a young girl with hyperassociative disorder. She is bursting with words, imagination, her mind often skipping several steps in the thought process. Her well-meaning but glory-hunting doctor may go by the book, try to make her 'regular' and like everyone else. But the gentle exploration of what the doctor sees as an issue and what the girl sees as a hyperactive imagination, is how the author gives the book its form.Tl;dr - I loved it. It's a difficult read, but I adore an author with a distinct voice.