Adrián Astur Álvarez reviewed Dark Satellites by Katy Derbyshire
Review of 'Dark Satellites' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I am so impressed by Clemens Meyer. This is the first of any of his work I've read and it is already influencing so much of my own writing, specifically, his interest in viewing characters across multiple planes of time.
Meyer's technique of compressing time had a few interesting consequences (well I thought they were interesting): by flattening a character's story across time, he dispensed with a common urge authors have to fulfill a narrative arc with one character's catharsis. This is especially true for short story writers. The second consequence I noticed was that in some of the stories, like my favorite, The Beach Railways Last Run, the revelatory moment of catharsis was twisted into a narrative arc for the reader. The character was already well aware of the important details of his past. So instead of reading a story about a character who develops by uncovering a …
I am so impressed by Clemens Meyer. This is the first of any of his work I've read and it is already influencing so much of my own writing, specifically, his interest in viewing characters across multiple planes of time.
Meyer's technique of compressing time had a few interesting consequences (well I thought they were interesting): by flattening a character's story across time, he dispensed with a common urge authors have to fulfill a narrative arc with one character's catharsis. This is especially true for short story writers. The second consequence I noticed was that in some of the stories, like my favorite, The Beach Railways Last Run, the revelatory moment of catharsis was twisted into a narrative arc for the reader. The character was already well aware of the important details of his past. So instead of reading a story about a character who develops by uncovering a traumatic origin we read a character, who is traumatized, and the mystery of this trauma is a plotted adventure sorted out between the implied narrator and the reader, and Meyer does it so effortlessly.
Technical flourishes abound in this collection but none of it would be so remarkable if the writing were clinical or if each story felt like a writing exercise. In my experience, the very opposite was true. There is a heart running through each one of these stories. I came away from the collection feeling I had just read an apt description of what it is like to be human: that we inhabit obscuring clouds of personal history and experience and slivers of political circumstance and all of these aspects of living are what we push through every day with our arms waving in front of us as we try and make sense of things.
Maybe it's the corona shelter in place talking but I found the poignant absurdities laced into stories like Broken Glass in Unit 95, The Crack, and Dark Satellites all relevant. This is, hands down, among the best fiction I've read this year. I'm excited to seek out more of Meyer's work.