How We Are Hungry

Read from Wednesday, July 6th to Thursday, July 7th.

How We Are Hungry, by Dave Eggers.  This is a collection of short stories by one of my favorite authors, Dave Eggers.  It is a small collection, and I read it very quickly one morning on a bus ride up to New York City.  Some stories are just a page long and involve an intimate moment in a character's life, while other stories are more in-depth and span a longer period of time.  I love Eggers' style of writing, and there are many animalistic elements to these stories.

One of the more memorable stories is 'The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water,' in which a young woman travels to Costa Rica to visit her friend Hand, a character from You Shall Know Our Velocity, and they spend the week surfing and hooking up.  It is about the spiritual zen of surfing, and about escaping from the ordinary routine of life and taking an adventure in an unknown land.  There are wild horses that watch the couple throughout their stay.  Another story is about a man who visits his cousin in the hospital after he tried to commit suicide for the umpteenth time.  One of the longer stories is about a woman who tries to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. She is traveling alone, but with a tour group. Some of the tour group get sick and can't make it to the top, and then some of the porters, the black employees hired to climb and carry equipment, die in their sleep one night.  She eventually makes it to the top, mostly as a personal accomplishment.

There are other quirky stories that I enjoyed a lot as well.  One story is about a super-couple talking to their child, 'Your Mother and I.'  This story recounts how somehow they were able to bring about world-peace, solve all of humanity's problems, and even some minor problems as well.  It was so easy, they said, once everyone worked together and stopped dividing upon ideological extremes.  Another was just notes about a potential story Eggers would write in the future.  It is about an old man who wants to make his death a large, public event in a stadium.  He reconnects with his kids and an old flame to plan the thing, and it is the only way he would be happy dying.  Finally, the most interesting story, and the one that will stick with me, is the story 'After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned.'  It is told from the perspective of a dog.  As a puppy, he was thrown in a river, but he was rescued and went to live with a family.  However, all the dog wanted to do was run in the woods at night with other dogs, that he could communicate with.  They had races for fun along a course that ended with a jump over a river.  One night, a dog jumped and broke her leg.  It is a bad omen, but the main dog wanted to race again.  He jumped, but the river was swollen from rain, and he drowned.  The story continues with life after death, including what it was like on the river bed, and then what dog heaven looked like; a giant field with nothing to do but roam around.  The story, and book, ended with this quote about his realization in heaven:

"The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun.  It makes sense, if you think about it.  Why we didn't see it sooner I cannot say.  Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing, and we didn't think it was God.  Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.  Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know."

I liked these stories a lot, and I look forward to more by Dave Eggers.  Four out of five stars.