It’s been a while since I enjoyed a book as much as I did Lauren Groff’s Brawler.
Her writing reminds me of (a bit) of Jhumpa Lahiri’s. Clean and crisp – never overly emotional, trite or dripping with adjectives. Every now and then though, she drops a lyrical line here and there reminding you that she knows what she’s doing.
As an undergrad, I took a class on short story analysis. And I fell in love. Short stories are tidy things that pack a punch when done right.
Brawler is a book of short stories. And each story does just that. Packs a punch!
Each is set in a different place and some in a different time. Groff, it seems, puts a lot of her own experiences into her writing and so the stories feel effortless and light. Like they are part of her skin and she’s just putting there on the page for you to borrow.
I had the strangest experience while reading “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?”. The denouement felt as though it were casually written but there an undercurrent of something I can’t quite explain which made me itch to skip ahead — not to find out what was going to happen but just to be done with it. That delicious sense of discomfort that good stories bring. No — I didn’t succumb, I’m happy to say. Yet that story first comes to my mind when I think about this book.
On a very different note, here is the front cover artwork.
And the artwork inside is perfect for these stories. (Slide over images to enjoy them both)
Love it. All of it.
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