Review of Tales of the Seventies
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Sherry Wilson 1
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Review of Tales of the Seventies
[Following is a volunteer review of "Tales of the Seventies" by David Done.]
Seven short stories and a novella by David Done deftly transport us to San Francisco in the seventies.
First, meet the Chinese gentleman, Mr. Zhen Hua, who runs a shop on the corner of Franklin and East 13th Street (delightful details for people who know San Francisco). Here is a family drama of inevitability; a bitter-sweet tale full of poetry and pain.
Next, we meet Don and his 'Blind San Franciscans'. Is Don a do-gooder or a profiteer? And we meet Don's 'people', those who 'had fallen into the cracks of society.'
Then, 'The Cat Burglars', an entertaining frolic on the wrong side of logic. The author cleverly provides compelling motivation for a senseless enterprise using the doltish ambition of a small-time crook. A fun story.
The following story, 'Mack the Knife', features a thirty-year-old virgin trying to remedy his condition. It is a gambling tale. Most of the action takes place in a lively bar in downtown San Francisco and centres around a dice table where Mack is pursuing love and fortune.
Gambling also features in 'Three Card Shuffle'. A touch of predictability adds to, rather than detracts from, a compact and self-contained tale. Interesting start, satisfactory finish: a bare-essentials yet fully rounded story where nothing is superfluous.
The 'San Francisco Adventure' is an improbable and sordid romp around San Francisco's sleazier side. Its redeeming feature is its spot-on ending. It takes the elements from the start of the story and reproduces them, diversely, at the end.
'The Short Unhappy Life of Terrence McAkers' is a terrific character study. You hate this creep right from the start. Vile, arrogant, ignorant, narrow-minded. A ne'er-do-well without one redeeming feature.
Tales of the Seventies concludes with the Novella 'Yesteryears Snows'. The protagonist, the schizophrenic Jeff, features in unrelated episodes. First: the cave, garbage, a harmonica. Then, a short episode puts four characters and a cat together and raises questions about them. None get answered. Then, the Mexican interlude, between dream and not-quite-reality, suggestive of seventies' drugs laced with tequila. The peculiar woman in the next scenario is a witch, a sex-starved snake-friendly witch. The scene moves from surreal to fantasy with seventies psychedelic images. The seventies come across strongly in this bizarre episode. And even more so in the story about the Stranger that describes typical seventies mind-blowing 'trips' and hallucinations. In 'The Reactor' story, an industrial setting softly swells into glorious visions and the language, with its 'cosmic sundial', soars with it. Clever the way the author allows us to see this curious scene in two different dimensions simultaneously. The last part, 'The Snows of Yesteryear', mostly centres on unaccountable feelings. There is no happy ending. But it is an appropriate ending for this episode, for the novella and the book. It summarizes the mind-bending drug abuse, the hallucinations and flights of fancy, the lurking danger therein and possible fateful consequences.
The author, David Done, displays a knack for smooth poetic incipits that capture the reader. Every story in this collection has a soft beckoning lead-in. However, the enticing 'follow me' never sticks to the primrose path but takes the reader through spiny thickets and muddy shadows to emerge in unexpected places, murky unpleasant places, in stark contrast to the lilting beginnings. David Done has reproduced an era, the seventies, with all its strengths, weaknesses, fashion statements, creativity, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Seventies San Francisco was all of the above. Undoubtedly, David Done lived it to the full and has poured his memories/emotions into these stories so that readers can experience the dreamy, daring lifestyles of those times.
Some descriptions are pretty raw, like '. . .a wad of spit rushes up and splays out on Jeff's neck.' This detail on page 202 is the grotesque element that completes the previous distasteful scene of debauchery and out-of-place sexual squalor. Surrealism? Or just 'seventies'? Frequent dream-like sequences where reality comes and goes and sex and drugs figure strongly emphasize only the seamier side of seventies San Francisco.
David Done, an author with many resources, delivers low-level nitty-gritty alongside fine prose. Each story presents diverse realities (or non-realities), all compelling in different ways. However, unnecessarily crude descriptions and raunchy sex scenes (real or imagined) lower the tone. There are also several typos, so the rating is three out of four stars.
Be warned. The stories start poetically, lulling the reader into dreamy appreciation. Then, the author delivers a sharp return to (un)reality, with various gory details. The David Done strategy, maybe? An example (page 204): a lilting paragraph about harmonizing voices, twilight, moonlit reflections, peace, leads into a gruesome description of killer-ants avidly attacking face, nostrils, lungs. If you are up for this roller-coaster ride, this book is for you. It contains sex and some lurid scenes. Not for everybody.
******
Tales of the Seventies
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Seven short stories and a novella by David Done deftly transport us to San Francisco in the seventies.
First, meet the Chinese gentleman, Mr. Zhen Hua, who runs a shop on the corner of Franklin and East 13th Street (delightful details for people who know San Francisco). Here is a family drama of inevitability; a bitter-sweet tale full of poetry and pain.
Next, we meet Don and his 'Blind San Franciscans'. Is Don a do-gooder or a profiteer? And we meet Don's 'people', those who 'had fallen into the cracks of society.'
Then, 'The Cat Burglars', an entertaining frolic on the wrong side of logic. The author cleverly provides compelling motivation for a senseless enterprise using the doltish ambition of a small-time crook. A fun story.
The following story, 'Mack the Knife', features a thirty-year-old virgin trying to remedy his condition. It is a gambling tale. Most of the action takes place in a lively bar in downtown San Francisco and centres around a dice table where Mack is pursuing love and fortune.
Gambling also features in 'Three Card Shuffle'. A touch of predictability adds to, rather than detracts from, a compact and self-contained tale. Interesting start, satisfactory finish: a bare-essentials yet fully rounded story where nothing is superfluous.
The 'San Francisco Adventure' is an improbable and sordid romp around San Francisco's sleazier side. Its redeeming feature is its spot-on ending. It takes the elements from the start of the story and reproduces them, diversely, at the end.
'The Short Unhappy Life of Terrence McAkers' is a terrific character study. You hate this creep right from the start. Vile, arrogant, ignorant, narrow-minded. A ne'er-do-well without one redeeming feature.
Tales of the Seventies concludes with the Novella 'Yesteryears Snows'. The protagonist, the schizophrenic Jeff, features in unrelated episodes. First: the cave, garbage, a harmonica. Then, a short episode puts four characters and a cat together and raises questions about them. None get answered. Then, the Mexican interlude, between dream and not-quite-reality, suggestive of seventies' drugs laced with tequila. The peculiar woman in the next scenario is a witch, a sex-starved snake-friendly witch. The scene moves from surreal to fantasy with seventies psychedelic images. The seventies come across strongly in this bizarre episode. And even more so in the story about the Stranger that describes typical seventies mind-blowing 'trips' and hallucinations. In 'The Reactor' story, an industrial setting softly swells into glorious visions and the language, with its 'cosmic sundial', soars with it. Clever the way the author allows us to see this curious scene in two different dimensions simultaneously. The last part, 'The Snows of Yesteryear', mostly centres on unaccountable feelings. There is no happy ending. But it is an appropriate ending for this episode, for the novella and the book. It summarizes the mind-bending drug abuse, the hallucinations and flights of fancy, the lurking danger therein and possible fateful consequences.
The author, David Done, displays a knack for smooth poetic incipits that capture the reader. Every story in this collection has a soft beckoning lead-in. However, the enticing 'follow me' never sticks to the primrose path but takes the reader through spiny thickets and muddy shadows to emerge in unexpected places, murky unpleasant places, in stark contrast to the lilting beginnings. David Done has reproduced an era, the seventies, with all its strengths, weaknesses, fashion statements, creativity, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Seventies San Francisco was all of the above. Undoubtedly, David Done lived it to the full and has poured his memories/emotions into these stories so that readers can experience the dreamy, daring lifestyles of those times.
Some descriptions are pretty raw, like '. . .a wad of spit rushes up and splays out on Jeff's neck.' This detail on page 202 is the grotesque element that completes the previous distasteful scene of debauchery and out-of-place sexual squalor. Surrealism? Or just 'seventies'? Frequent dream-like sequences where reality comes and goes and sex and drugs figure strongly emphasize only the seamier side of seventies San Francisco.
David Done, an author with many resources, delivers low-level nitty-gritty alongside fine prose. Each story presents diverse realities (or non-realities), all compelling in different ways. However, unnecessarily crude descriptions and raunchy sex scenes (real or imagined) lower the tone. There are also several typos, so the rating is three out of four stars.
Be warned. The stories start poetically, lulling the reader into dreamy appreciation. Then, the author delivers a sharp return to (un)reality, with various gory details. The David Done strategy, maybe? An example (page 204): a lilting paragraph about harmonizing voices, twilight, moonlit reflections, peace, leads into a gruesome description of killer-ants avidly attacking face, nostrils, lungs. If you are up for this roller-coaster ride, this book is for you. It contains sex and some lurid scenes. Not for everybody.
******
Tales of the Seventies
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Latest Review: Three loves and other stories by Lata Gullapalli
