You remind me of me Pdf Summary Reviews By Dan Chaon

You remind me of me Pdf Summary

With his critically acclaimed “Among the Missing” and “Fitting Ends,” award-winning author Dan Chaon proved himself a master of the short story form. He is a writer, observes the “Chicago Tribune,” who can “convincingly squeeze whole lives into a mere twenty pages or so.” Now Chaon marshals his notable talents in his much-anticipated debut novel.
“You Remind Me of Me” begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon” “explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?
In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary” people.

READ

You remind me of me Review

jonathan briggs

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful stuff
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2012

Verified Purchase

My parents tell me that when I was a baby boy, I inflicted my affections on a neighbor’s Doberman pinscher. I’d fall headlong on the dog and happily spend the day chewing on his nose. The dog suffered through it all patiently. I was reminded of this in the first chapter of Dan Chaon’s “You Remind Me of Me,” in which a 6-year-old South Dakota boy named Jonah is rough-housing with the family Doberman, who’s not as patient as the dog who tolerated me. When Jonah falls on her, she lashes out, either in panic or in pain, savaging the boy to the extent that “Jonah was dead for a brief time before the paramedics brought him back to life.” (That is a GREAT opening sentence for a novel!)

Around the same time in that spring of 1977, a 10-year-old named Troy is hanging out in a trailer home in Nebraska, watching his cousin sell pot to teenagers. Troy will grow up to fall in love with, marry, divorce but remain attached to one of the girls smoking dope that afternoon. At least Jonah got his mauling over with quickly.

I hope I’m not spoiling anything, but it’s pretty easy to guess that Troy and Jonah are brothers. Troy was given up for adoption by the boys’ mother, Nora, shortly after his birth. Jonah claims to remember his older brother, but Nora scoffs, assuring Jonah that Troy was gone before Jonah made the scene.

Growing up, Troy is effortlessly likable, while Jonah finds that people instinctively object to him. Even Nora sees him as a “constant, living reminder of her failures as a mother, as a person.” And the scarring makes it worse.

“The scar they noticed first ran along his cheek from the edge of his eye to his lip. A keloid: a smooth, raised line of healed skin which they might associate with a cesarean section or appendectomy but not with a face. Not in America, not in the twentieth century. It made them think of a pirate, a thug from a pulp novel, a hideous blind beggar in a third-world country, and though there had been several revisions over the years, attempts at plastic surgery, the scar remained Jonah’s most prominent feature. He had grown used to certain looks … no matter where they looked they couldn’t help but see damage: the nick of missing ear, the thin lines that ran along the backs of his hands, and others that pull down the side of his neck and past the collar of his shirt.”

After his mother dies, Jonah takes his inheritance, cuts off ties to his home and his past and moves to Chicago to start a life of his own, though mostly he observes the lives of others from a safe distance. When Steve, a co-worker, catches Jonah staring, Jonah explains that Steve reminds him of his brother who died in a car accident. “The lie had come to him almost supernaturally, like a premonition. … The whole thing had burst forth with such vividness that it had almost seemed real.” And the lie works. “It had established a connection between them, a bond … Steve was pleased in some way, flattered that he looked exactly like the brother who had died.” Jonah has a friend.

Steve and his wife, Holiday, have a history of adopting strays, and Jonah is their latest. They welcome him into their circle, but after a while, Jonah’s neediness proves too much for them. This leads to an excruciatingly uncomfortable scene in which Jonah desperately and futilely tries to pry himself back into their lives. Jonah, alone again, decides that he’s spent so much effort in constructing a fake dead brother, he might as well try to find out what happened to his real one. He quietly leaves Chicago, discarding another life, without telling his boss, his landlady or his former friends. “Better, he thought, to simply disappear.”

Twenty-some-odd years after the scene in the motorhome marijuana den, Troy is trying to responsibly raise his son, Loomis. He and his wife, Carla, agree that Troy is the lesser screw-up in the couple and slightly more suited for parenthood. “‘I’m not dealing,’ he said, which was mostly true. ‘I’m not even hardly smoking myself,’ he said, which was not.” Troy, at 30 years old, decides it’s time to start acting like an adult, to get out of the drug trade, go to school and be a dependable dad to his “Little Man.” But marijuana has a way of staving off good intentions until manana y manana y manana…

One night, the cops bust in on Troy while he’s holding a re-up bag full of weed, ‘shrooms and acid. One of Troy’s steady customers is a lawyer, but after his trial, he wonders if having a pothead mount his defense was the best choice. Troy is electronically shackled to his home, and Little Man is taken from him and given to Carla’s mother, Judy. “His parental rights had not been terminated, exactly — though Judy had official custody of Loomis for an indeterminate period.” Judy sees Troy as a “druggie little leech” and won’t even let him talk to his son over the phone. But she loves Loomis and is happy to bring him into her home. She sets out to make the arrangement permanent, filing to strip Troy and Carla’s parental rights.

Then one bright day in June, Loomis disappears from her backyard.

Before “You Remind Me of Me,” I read Andre Dubus III’s “The Garden of Last Days.” I couldn’t help but compare the two. Both books are about people in the throes of bad habits, chemical and personal. People who captain the sinking ships they themselves scuttled. Both books feature a kidnapped child. “You Remind Me of Me” even includes a stripper, just like “Garden.” I dinged Dubus’ book for the self-pitying stupidity of its characters, so why does Chaon get a pass from me?

For one thing, his characters are much more interesting and sympathetic. Jonah isn’t trying to defraud anyone or get something for nothing. He acts out of an urgent need to belong — somewhere, anywhere. Most readers should be able to relate to that. Jonah can’t even inhabit his own skin comfortably, inventing false persona after false persona. “It is as if each possible life is just beyond his reach. He thinks of a fly against a windowpane, tapping steadily against a transparent barrier. He always gets to a certain point, he thinks, and then he fails.” Troy never moans about how the world is out to get him and keep him down. He could be considered a loser, but he has the self-awareness and good grace to recognize where the roots of his problems lie: “What an idiot he’d been. What an idiot!” During court-ordered rehab, Troy feels guilty not only for his own actions but for enabling other people’s failures. “At least there is no one here he knows. That would be terrible — to have to sit here with one of his former customers, thinking that this was someone he had aided and abetted down their trail of addiction, someone he had wronged.”

And good writing will elevate any story, no matter what the content. Dubus’ monotonic prose often feels as if it were written expressly for the dullards who populate it. Where Dubus plods and trudges, Chaon springs nimbly from word to word. He’s a keen observer of behavior, sketching in the beautifully mundane minor details that bring a character fully to life. Most of his work has been in the form of the short story, and his first novel features several perfect little character sketches that could spin off into their own self-contained tales with some elaboration.

“She was already frowning when she opened the door, a small, thin, bedraggled woman with a mole like the head of an emerging earthworm at the corner of her eyelid and a pelt of gray-black hair on her head. Her jowls and lips were turned down in an exaggerated arc, which nevertheless deepened when she saw him standing there. She stared at him hard, her lower lip protruding and her nostrils widening as if she were furious, as if he were an enemy she were preparing to defend herself against. ‘Yes?’ she exclaimed.”

In just a few sentences, the reader already knows quite a bit about what kind of person this is. For my review, I could just continue to string together particularly good paragraphs from “You Remind Me of Me.” There’s certainly no shortage of candidates for excerpting, and Chaon’s words could do a much better job than mine of selling his book. But I’m far too fond of my own voice to go the easy route, and besides, I had to share my own dog story with the world. So let me just say in my inadequate but enthusiastic way: This is a really, really good book.

Jill I. Shtulman

5.0 out of 5 stars It Reminds Me Of “Masterful”!
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2005

Verified Purchase

This book was extraordinary…a book that revived my faith that the novel is here to stay. The theme — in Chaon’s own words: “How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments, each careless step branches into long tributaries of alternate lives, shuddeing outward and outward like sheer lightning.”

That’s solid writing by a master in control of the process. The novel is, ultimately, about choices and alternate lives: what would happen if you were born to a different mother? If you’d grown up in a different place? If you had some kind of proof that you were unlucky? These are questions that we all wrestle with at some point in our lives; Jonah more than most.

There is ample foreshadowing that “something is wrong with Jonah”: his child demeanor, the way he deals with the dog Rosebud as an adult, his own lack of involvement at the time of his mother’s death. It is inevitable, then, that his appearance in Troy’s life will eventually create what appears to be a crisis.

Each character is carefully drawn, even the minor ones. I could picture each one — the twitches, the yellowing sheets, the gnarled hands, and most of all, the scar which, of course, is symbolic of the schism that runs through Jonah’s life.

About Dan Chaon Author Of You remind me of me pdf Book

Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon is the Author Of You remind me of me pdf Book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. His new novel, Await Your Reply, will be published in late August 2009.

You remind me of me pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information

you remind me of me pdf book
you remind me of me pdf book
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books (May 25, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 356 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345441419
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345441416
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.38 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
  • Best Sellers Rank: #2,781,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17,700 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
  • #113,639 in American Literature (Books)
  • Customer Reviews: 4.2 out of 5 stars    134 ratings

Get A Copy Of You remind me of me pdf Or Paperback By Dan Chaon

You Can get A Copy Of You remind me of me pdf Or Paperback By Dan Chaon from these online store links below.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *