George Saunders´ PASTORALIA

The short stories in this book are excelent!! Portraits of contemporary America with disfunctional families, the poverty and the competitive imoral work relations, the violence, all served with a great sense of humor that reminds me of Buñuel. The optimists ("Man, what an optometrist," says Jade.) and good and well intended characters sound even more funny and absurd than the mean and desperate ones. On July 7, due to friendship and fate (thank you Resa *****, Alina, Jeff, Iosip, Scott...) I was in a private party, in Lisbon, also attended by George Saunders and other great writers and poets. I had never found myself in the company of so much litterary talent before. I had heard Mr. Saunders read one of his short stories a couple of days before, but I didn´t understand much of it, due to his accent and the many english words I didn´t know ( specific references to popular American culture, tv programs, local characters and brands, etc.) Resa told me he is excelent, stellar, with many stories published in the New Yorker. I already ordered too other of his books from Amazon. His dialogues are amazing, especialy those long parts, more like monologues, imagined or real, with fine irony or sudden changes of opinion. The first time I read something similar was in a small text by Woody Allen; a man feels atracted to some pretty nurse; he starts by praising her beauty, charm, personality, selfishness, etc, but, feeling ignored by her, just two lines below he starts doubting her qualities, suspecting she may even be so stupid she couldn´t find anything more interesting to do than being a nurse... One must know a lot about all shapes and forms of human nature to describe such complex characters with few lines, like Mr. Saunders does.