This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories

by Johanna Skibsrud

Overview

Nine loosely connected, hypnotic stories about memory and desire showcase one of fiction's bright new voices.

In the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud’s new book, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life—these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393345926
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/15/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of The Sentimentalists, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and This Will Be Difficult to Explain, as well as two poetry collections. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

"[Johanna Skibsrud’s] prose is as taut as Alice Munro’s, her plots as spare as Mavis Gallant’s. Her characters have startlingly vivid inner lives…Skibsrud’s new book is just as assured [as her novel], and it has the same emotional punch."

Toronto Life

"Sharp and stirring. ... [T]his subtle mixture of melancholy and world-­historical resignation...gives Skibsrud’s collection its potency."

New York Times Book Review - Jessica Loudis

"Like the best short fiction, Johanna Skibsrud’s new collection, This Will Be Difficult to Explain, centers on the complex and layered interior lives of ordinary people. These are the kind of stories that make you take a long, hard look at the person standing next to you at the supermarket—or even sitting across from you at the dinner table—and wonder what unspoken oddities are floating around in his or her head. . . . The quality of Skibsrud’s writing is undeniable."

Washington Independent Review

As the title suggests, the stories in this debut collection resist easy summary. Indeed, the title story starts with a first-person account of a wartime incident involving a shooting and the sacking of the family home. That account is repeatedly called into question, as the point of view shifts from father to son and serves as a vehicle to convey the inner workings of an unbalanced household. A beguiling series of linked stories involve a young American girl who travels to Paris, begins to learn French, finds a job, makes a few friends, and falls in love, but more significant is her response to viewing the pointillist paintings of Paul Signac, whose "small points of color maintained themselves independently of the image they conveyed, while at the same time they gave themselves up to it entirely." The larger subject of these intricate stories is the tension between the parts and the whole, perception and creation, art and artfulness. VERDICT Skibsrud, a poet and author of the Giller Prize-winning first novel The Sentimentalists, brings to these stories a poet's eye and the subtle shadings of some of our best practitioners, including Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro.—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Library Journal

Connection and enlightenment are sought and occasionally experienced in a first collection from Canadian poet and Giller Prize–winning novelist Skibsrud (The Sentimentalists, 2011). Relationships remain unexpressed or rest in not-quite-connected small family knots in Skibsrud's dreamy yet searching fictions—e.g., "The Limit," in which an absent father reaches out to his stranger-daughter. Reminiscence features often, as in "Clarence," recounting a newspaper photographer's use of a childhood episode to revive his subject, the oldest man in the county. The stories offer glimpses of France, Canada and the Midwest, yet the landscapes seem desolate and are often visited by death, like the suicide of a son in "French Lessons" or the casually mentioned murder in "Signac's Boats." These two stories are also connected via the character of Martha, an American in Paris who falls in love there, but even on this subject Skibsrud's approach is cerebral, almost abstract. "Cleats," another story in the Martha/Paris sequence, is more concrete, tracing the feelings behind an abandoned marriage, although it too is driven by the ineffable. And the closing tale, "Fat Man and Little Boy," is one of several striving to capture a flash of understanding for which words seem scarcely adequate. Skibsrud's economical, poetically aware stories reveal a writer comfortable with the form, and one who requires her readers to think.

Kirkus Reviews