I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek

I Sailed with Magellan Reviews

• 
  Sosen

  Sometimes you tear through a book in one day; other times, it takes years. Either way, it could end up as one of your favorites. I read the first four stories in I Sailed With Magellan several years ago. I got sidetracked, most likely by college, and never finished it--although I enjoyed it. At the time, I probably would've rated it like 3.5. More importantly, though, I just forgot about it; and when I saw it on my shelf, I didn't feel the slightest urge to pick it up and read it.
  
  Then, last month, I specifically wanted to finish one of the many books on my shelf that I'd abandoned. I tried to pick up Magellan right where I left off. I read about one page of "Wild Orchids" before I was intrigued enough that I knew I had to start over. By the time I was halfway through "Breasts", I already considered Magellan among my favorite books ever.
  
  By stringing together twenty years of the life of a character who is obviously deeply personal to him, Dybek lays himself bare through Perry Katzek. Dybek lets us dream alongside Perry in the early years of life where anything is possible; and then thrusts him into the vastly eventful years of high school with its adventures and ambition, yet constant sexual frustration; and then beyond, to the acceptance of a disappointing "real" world.
  
  Dybek's Polish ancestry and the city of Chicago are central to I Sailed With Magellan. Not only am I not familiar with Polish culture, but I haven't even been to Chicago. There were a TON of references to these two things that probably would have made the book even better for me. However, this never got in the way of understanding Magellan. Dybek is interested not in telling his life story through fiction, but in using his experiences and background to write about imagination at its most glorious, and disappointment at its most heartbreaking.
  
  I'm tempted to write a review for each story in this book. "Breasts" is epic; I'd call it literary magic. It's that kind of story that is just as likely to annoy a reader as it is to blow them away. I would say the same about the whole book, but two other stories in particular were amazing to me. Dybek's wandering style is already a huge influence to me. When I start to daydream and wish I was a writer or film director (which is often), I think of creating something similar to what Dybek did with this book.
  
  There are no bad stories in this collection. Great literature is subjective, of course, but I feel lucky to have found a book that I love so much; and I also feel kind of silly for not realizing it when I tried reading it before. I'd recommend I Sailed With Magellan to anybody who likes to read. And if they read it and don't like it, I will never speak to them again. Well, I guess that's a little severe. But I will seriously be really really mad at them and possibly never forgive them.
• 
  Keegan

  A few years back, I had the fortunate opportunity to have lunch with Stewart Dybek (though it's unlikely he'll remember it as much as I did). He was quite delightful during the meal as we talked about his work, my past delusions of being a creative writer, and my current studies at SIU-C.
  
  So, flash-forward several years, and I finally get around to reading I Sailed with Magellan, his follow-up to Chicago Stories, with which I was more familiar. Regardless, my brief and pleasant encounter had not prepared me for the deep and profound sadness that threads through this collection of stories (a novel in stories, some would call it, but those people would be idiots).
  
  This collection is more about a place than a person, though a young Polish Chicagoan, Perry, does tend to be in most of the stories, or one of his family members. What these stories really give the reader is a taste of Chicago at a certain point in history. More than other authors who use Chicago as the backdrop for their narratives (see: The Time Traveler's Wife, which was terrible), Dybek gets a sense of what Chicago looks like to a native. There was more than just a parade of tourist locations; this took place in a neighborhood which was at one point filled with various European immigrants, but now has shifted. This shift, this cultural and ethnic shift, is present in the narrative as much as the change that takes place in the characters.
  
  Chicago, for Dybek, exists now only in memory. And that, really, is the central point of the book: an exploration of the role of memory in narrative. Most stories have very little present-day action. For example, in the final story, Perry's brother Mick stands outside his old house, is asked one question several times, and then runs away (that's not really a spoiler). The action that is in the present of the narrative is very, very limited. Most of the story takes place as the narrator seamless drifts from present day observation to long recollection. Connections are made between how the current situation and what past events lead to it.
  
  It would be easy to label this stream-of-consciousness writing and lump it in with Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but there is something more here. There is an overarching sadness at not only the events of the characters, but how the city remembers it's citizens. Throughout the course of the novel, the characters change quite a bit, both internally (their personalities and characterizations) as well as externally (where they live and what they do), but the city remains mostly static. Buildings seldom change purpose, and instead are left abandoned when emptied. Houses fall down and never reappear. It's a horribly sad reflection on how a city is merely a holding vessel for a constantly shifting mass of people who never stop to see it for what it is. In the same way that a glass will give shape to the water within, so to does Chicago give shape to the characters therein.
  
  I would strongly recommend this book to anyone. There is just one warning: don't approach it as if it were a short story collection. Approach it more like a novel about a city told in a varied, shifting perspective. But not, under any circumstance, a novel-in-stories.
• 
  Gerry LaFemina

  Stu Dybek is one of the best writers in America today--he's a writer's writer, but he's also a reader's writer. he writes with the cadence, phrasing and eye of a poet. But his characters are real, their dramas unique and poignant, the plots engaging and interesting, and the prose is all together lovely.
• 
  Tuck

  alexsandar hemon name checked dybek as a great and influential writer to him in his recent occasional memoir
  The Book of My Lives and one can tell right off why. dybek is fantastic, and he conjures the old chicago neighborhoods of polish czech mexican black puerto rican russian packed in the strictly, though invisible (most everybody was terribly and equally poor, cept the rich banksters), demarcated territories. dybek uses smells and sounds as much as dialog and characterization and plot to bring this lost? world alive. linked short stories record the life and upbringing of perry katzek, from singing in the bars as a little tyke (for his uncle lefty's free shots, and his root beers) to trying to make some time with his best friend and potential lover down at the fire truck graveyard by the polluted and sick "river" (she did NOT like the ambiance) dybek is the real thing and you'll find yourself transported to his world he loves. even if if doesn't exist anymore, and maybe never really did.
• 
  Manda

  with expectations so high after Coast of Chicago-I couldn't believe that Magellan surpassed it. I truly enjoed Perry's threading through the narrative. It was like listening to stories of extended families and communities where I have to pause to remember the relationship of my Mother's cousin's husband's best pal that ended up falling into a dumpster after golfing all day and drinking through the night-only to stumble off the path back to the Chrystler into the dumpster. I am incrediby biased to Dybek, I know, because he writes of the time of my parents and grandparents, in those neighborhoods. Using Polish words I know for food and insults. Reading Dybek for me is like being a kid again, sitting underneath the table where "the Adults" played Pinochle or Rams, smoking, yelling for someone to bring another beer or grab the bottle of V.O. and telling stories. I can smell the butchers shops, the garlic and the sewer in his writing and in their voices.
• 
  Patty

  Interconnected stories about Chicago. sometimes I didn't totally understand how the stories connected. All in one neighborhood or one family in the neighborhood - I guess.
  
  I think I heard Dybek speak at a ALA program in Chicago which would have been appropriate and also would explain why one story seemed very familiar.
  
  My favorite story was "We Didn't" which may be the one that was read to us.
  
  Worth reading if you like short stories - much of it was serious, but there were definitely some funny bits. And the two brothers were great characters.
  
• 
  Ryan

  Worth it for the story 'We Didn't' alone.
• 
  Felicity

  I wonder if the dominance of bildungsroman narratives in the shnovels (linked books of short stories) I've surveyed indicates a modern realization about the nature of growing up. It isn't linear or clean, a smooth line of story unspooling over years, and the collage approach of books like
  Local Girls and this one seems a better fit for our current understanding of memory and childhood.
  
  At any rate, a bildungs-shnovel is more or less what this is; along the way, a portrait of place and yet another story
  where the heart is half-hidden in the untold. I liked that Perry's story includes his brother's, the way real people's growing does intertwine and contrast with the growth of those around them. I liked the elements of the unreal or quasi-mythic in the neighborhood, in the stories of the men who drink at Zip's. I like the way the young people are explicitly interested in understanding their lives as stories and writing their own identities.
• 
  David Gallin-Parisi

  Dybek writes love stories about southside Chicago. He tells stories like snapping tons of quick photographs, rushing depictions images of Polish families shopping during Sunday mass, saxophone bleating uncles, war veterans drinking while bartending, and intense moments of fleeting love. These are beautiful stories, filled with sensual experiences, even when characters are riding in old cars or listening to El pass them by in tiny apartments. Or maybe even more sensual because of those sounds and vibrations. Comforting, poignant vibrations happen throughout. The stories depict growing up with memorable instances of midwest urban life, from third dates, throwing out all one's belongings, and visiting bars with relatives. All of the stories concern friendship and love at their core, told in a quick-moving and multi-emotional succession.
• 
  Maple Street Book Shop

  Dybek's been called Chicago's James Joyce over and over again, and every collection he puts out gets hailed as his Dubliners. Unlike most of my favorite writers, dude does not shy away from love stories. This book made me knee-bucklingly nostalgic for stuff I never came remotely close to experiencing.
• 
  Paige

  The blue boy story captivated me completely. Others were good, minus Breasts. Dybek entranced me for the first time when I read Chopin in Winter from his other collection, The Coast of Chicago. Hot damn, I read that story in 2000 and it still rattles me when I think about it 13 years later.
• 
  Alice

  “But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.”
• 
  Mike

  Short, interconnected stories follow the life of Perry Katzek and his experiences while growing up in Chicago.
  
  Like his Coast of Chicago, which I remember loving years ago when I read it for the One Book One Chicago, this novel-in-stories is sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy, and shows the author’s obvious love of this gritty and beautiful city.
  
  
• 
  Kathryn

  After reading of Dybek's collection of novel-in-stories, I Sailed with Magellan, it is hard to resist the sense that contested dreams, memories and what remains unspoken between us are what most deepen the love we have for others and for ourselves. These dreams, memories, and secret thoughts and feelings may fuel our greatest creations; may turn us into endearing fools; or bring us luck; may make possible living on for another day; or grant us a long circuitous lifetime. Even if these memories and dreams and hidden lives drive us mad; even if they kill us: even if they lead us on to countless other forms of destruction, Dybek shows us how they can still deepen our love for one other and for the beauty of our minuscule existence as it is lived in narrow alleyways, unclean waters, and a vast cosmos.
  
  Dybek's stories are full of digressions that are as perfectly shaped as the finest cut pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each digression, its own right, is a tale worth savoring. Together, they contribute to the richly symphonic whole collection of stories. Thus, while rendering an extraordinarily particular (sometimes humorous, sometimes brutal) portrait of life in the Polish immigrant community in the 1950s and 1960s Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods of Chicago, Dybek gives the reader so much more than a warm and nuanced reminiscence of time and place: he gives us access to dreams, story structures, and histories that draw us beyond that place, time, and particular community, toward what can make us fully human.
• 
  Katarzyna Bartoszynska

  While there was no single story in this collection that I loved as much as my favorites from Coast of Chicago, I think that overall, this is probably the better book. The echoes between the stories, for some reason, really distracted me, although they probably would be more appropriately seen as a masterful interweaving of stories. I read the book over the course of several months, which I think was wise, because when I read the last 100 pages in one big push, I found myself rolling my eyes a bit at the digressive style, which started to feel a bit formulaic.
  Still though, despite this curiously negative set of impressions, I honestly think it's a lovely book, one I'd definitely recommend to pretty much anyone.
• 
  Lucio

  My friend Brian turned me on to Dybek with story "PET Milk." It stuck with me, as do the stories in this collection.
  Dybek has a gentleness, a backdoor entrance to the rapture room. Man, I'm flamin' away here...
• 
  Cathy

  I wanted a feel for Chicago, so I picked up this book, and it certainly did give me a feel for immigrant communities, especially the Polish community, on Chicago's South Side, and for the city in general.
  
  Honestly, I struggled through most of the stories in this book. It's billed as a "novel in stories," which is more true in this case than in most books that are billed as such. The character in most of the stories is Perry Katzek. There is a brutal and gritty side to many of these stories, especially the story "Breasts," about a small time thug sent out to do a hit for a criminal organization. I didn't care for these stories, but I'm sure they do reflect the rough underbelly of 1950s and 1960s Chicago.
  
  Suddenly, as I was struggling to get through these, I came upon my two favorites by far. "Lunch at the Loyola Arms" tells of how Perry returns to Chicago after his family moved to Memphis, and he is scraping by on barely any money. He tells of a girl he was involved with, Melody, who he calls Natasha. He tells her "I'm living my life like a haiku. Syllable by syllable." Perry is full of stories he wants to write, and Natasha tells him strange and captivating stories of her life. Finally, she writes him a letter that poetically encapsulates their relationship in a way that made me gasp.
  
  The other favorite of mine was "We Didn't." It tells in an incredibly moving and poetic way a story of yearning and love, how a romantic beach adventure is interrupted by something that washes ashore, how every attempt to connect is interrupted. It is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read, told so beguilingly.
  
  I also loved "A Minor Mood" and "Je Reviens." I'm so glad I made it through to the second half of this book or I would have missed these wonderful stories.
• 
  Jane

  I eagerly awaited the opportunity to read this book after having been blown away by Dybek’s previous stories about growing up in a (1950s, 60s ?) Chicago white ethnic south side community (The Coast of Chicago, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods). I Sailed’s stories journey from boyhood to the cusp of adulthood. They are linked by common characters, but are vastly different from one another in tone. The dark and violent “Breasts” contrasts with the playful “A Minor Mood” and the sweetly nostalgic closing “Je Reviens.” Trigger warning: “Live from Dreamsville” includes mistreatment of a dog, which almost ended things for me after story number two, but I persevered and am I’m happy to report the only mistreated things from there on are human. The memorable cast of characters includes Uncle Lefty who was prone to playing his sax to the pigeons on a rooftop overlooking Blue Island, Lefty’s musically spontaneous grandmother “playing the radiators with a ladle as if they were marimbas,” and Ralphie the blue-skinned younger brother of Chester Poskozim. Frequent narrator Perry and his friend Stosh are refreshingly drawn to things intellectual. Perry tries out on a girl a line of translated Mallarme poetry. “She merely gave me one of those looks that says if there’s one thing more tedious than being a bore it’s being a pretentious asshole. I knew she was impressed.” A poet of the urban landscape, Dybek takes us from St. Roman’s parochial school, to to the backseat of a Rambler that “smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa his father delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market,” to the fire truck graveyard and the (not so) Sanitary Canal, to the Zip Inn tavern, to a lakeshore escape north near the Baha’i temple, ending with a Marshall Field perfume counter at Christmas.
• 
  Robert Palmer

  This is a book of eleven short stories ,it takes place in Chicago’s south Side in the 1950s—1960s it is a bleak and sad landscape populated by hard people,a few Italian mobsters and a few bag ladies, the stories are somewhat connected by a young “ Perry Katzek “a young Polish native of Chicago’s “ little village “,one of the many neighborhoods of Chicago,I grew up on the south side in the neighborhood of Hyde Park about a thousand miles from Little Village. In this book there is a lot of violence,some sex and a whole lot of profanity. One thing that I didn’t understand was that all of the characters seemed to be great fans of Jack Brickhouse and the Chicago Cubs ,which as everyone knows is the north side team and the only baseball team I knew as a kid was the White Sox! Well all that aside I would have to say that you need to know Chicago to really appreciate the stories,which I might compare to “ Nielsen Algren “ and his novel “ the man with the golden arm”.
  This was a beautiful collection of stories,each one a winner!
• 
  Tali Zarate

  In this collection of connected short stories, we are given various portraits of a boy coming of age in a family, and a city, that is fierce, divided, and undyingly loyal. With his clean, precise prose, Dybek puts every word to the test, allowing no extraneous descriptions, no weak verbs, no unspecific nouns. Take, for example, these lines from his story “Orchid,” describing a drive through the city: “We were in third doing fifty through the pinging dust along the curb, passing semis on the right…We fishtailed left on Thirty-first, gunning past the Hospital for Contagious Diseases…By the next block we’d slowed to a crawl, hugging the curb as we passed the city auto pound…He stomped the gas, and we bounced over the rail tracks at Twenty-sixth just as the gates were dinging down.” Like the car itself, the prose revs to life with the power of these verbs and specific nouns, and we are there with the narrator and his pal, lurching out of the city, into the outskirts of town.
  
  
• 
  dana

  Read this one for class, it's so hard for me to rate anything lower than 2 stars but I genuinely disliked this one. The stories didn't connect, I couldn't see a point, and the only reason I got through it was because it was mandatory. The stories were so slow, too many unnecessary words and it took forever for it to make it's point. The chapters were too long and that only works if you REALLY want more of that story, which I don't. I was 75% into this book and by then I should've already been captured by this story and by then the reader should WANT to learn more, but I just really dreaded picking this one up. My favorite chapter is Live From Dreamsville, that chapter was beautiful and I deeply enjoyed it so much; However, I don't think your favorite chapter is supposed to be 2 chapters in because then the rest of the book can't and doesn't live up to that. Overall, I didn't really enjoy this one.
  
• 
  V

  Several stories about life in Chicago's South Side, varying degrees of connection between the stories. The stories seemed to feel more universal as time progressed. Maybe that was just me finding the later stories more relatable because they seem to take place in the 1970s... a decade much more familiar to me than the 1950s of Dybek's youth. I did, however, like the stories of the protagonist's childhood better than those of adolescence and beyond... so there's that.
  
  This time I did not consume a collection of stories in a couple of marathon sessions. It was a much better experience as a result.
• 
  Kate

  I knew Dybek (remotely) via my MFA program, where he was on the roster but never in house (having moved on). We finally met at the Prague Summer Program and he signed a copy for me. It has been on my shelf for, oh, 10 years...Recently, I got to it at last. Knowing he’d been awarded the MacArthur Foundation award for genius, I was skeptical, but by the time I finished the book, I have to say: it is masterful. His adeptness with the language made me feel like I was right there on the gritty streets of Chicago alongside his characters as they made their way through life. I am now a fan. I recommend this book of linked stories. They will move you.
• 
  Liz

  Why did I rate this collection so highly? To wit:
  
  "We Didn't"
  
  
  “But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.”
  ― Stuart Dybek
• 
  Patrick Murphy

  Having grown up in Chicago, Stuart Dybek's stories transport me to my childhood like no other media possibly could. They are like lucid dreaming. I wonder if people who didn't grow up in Chicago can respond in the same way, but judging by the reviews here, the answer is yes.
• 
  Ian

  although set in Chicago, these stories could have happened anywhere. Many universal growing up stories in here, a few seem like my own memories in an alternative universe
• 
  Maryka Biaggio

  Linked short stories set in Chicago. Partial read.
• 
  Elizabeth

  lovely