Oblivious [Kindle Edition]

I stumbled across this self-published (I presume) collection of short stories somewhere on the forums... There was a comparison made to Raymond Carver. Oh god, I thought, yet another writer who doesn't really understand why Carver was so good...

Well, guess what? I suspect Neil Schiller DOES know why. Obviously this isn't as good as Carver, but it is really very good, and in a similar style. The stories here touch on themes of depression, angst, divource, music & memory and illness. But the writing itself is stylish and and stops the whole thing becoming too drab and downbeat.

My favourite is 'Fugue' about a stag-do in a drab seaside town, but I've enjoyed nearly all of the stories here. A real lucky find, and at less than a quid a bargin.

I came across Neil Schiller's work a month or so back now, and have enjoyed dancing around the subjects of Bukowski and the Beats in the forums with him. Reading the work of people you have got to know is always a risky business, because as a reviewer you must be honest, and knowing someone you must be decent. But, 1. I had resolved to reda and review this before I knew anything about the man behind it, and 2. a good writer and a good person will never mind honesty.

Thankfully there is absolutely no cause for worry, because this collection is stunning. What Schiller does best is understatement. There is a quiet confidence in his prose, a simplicity, a levelness of tone that covers a depth and complexity of emotional content that is quite dazzling. This is the kind of writing I love, because it deals with life in all its messiness, but it does so without ever going down the road of bleakness and despair. it does justice to life's complexity but it does so without ever falling into the trap of "needing a good edit".

Thoroughly thoroughly recommended.

Oblivious consists of twenty-one stories, almost all first-person male narratives. The narrator is seldom named. He could be anybody. He is anybody.

There is the prisoner in his cell, there is the man crushed by grief and guilt over the death of his daughter, there is the grown-up son paying a rare visit to his disintegrating father. Schiller makes us look at those bits of our lives that shame us and embarrass others - the saddest bits, the bits that can never be put right; the bits we must hide from the world, because the world doesn't want to see them.

For the most part, the anonymous narrator reveals only gradually, or perhaps only at the end, what is really going on. And all the tales, like all our lives, are really about the past. Something has happened, or has always been happening, and this is where it has led to: "Nothing ever starts. Not really. At some point you simply realise that you're in the middle of something that has been going on forever."

Every story in Oblivious presents us with a bleeding chunk of someone's existence, and in it we see the whole life. There is a reason for the brevity of the tales (one is only six words long): they are distillations; more words would only dilute.

Oblivious presents a bleak picture of human life. If there is redemption here, it comes through meaning. All these lives, Schiller says, really matter; they are worthy of our attention. It may not be much, but it's something.