I Sailed with Magellan FROM THE PUBLISHER
A New York Times Notable Book A Chicago Tribune "Best Book of the Year" Winner of the Society of Midland Authors 2003 Adult Fiction Award
Following His Renowned the Coast of Chicago and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, writer Stuart Dybek returns with eleven masterful and masterfully linked stories about Chicago's fabled and harrowing South Side. United, they comprise the tale of Perry Katzek and his widening, endearing clan. Through these streets walk butchers, hit men, mothers, and factory workers, boys turned men, and men turned into urban myth. I Sailed with Magellan triumphantly confirms Dybek's standing as one of our finest chroniclers of urban America, and when combined with his previous fiction, occupies a place beside Joyce's Dublin or Faulkner's Mississippi.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
With I Sailed With Magellan Dybek solidifies his reputation as the rightful heir to [James T.] Farrell's gritty realism; his stories remind us that despite Americans' ambivalence over urban life, exemplified by the flight to suburbs and the Sun Belt, the old brick-and-asphalt city remains a productive crucible of human drama, the place where an open fire hydrant or a sudden thunderstorm can seem as if it might ''drown the innocent and guilty alike.''
— Albert Mobilio
The Washington Post
This is only Dybek's third book of fiction in 23 years (he has also published a poetry collection), but despite his limited output, or maybe because of it, the author has become a semi-legendary figure among literary cognoscenti. It's no wonder; I Sailed With Magellan is the work of a master craftsman, and if you've never read Dybek before, it's the perfect place to start. The episodes that intersect and surround young Perry Katzek's upbringing in the Polish-Mexican ghetto of Chicago's South Side are simultaneously daring and compassionate, intimate in detail and mythic in scale. Dybek has the rare ability to dart back and forth in time and slide around recklessly in space while carrying the reader effortlessly with him.
— Andrew O'Hehir
Publishers Weekly
Dybek's third work of fiction (his first in over 10 years, after the story collections Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and The Coast of Chicago) comprises 11 elegiac, interlocking stories narrated by Perry Katzek, a young Polish-American growing up on Chicago's racially diverse South Side in the 1950s and 1960s. Although it lacks the narrative momentum of a linear novel, the book offers a powerful, cumulative portrait of the lives of Perry, his family and the people in his neighborhood, where "it seemed that almost every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars." "Breasts" follows three men with only tenuous connections to Perry, including Joey Ditto, a gangster who keeps getting distracted from making a ruthless hit by the ethereal forms of past lovers. "Blue Boy," which begins as a tale about a sick youngster, ends as a gorgeous contemplation of loss. The strongest stories deal directly with Perry's exploits. In "Orchids," Perry and his friend Stosh try to scheme their way to Mexico by stealing exotic orchids, and in the much-anthologized "We Didn't," Perry and his girlfriend's erotic lakeshore tumbling ("Swimsuits at our ankles, we kicked like swimmers to free our legs") is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body. "I was the D. H. Lawrence of not doing it," Perry reflects, "the voice of all would-be lovers who ached and squirmed." Indeed, all of these beautifully written stories teem with aching recollections. They are lyrical odes to wasted lives, youthful desires, vanishing innocence and the transformative power of memory, which is "the channel by which the past conducts its powerful energy; it's how the past continues to love." (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Steeped deeply in the street culture of Chicago, this latest from Dybek (Coast of Chicago) is a novel in the form of connected stories. Here, he proves himself to be equally adept at gritty South Side reality and coming-of-age comic touches, with wry and noir intermingling. The centerpiece is a novella called "Breasts," which starts years-gone-by in medias res when a hit man's mission is interrupted by surprising reappearances of old girlfriends. The narrative then moves on to the bloody mission itself, an arm-wrestling encounter in a seedy bar with an aging, hummingbird-costumed wrestler, and back to the locus of the book-the narrator's brother turns out in the book's "present" to be best friends with the son of the hit man's victim-all held together by a leitmotif from the title. It's a remarkable story, at once ironic, edgy, hard-boiled, sophisticated, and brutal. And it's part of a remarkable novel. Strongly recommended for all fiction collections middle-sized and up.-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A crowded, episodic novel-in-stories portrays life in a multiethnic midwestern urban enclave pretty much as did Dybekﾽs memorable story collections (The Coast of Chicago, 1990, etc.). The scene is Chicagoﾽs fictional "Little Village," and the focal character (who doesnﾽt appear in all 11 stories, is Perry Katzek, whom we first encounter in the opening story "Song." Here, heﾽs a precocious crooner employed by his Uncle "Lefty" Antic (Korean War vet, self-taught musician, and drunk) to perform at Leftyﾽs favorite wateringholes, for drinks (bourbon for uncle, root beer for nephew). We also eavesdrop on Perryﾽs loving rivalry and mischievous collusion with his extroverted younger brother Mick (a day at a nearby beach in "Undertow," first intimations of adolescent sexuality and premature death in "Blue Boy"). Other tales relate Perryﾽs efforts to earn a better-late-than-never high-school diploma, while abetting his buddy Stoshﾽs harebrained scheme to grow and sell "Orchids" (in Chicago, yet); live by himself, become a writer, and plumb the mysteries of womanhood ("Lunch at the Loyola Arms"); and, in a graceful concluding story-coda ("Je Reviens"), pursue a vision of beauty thatﾽs as elusive and deceptive as are most of his other dreams. Uncle Lefty reappears, during his hallucinatory final days, in "A Minor Mood." And Mick, grown into a professional actor and compulsive vagrant, revisits the old neighborhood where his "ever-fomenting theories that life was essentially about playing roles" were formed, in "Quﾽ Quieres." Good as these tales are, theyﾽre dwarfed by the aforementioned "Blue Boy," in which the embryonic writer in Perry responds to early emotional and intellectual challenges; and bythe superb novella "Breasts," a tightly plotted little nightmare depicting the fateful collisions of a mob hit man preoccupied with encountered and remembered images of old girlfriends, a stoical Little Village entrepreneur, and a cross-dressing retired pro wrestler working as a store security cop. Dybek has become his generationﾽs Nelson Algren. Thatﾽs no small achievement.
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