I Like Being Killed: Stories - Hardcover

Fischer, Tibor

3.31

631 ratings by Goodreads

9780805066012: I Like Being Killed: Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805066012 ISBN 13: 9780805066012

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2000

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Fiendishly funny and dark, here is a Canterbury Tales for the millennium, a vision of the New Europe where the young and bright live ultra-hip lives of noisy desperation

Tibor Fischer has been called "a Joseph Conrad with jokes" (The Sunday Times, London). Now he earns the title again with a story collection that ranges from the blackest, high-voltage humor to sober and moving pessimism about the sorry condition of humans at the new millennium.

Here are those left behind by the vacuous nineties: a failed software designer who cannot connect with others, a failed artist, a failed cowboy, a failed solicitor-seducer, a bookseller primed for failure as he tries to read every book in the world, and a venomous stand-up comedienne who has fallen from grace. From London to the French Riviera, from Hamburg to Romania, in the new Europe only the ruthless succeed: the weak are cowed by the strong, the rich fleece the poor, and the ugly is bested by the surgically enhanced.

Reveling in the absurdities of his characters' predicament's, Fischer rescues them from a relentlessly dark fate. Laced with exuberant narrative and matchless comic invention, I Like Being Killed reveals the struggle of intelligence to make sense of our twentry-first century world.

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Review:

When it comes to snappy, devastating titles, nobody can beat Tibor Fischer. Calling his new collection I Like Being Killed is enough of a provocation to begin with. But once you've gotten past the title page, you're confronted with seven brilliantly dubbed pieces, from "We Ate the Chef" to "Portrait of the Artist as a Foaming Deathmonger" to the peevish "Then They Say You're Drunk." As all this might suggest, Fischer--best known for Under the Frog and The Collector Collector--is a writer of tremendous dexterity, whose prose surges forward with an irrepressible energy. This fluency tends to push him to the very darkest edges of the black-comic spectrum, and occasionally into the realm of jarring callousness.

Take his opening novella, for example. "We Ate the Chef" starts innocuously enough in Cambridge Circus, but somehow spirals into a Cote d'Azur thriller, climaxing in a particularly ungracious (but utterly appropriate) orgasm. In "Then They Say You're Drunk," Fischer, an adopted South Londoner, explores the quite plausible proposition that Brixton "must have more headcases per square inch than any other place in the world." His portrait of "today's guest nutter" is an alarming bit of urban naturalism:

Walking up to the bus stop, Guy reflected that someone with his trousers around his ankles, trying to eat his shirt, wouldn't normally have troubled him much. It was the size of the shirt eater rather than his activity that was perturbing. Six three and big, big, big; they obviously didn't spare the carbohydrates at the bin. What concerned Guy was that if the shirt eater wanted something to wash down his victuals, and mistook Guy for a can of Tennant's and tugged firmly on his pull tab, Guy couldn't do much about it.

Not too strong in the empathy department, is he? Still, among the casual (and comedic) cruelty there's more than a hint of seriousness. It was Jean-Paul Sartre, another cheery type, who defined hell as other people. But Fischer's narrator in "Ice Tonight in the Hearts of Young Visitors" has other ideas: "I assure you if there is a hell, it will be the most solitary of confinements and cold." --Alan Stewart

About the Author:

Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport, England, in 1959, the son of Hungarian basketball champions. He is a journalist, TV documentarian, and author of three novels, Under the Frog (a Booker Prize finalist), The Thought Gang, and The Collector Collector.

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