Orientation: And Other Stories Review

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Orientation: And Other Stories Review"This book has been a long time coming," Daniel Orozco observes in the Acknowledgments page at the end of "Orientation and Other Stories," his terrific collection of nine short stories. The book assembles all of the pieces Orozco has published thus far in literary magazines (both print and online), starting with the title story which he conceived nearly 20 years ago.

Recently, Orozco was interviewed by the local newspaper in the town of Moscow, Idaho, where he teaches fiction writing at the University of Idaho. Describing his painstakingly slow path in composition, he revealed he might spend a week writing a paragraph and a month writing a page. He said this was "a way that makes me feel comfortable about moving on."
It's no surprise, then, to find every one of the nine stories in "Orientation and Other Stories" to be of consistently high quality. This consistency does not come from Orozco chaining himself to one comfortable formula or style. No, he manages to pull something different and original out of the hat at each performance.
Thematic links do appear among the stories. Although Orozco can be satirical (especially in several of the stories that take place in office settings) and flat out hilarious (as in the farcical mutual seduction of two cops in "Officers Weep"), his overriding interest is in deadly serious matters: what it means to be alive ("this feeling that you're part of a world with other people in it, and that you matter because somebody else seems to think you do'); why human connections are so difficult ("you get where you are by yourself"); how living our modern, pretend lives (building imaginary connections) dooms us. Some of these stories will make you shiver in self-recognition.
If you've previously read something by this author, you probably don't need any persuading. But if not, and you want to get a taste of Orozco's writing, the "Click to Look Inside!" book feature here on Amazon will give you access to the first eight pages of "Orientation." A complete version of the story is available elsewhere online (search the three words, Orozco Orientation nomrad; or go to Google Books and search for Orozco Orientation). Want more? The fourth story in the collection, "I Run Every Day," can be read for free at All-Story, the online literary magazine supported by the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (search the two words, Orozco Zoetrope). That story of a lost man will introduce you to a signature skill Orozco has mastered as a writer, even in the small compass of these short stories: how to slow down or speed up the reader's sense of time, in the service of the narrative. This is especially felt in "Somoza's Dream" (a fictional look at the life in exile of the Nicaraguan dictator, in which the author "stops time" at the moment of his gruesome assassination) and also in "Only Connect" (in which a woman harbors an act of moral cowardice for decades).
Two final notes:

1. If you choose to buy the physical book, you'll find it's rudely made -- essentially a tight, glue-bound paperback encased in stiff cardboard covers. So if you own and use an e-reader, I recommend passing over the hardcover in favor of the Kindle version. There's something about these stories -- their intensity and brevity (about 20 pages each) -- that makes the collection well suited to the e-reader format.

2. There's news that Orozco is under contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to complete a novel he started back in 2005 while living in a small town in West Texas. No word yet on the subject or release date. In an interview on WNYC Radio in April, Orozco laughed and said it would appear "in a couple of years" (you can listen to the 15-minute audio at wnyc [dot] org).
The pieces in "Orientation and Other Stories" are Orozco's initial attempts at a psychological and moral accounting of the kind of lives we live today, and I for one look forward to reading his next, longer-form report.Orientation: And Other Stories Overview

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