Roger Leslie Paige – Bookbound and other stories

Short stories, quite like the genre. Extra benefit, should one not like one specific story, soon there is another chance. In this particular case 18 stories.

The first one immediately impressed me. Great build up, interesting characters, plenty of opportunities. Then suddenly it’s over. Something happened, and that was that. It had all the potential for a longer story, possibly even a novel, yet the author decided this was enough.

The second one was a bit predictable, yet so nice (the word is very appropriate) it didn’t matter. It was followed by two stories that go completely beyond me, yet a Tom Waits-mention in story five gives the author a bit extra credit. The book needs it.

Spreoty is a great story, that could have been written by Frank Heinen or Erik Brouwer (two Dutch authors of short stories I rate high; hence a compliment) about a female jockey posing as male.

Then follow quite a few games with chess as main topic or the most important context. And funnily enough, that’s what saves the book. Even though I am not even an amateur at chess, I barely know the rules, I do like to read about it. The game (sport) has a lot of potential for literature. It immediately starts with a great story about a small boy beating ‘the doctor’ and them meeting again decades later.

Another highlight is the story ‘The thirteenth player’ in which a almost forgotten legend not just shows up, but makes a huge impression. Together with ‘Z is for Zugzwang’ (a little chess and a little magic realism) the two chess stories alone make this book worth reading.

I enjoyed reading this collection, yet I feel that there is hardly any common ground apart from the author. Way too many enumerations. The complete (fictional) chess games are only added value for some chess fanatics. Many quotes in French and German might bother several readers who do not read more than English. If I were Roger Leslie, I’d ask someone to help me edit this book, before actually publishing it.

Quote: “For some time the committee thought the letter was a hoax. Who wouldn’t? Since having won the title in 1972 when he beat Boris Spassky in Iceland, Fischer had been a virtual peripatetic recluse.” (p.236) ( )

The style of this collection of short stories doesn’t mesh well with my interests in reading.
The first story—a thriller told from a female perspective—begins joltingly mid-activity inside a posh bar within the slow and easy Distard City. The female character’s tone is rife with analogies, slang jargon, and off-topic quirky dialogue. Somehow this woman comes across as a chauvinist character who uses juvenile boy/girl terms to describe adults within her purview. The author uses more offensive descriptors, referring to a possible lesbian as a ‘lezzy’ and men as ‘fellers’ and ‘studs’. Ugh.
Some women, working for the private eye firm, are described as ‘smarter than they look’ and the detective later remarks about herself: “I can be lippy. A lot of the time I can’t help it.” Oh, please.
A bizarre rant a few pages over refers to BIPOC people in an offensive way which I won’t deign to describe in this review.
The most interesting thing about this first short story is surely the cat. Named Gongzhu (boar in Chinese), he manages to accidentally save the protagonist’s life.

I received a copy of this collection from the publisher and am completely distraught over work like this going to publication. It’s not for me. ( )

I received an Early Reviewer copy of Bookbound and Other Stories by Roger Leslie Paige in exchange for an honest review.

Honestly, I am still not completely sure what I think about this book of short stories. I do feel like I sometimes missed the joke, or the twist, especially since I don't read chess notation. Yet, despite that, I found the book fascinating, often turning to the Internet to fact check. For instance, Chopin did play chess and Duchamp did give up art for that venerated game. Paige is, not surprisingly, a chess player and has published books of his chess games.

The stories were quirky, often rambling affairs written in first person, those narrators never completely trustworthy. Paige quoted diaries, often in French, only sometimes providing the translations. I have basic French but was glad for the Kindle translation tool just to check my understanding. He has also written several volumes of short stories available via Amazon. In those, he describes the stories as "a mixture of the serious, lightly comic and ‘reportage’ type story." That works for this collection as well. I am still thinking about some of the stories, always a mark of good writing. I may explore a few of the other collections.

Bookbound And other stories by Roger LesliePaige confused me. It’s a book of 16 short stories but it’s difficult to tell where one story ends and the next begins. That may be just that it isn’t in final form yet and I was reading an e-book format that isn’t set up to move around in the book easily. Of the 16 stories, I read the five that pulled me in and skimmed the others. The five I read were really good and well-written. They were “Bookbound” about a female private investigator guarding a presidential candidate’s teenage daughter, “Balcon de Fleurs” about a man discovering his father’s past in Paris, “The Empty Fridge” about a janitor at a mill and his quirks, “The Game of Chess” about a man who’d been a child prodigy at chess and “Z is for Zugzwang” about a mystery writer and a mysterious book. The remaining stories ranged all over the place, with quite a few of them about chess. They just didn’t capture my attention although I tried to give each one a fair trial. Roger Paige is obviously a good writer but the selection of stories was very uneven. ( )