Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolfe

These were a mix of short-stories he’s recently written along with some classics. This is my first time reading Wolfe and wasn’t too impressed. At the time of this book release he was a professor at Stanford, had won all these awards and was praised for his literary works. I think it was the overall themes of each… they start going somewhere interesting and then die out like a deflated balloon. ‘Her Dog’ had the potential, and then, as in many of his short stories, doesn’t have an end… this I know, but at least take it some place where we feel satisfied – bad or good, or just a general feeling. Victor was left with a dirty face and John, a waif. I guess I just wanted more. His best was ‘Hunters in the Snow’…. 3 friends go out hunting, one of them shoots another and while the injured friends bleeds out in the back of a truck in the cold and snow, the other two stop at a series of bars and restaurants to deliberate their own personal struggles with monogamy and gluttony. A bit clownish, a bit laughable, and spot on with the philosophy inevitably wrapped around most people’s minds – the self-centeredness and the questions that in some cases, take you a lifetime to answer.