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Before the End, After the Beginning Kindle Edition

by Dagoberto Gilb (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
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Ten “stark, realistic” short stories from the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author ‘told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose” (The Boston Globe).
 
Dagoberto Gilb wrote most of the stories in Before the End, After the Beginning while he recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2009. The result is a powerful and triumphant volume that tackles common themes of identity, mortality, and the physical limitations which arose during his own illness.
 
Taking readers throughout the American West and Southwest, from Los Angeles and Albuquerque to El Paso and Austin, these ten stories cover territory close to Gilb’s heart—a mother and son’s relationship in Southern California in the story ‘Uncle Rock’ or a man looking to shed his chaotic past in ‘The Last Time I Saw Junior’—while describing the American experience in his raw, inimitable style.
 
With this new collection, Gilb offers what may be his most extraordinary achievement to date with “an authenticity that’s unimpeachable” (San Antonio Express News).
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  1. Print length
    209 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Grove Press
  5. Publication date
    November 1, 2011
  6. File size
    2029 KB
  7. Page Flip
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  8. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[Readers] luxuriate in prose that is as sudden as it is meditative . . . [Before the End, After the Beginning] places Gilb’s talent for rendering the mundane into myth on full display.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Stark, realistic, and told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose . . . Gilb portrays his characters simply and powerfully, without apology; even his unnamed characters represent the plight of not only every working-class Mexicano but Everyman.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Demonstrates that the author has more power than ever in addressing the conditions and contradictions of being split across cultures, and reminds us that every American, native or immigrant, is the product of a society that must learn to share or risk losing its founding graces.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“The heroes in these ten sharp stories are mostly Mexican-American men who weather plenty of prejudice . . . Gilb gets excellent mileage from simple elements. Though the men in these stories have common concerns, each feels distinct and alive.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“[Gilb] is in fine form . . . He’s simply telling good stories: of men who are both Mexican and American, who are cultured and uncouth, who look at wealth from the outside and, occasionally, from within.” —Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Dagoberto Gilb's previous books are The Flowers, Gritos, Woodcuts of Women, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, and The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines, most recently Harper's, The New Yorker, and Callaloo, and is reprinted widely. Gilb is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award. He makes his home in Austin.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005VSIX32
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 1, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2029 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 209 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 13 ratings

About the author

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Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb

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Dagoberto Gilb was born and raised in Los Angeles and spent as many years in El Paso. He now lives in Austin. Gilb's books have won the PEN/Hemingway Award and have been finalists for the PEN Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award. He edited Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, the canonical volume of Texas Mexican literature, which won the Southwest Book Award for nonfiction. Anthologized widely, recipient of awards including a Guggenheim and Whiting, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines, such as Harper's, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review. Gilb spent most of his adult years as a construction worker and a journeyman, high-rise carpenter with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Writer-in-residence at the University of Houston-Victoria, he is also the executive director of CentroVictoria, a center for Mexican American Literature and Culture.

Customer reviews

3.7 out of 5 stars
3.7 out of 5
13 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

A. Sigmon
5.0 out of 5 stars Luminous stories that make you think
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2012
Verified Purchase
Dagoberto Gilb has written a book of luminous stories that will make you laugh, make you cry, and above all, make you think. I adored this book.
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Atriportwo
2.0 out of 5 stars so must not have liked it.
Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2014
Verified Purchase
Not for me. Another book group selection. Don't remember hating it, but it is not at all memorable. Couldn't tell you the first thing about it, so must not have liked it.
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Robert Taylor Brewer
4.0 out of 5 stars Cultural Contra
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2011
Literature, it is said, unites us while politics divides. Makes sense. Literature aspires toward universal themes - anybody can have courage, anyone can make mistakes and atone. In Dagoberto Gilb's new set of short stories, Before The End, After The Beginning, anyone can have a stroke.

In the first story of the collection, "please, thank you" the author gives us a narrow minded anti-hero Mr. Sanchez who, in addition to his illness, is drowning in bitterness and self pity, mostly over percieved slights by the hospital staff, and we begin to wonder if the politics of victimhood will overwhelm this spare intense story in which even the language is handicapped: sentences do not start with capital letters, indents are missing and personal pronouns are not capitalized in order to make the language conform to the main character's physical infirmity. It's a marvelous way of making form follow function. When Estrella, a janitor at the hospital, describes a shouting match she had at a local Walmart, where she was derided for speaking Spanish, we see another side of Sanchez as he consoles, and finally focuses on something other than his own discomfort. Our awareness that we are in the hands of a major literary talent increases accordingly.

Men may narrate the stories in this collection but women are the main characters, mostly because of their physical beauty. In "Willows Village", for example, Guillermo has aspirations as a car salesman and stays with his beautiful Aunt Maggy while job hunting. Billy, as he himself likes to be called, undergoes a moral dilemna when he confronts the source of bounty at Aunt Maggy's house. We may not approve morally of his choice, but it is Billy's decision and Billy's life, and his decision defines his character. We also learn something about Gilb from this story. He lets his characters lead the life they choose.

In "Uncle Rock", the hero Erick has a mother who is, once again, drop dead georgeous. The men in the story are pigs. Except one, Rocco, a down to earth guy we really like and respect. The more money the men make the more piglike they become. Which is contra to North American culture because with higher salaries, audiences assume a sauve, deboniar and cultured demeanor accruing to men. Not Gilb. The more money men make, the more piglike. The baseball players? The highest paid people in the story? The Phillies? The biggest pigs of all. Real cabrons. Which makes Gilb a subversive writer. And who is going to argue with him? It costs $500 to take your family to a baseball game today. Why so? To pay $25 million to a shortstop who hits .215. Gilb is right. Pigs.

"Cheap" is not a hot story. I could not find the story line despite ample trying, and unlike the language elsewhere, here the prose was clunky, cumbersome, and lacked a coherent flow. What I do in cases like this is to read the end of the story first. Endings in literary fiction are very important because a good author will always strive to leave you with a satisfying conclusion. It is where they put their individual stamp. But even this technique failed to make sense of the piece. In horseracing, there are races like this - on a nine race card, you may have one or two races that leave you completely frustrated. Perhaps the author is borrowing from horseracing and throwing in a clunker. From that perspective, it worked. The story is a clunker.

With the next story in the collection, "Blessing" we are back on track. The language has a georgeous flow as though Gilb knew he was experimenting in "Cheap" and so to make it up to us for suffering, he gives us his best writing in "Blessing". OK, that works. There are potholes even in the best roads. And don't expect to like the main character in "Blessing" He doesn't like himself, and even admits at one point that he is a scurrilous individual. Major league. But this is self awareness and this character is what we call in literature "redemptive". He can be saved. And he is saved, turning away from entrapment.

The most riveting story in the collection is The Last Time I Saw Junior. This Junior, he is beyond redemption and he cons our narrator into taking a ride with him. Because this narrator doesn't take a stand early on, he has to take a stand later, and you know what they say about late stands. They are hard to pull off because they can go in any direction, and you are not sure about the outcome, especially the way Gilb does it, with language so gritty this story could have been written on the back of sandpaper.

From the last entry in the book, Hacia Teotitlán, one gets the feeling this author wanted to keep this story to himself, that he kind of resents readers, especially gringo readers, from entering his private domain. But gringos have been into Latino culture for years and years. We knew about Luis Aparicio in 1958, and before that we knew about Mike Garcia of the Cleveland Indians and Chico Carrasquel of the White Sox. Then we read La Casa de Bernarda Alba in college and ate pinto beans and tomato sauce doing it. And everybody likes Ozzie Guillen. So really, who's kidding who here? Put the work out there and let people observe, comment, learn and enjoy.
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Texas
4.0 out of 5 stars Deserves a conversation
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2011
I first discovered Dagoberto Gilb's work while taking an undergrad Chicano/a literature course at Texas State University and immediately fell in love it, so I was upset to learn that he'd had a stroke in 2009. Although Gilb permanently lost some vision in both eyes, he recovered enough use of one hand to return to writing about six months after his stroke. Before the End, After the Beginning is a collection of ten short stories. A couple of the stories in the book have appeared in other places-I read "Uncle Rock" over a year ago in The New Yorker-but most of this book is comprised of new material. Though not much has changed in terms of his style-Gilb is a gifted storyteller whose protagonists are usually male-this collection does seem a lot more introspective compared to his other works that I've read.

If the elephant in the room is his stroke, Gilb acknowledges it head on in the first short story, "please, thank you". The main character, Mr. Sanchez, has suffered a stroke. Once a strong man, Mr. Sanchez is knocked down by his health. The reader sees him through the early days of disorientation and follows along as he makes small victories in his recovery over the next few months. The story is at turns humorous and touching. It is also typed by Mr. Sanchez, who only has limited movement in one hand; as such, there are no capital letters in the story because Mr. Sanchez can't reach the shift key. It's a beautiful story, and one of my favorites.

Another favorite was "Uncle Rock," about a young boy and his single mother. No matter who his mother dates, Erick refuses to warm up to them. It's no different when she begins dating Roque; Erick can see that Roque adores his mother, but no matter how much Roque tries to engage with Erick over, Erick remains indifferent. Knowing that Erick loves baseball, Roque takes them to see a game at Dodgers stadium. Still, Erick tries to look nonchalant. But then something happens at the game, and Erick can keep his composure no more. The end left me smiling.

The final story, "Hacia Teotitlán," is another one that stayed with me. As young children, the narrator and his siblings visited Coyoacán, Mexico on vacation; as adults, they always talked about going back but never did. Now an old man at the end of his life, his brother and sister dead, Ramiro returns to Mexico. He spends his days reflecting on life, walking around town and talking to local vendors. It's a quiet story, largely plotless, but one that I found myself drifting off to reflect on more than the other stories.

Whether the characters in these stories are exploring politics or racism, the bounds of friendship or the roots of one's culture, all of them are experiencing a profound period of transition in their lives. There is a distinctly Southwestern feel to the stories, and though not all of them are set along the U.S.-Mexico border, the concept of navigating borders-be they physical or figurative-presents a recurring theme. The situations in many of these stories are not easy, and some of the protagonists are downright self-contradictory, but Gilb has written them with compassion and grace. This is a collection that deserves conversation.
7 people found this helpful
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Shrewsie Shrew
4.0 out of 5 stars Gilb captures Texas and the Southwest from a male perspective
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2011
This was my first time reading Gilb, and I really enjoyed the 10 short stories in the book. He captures Texas and the Southwest well. I can't comment on whether he captures the Latino experience in Texas, but he certainly does portray a lot of what I know about it. I particularly related to the first story, also the most personal in the book after Gilb's 2009 stroke, "please, thank you" written from the point of view of a stroke patient in the hospital. The patient goes through confusion, impatience with the staff, and during the story his thought patterns change and improve as he recovers. It really took me back to the fluorescent lights and confusion of being in the hospital. I kept thinking that each story would end with some tragic event, but Gilb is more subtle than that, like in "The Last Time I Saw Junior", about the changes in life and a feeling of belonging or lack thereof. They leave you asking questions and contemplating the characters. My only complaint is that his female characters are two-dimensional; they are either sexy young things or grandmothers (or sometimes, disturbingly, a combination-- as in Aunt Maggy in "Willows Village"). I thought that the ladies were not very relatable; the stories focused more on men's feelings about them-- sexy, sisterly, grandmotherly. Gilb's fiction is complex and deep, but definitely comes from a macho place.
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