Giving Up
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1771660910
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Fiction. In grappling with the line between what happened and what might have happened, Steeves gives voice to the anguish of a generation of people who grew up with great expectations, and are now settling into their own personal failures and compromises: James is obsessed with completing his life's work. Mary is worried about their problems starting a family, and is scared that their future might not turn out as she'd planned. In the span of a few hours on an ordinary night in a non-descript city, two relatively small events will have enormous consequences on James' and Mary's lives, both together and apart. With an unrelenting prose style and pitch-black humour, GIVING UP addresses difficult topics—James's ruinous ambition, and Mary's quiet anguish—in a funny and relatable way. This experimental work will appeal to readers of contemporary European fiction who enjoy fast-paced stories that focus on voice and ideas.
"Few first novels in recent memory are as consistently charming, smart, entertaining and incisive as GIVING UP. Somehow Mike Steeves has written a page- turner about stray cats and trips to the bank, and a story that treads through the banalities of everyday life with such precision to cast each detail, every gesture and object and silence, with great meaning."—Pasha Malla
time of night) just so they can kill it ‘humanely,’ which no doubt is going to cost him a couple hundred dollars. Not only would his night of working be completely shot, but all the excitement and subsequent exhaustion would prevent him from working tomorrow as well. ‘I’ll just go outside and take a quick look,’ he says, ‘just to make sure he’s not laying out there suffering or anything like that.’ He couldn’t help adding that little dig at the end because even though it makes absolutely no
causes pain and distress in my life, and consequently in theirs as well. If I was already a success and had accrued some fame and accolades for accomplishments in my field, then maybe people would wonder about what I was working on. The only reason anybody cares about whether somebody is working or not is if they have already done something great and path-breaking, in which case there is good reason, or at least a reasonable possibility, to think that they may continue to do great work in the
difference between what she wants and what she thinks she wants? For instance, when dinnertime rolls around there’s always a part of her that wants to scrap the home-cooked meal and just pick up some sushi. But whenever she does go through with it she never ends up enjoying it. She wishes she had stuck with the home-cooked meal because – she realizes, only after eating the cold and tasteless fish – that she actually doesn’t like sushi, she just thinks she does. Mary sits at the kitchen table and
she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her.’ ‘No,’ he would say, ‘it’s not like that at all,’ and then he would go off on some weird tangent that wouldn’t change her impression of the situation in the least, except to piss her off for being forced to sit and listen to even more horseshit. But once James has started on one of his explanations, it is impossible to convince him that he is wasting his time, that nothing he says will make a difference and that, if anything, instead of giving
is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,’ her dad used to say. If James is willing to devote himself to working non-stop on some monumental project that most people don’t even bother attempting, let alone actually pull off, then he must have that one percent of inspiration that her dad was so dismissive of, and as long as he was willing to do the perspiration thing then he might even succeed. She had never been with someone who talked so much about some far-off and likely