The Fun We've Had

I never know what I'm walking into when I pick up a new Seidlinger work. Every book is something different, something new. One thing I can trust at this point, though, is that I'm going to dig it. The patterns of personality that are clung to in context where they have no reason, if they ever did. The things that don't matter and are only relevant in the fact that their irrelevance must be recognized. This book is unsettling in an entirely different way, an unmoored way. Get ready to try to keep it from running through your hands long enough to hold and as if we're having fun.

Seidlinger's prose ebbs and flows like waves, really drawing you in to the floating coffin with these characters, at times soothing you, at times driving you mad, and by the end, certainly making you reflect on the fun you've just had.

It wasn’t as good as I was expecting but the premise was interesting and I picked up more reading through it a second time.

brilliant, as always.

I'm beginning to feel like The Fun We've Had was written specifically for me. Figuratively speaking. Seidlinger is adept at camouflaging a feeling, a doubt, a fear, painting over it with metaphor and as it hides there, it knows you can see it but continues to hide. He has nailed here what happens when you're infected with love for another individual. And there is no 'us' in this novel. There is only 'they', 'he', 'she', that's all it ever really is. Next time despair hits, this book could very well be my shield.I don't remember him ever specifying the girl's connection to the older man as they float in the coffin. Ultimately, I don't think it matters as much as it would in a conventional, linear plot. The two of them are emblematic of a much larger condition: a man who needs to consistently martyr himself in order to feel whole, to prove his devotion, and a young woman who requires distraction from her secrets, as well as sanctity for said secrets. Anyone who's ever been in love, picture you and that special someone floating along in that coffin on an endless body of water. Those sharks circling are everything that endangers and corrupts modern relationships.This is the male ego laid bare, dissected and disseminated with surgical precision. At the same time, the female ego is ever shifting. Two opposite forces pulled together, forced apart, static cling, yin/yang, compulsion and repulsion.Every page contains at least three gems that drive home just how hard people work to remain a mystery to themselves and others. We are forever grasping at straws of ourselves. As Seidlinger points out in the epilogue, entitled 'Our Turn': 'We seek the peaks in hopes of pleasing the fact that we thought we were, for a time, an individual among individuals. Though we may, though we might, the waves are purely that - temporary and fleeting, no matter how high.'Jodorowsky said as much, that people believe they are their experiences forever, but what happened to you a moment ago is like a snapshot while you have already exceeded the lifespan of that single frame.It was so important for Michael to set the two characters in a coffin adrift on the sea, The coffin for obvious reasons and the sea because it neither offered nor allowed any objects or non-sequiturs to muddle their own mediation.It seems unwise, maybe even risky until you realize that Hemingway did the same with old Man and the Sea, and that was with just one character as an island to himself. With this, Seidlinger has rewritten it as The Young Woman, the Old Man and the Sea. I have to thank him for puzzling this story out. Anyone who's ever cared about anyone, be it romantic love or paternal love, or even men who suffer from the dreaded White Knight Syndrome, or women who turn their self hatred into fashionable chic, use this book as your shield.

A creative and unique read, as I have come to expect from Seidlinger. Beautifully written in a sometimes disorienting style of prose, the premise is that a male and female as couple float indefinitely in a coffin in the middle of an endless ocean. Waves and the sharks are present as the voices of history's lovers and reminders of the demise, respectively.We move through all real aspects of a long term relationship, fleshed out with no buffer here to make them easy to swallow: the balance of give and take, guilt and entitlement, the ebb and flow of emotional proximity to each other, the burden we can be on each other, and much more. The egos and/or identities of each are explored in depth, male as the hero, and female as a more complex component, intermittently waiting for him to catch up as he denies the lack of progress. Most of the thoughts and feelings are exchanged non-verbally, as verbal communication between the two relies mainly on the two phrases "I love you." and "Are we having fun?" Throughout all of what is happening, there is no ignoring the beauty and poignancy that lies within the pages. There is a flow to the words that makes it a pleasure to read, all things considered.To wrap it up before I say too much, this story will stick with me for a long time. A well done addition to the catalog from Seidlinger.

I hate to describe a thing as dreamlike, for all its connotations. Forget the connotations and think of the word. Dreamlike, like a dream, what a dream is actually like.Starting Michael J. Seidlinger’s "The Fun We’ve Had" was one of the most disorienting reading experiences of my entire life. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know who these characters are, you’re adrift in a coffin in an endless sea with two people who are themselves and are not, who do not look like what they know themselves to look like and yet they remain, and yet each knows the other to be who they know themselves to be.Is there anything more like a dream, more of a defining element thereof, than that displacement? that bodilessness? that look in a mirror, a puddle, a window, where you see someone else and yourself in them, see a person across from you, both themselves and you and neither? Seidlinger puts you in another consciousness, puts you in one consciousness putting itself in the consciousness of the other, puts you in the narrator’s seat, the writer’s.Dreams are marked by a disconnect, by the surface and the depths; "The Fun We’ve Had" is a painting of both, with heavy white brushstrokes, neither quite translucent nor opaque, in the blank spaces in between.Seidlinger gives us all the boundless beauty of love, while reality – whatever we might consider reality – is at its most gruesome. Love and life and death and grief and humanity, words in the sky, sharks and ghosts, a shattered moon, love and love and love and love and love."The Fun We’ve Had" is a buoy in an endless ocean. It’s a buoy that you only wish could stay afloat forever.

This story has a brilliant concept behind it, two lovers pedaling a boat on an endless ocean, reflecting on love. It's like a long poet in the form of a novella. For folks who enjoy poetry, this is highly recommended. But if you are looking for a fixed storyline or adventure, look elsewhere!

One of the best books I've read all year.