Brief Encounters with the Enemy: Fiction

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

The first short story collection from a writer who calls to mind such luminaries as Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Nathan Englander

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE AND BOOKISH

When The New Yorker published a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2010, it marked the emergence of a startling new voice in fiction. In this astonishing book, Sayrafiezadeh conjures up a nameless American city and its unmoored a call-center employee jealous of the attention lavished on a co-worker newly returned from a foreign war; a history teacher dealing with a classroom of maliciously indifferent students; a grocery store janitor caught up in a romantic relationship with a kleptomaniac customer. These men’s struggles and fleeting triumphs—with women, with cruel bosses, with the morning commute—are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange. Sometimes the effect is hilarious, as when a would-be suitor tries to take his sheltered, religious date on a tunnel of love carnival ride. Other times it’s devastating, as in the unforgettable story that gives the book its A soldier on his last routine patrol on a deserted mountain path finally encounters “the enemy” he’s long sought a glimpse of.
 
Upon giving the author the Whiting Writers’ Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, the judges hailed his writing as “intelligent, funny, utterly unsmug and unpreening.”  These fiercely original stories show their author employing his considerable gifts to offer a lens on our collective dreams and anxieties, casting them in a revelatory new light.

Praise for Brief Encounters with the Enemy
  
“With impressive guile and design, Mr. Sayrafiezadeh uses the arrival and escalation of that war as the through-line connecting each personal drama. . . . These calculated echoes work to unify [his] haunting book in a way that story collections rarely manage.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
 
“In his memoir, Sayrafiezadeh told the remarkable tale of a childhood steeped in doomed dogma. His stories . . . offer something a searing vision of his wayward homeland, delivered not in the clamoring rhetoric of a revolutionary, but in the droll monologues of young men who kill because they lack the moral imagination to do otherwise.”—Steve Almond, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
 
“Sayrafiezadeh’s eight interlinked stories are just as fulfilling as any novel you’re likely to read this summer.”—The Boston Globe

“A tantalizing fiction debut . . . [that] menaces and mesmerizes.”—Elle
 
“The recurring motifs include 99-cent American flags, putting in a word with the boss, idealistic Army recruitment brochures and unseasonable temperatures. Each time they recur they are more potent, and poignant. The collection is readable, and real, and hopefully a harbinger of more fiction to come from Sayrafiezadeh.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Funny and surprising . . . Sayrafiezadeh’s simple style can fool you into thinking that his struggling narrators are plain and unassuming. They are anything but. . . . Each story compels you to read the next, and no character escapes unscathed.”—The Daily Beast


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Iran, American, Adult

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a memoirist, fiction writer and playwright. He is the author of the forthcoming story collection American Estrangement. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and his debut story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize.

His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship.

Saïd lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Karen Mainenti, and serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches creative writing at Columbia University, Hunter College and NYU, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.

Reviews

[Alessia Scurati · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ho dato un voto alto anche per la struttura della raccolta e spiego.
Quello che per tanti è un difetto di questo libro, per me è una delle qualità.
Sembra di leggere molte volte lo stesso racconto. Stesse ambientazioni, stesse situazioni, stesse frasi ripetute, rimesse in bocca da un personaggio all’altro.
In realtà, questa è una raccolta di racconti.
Cioè è pensata come raccolta. Un racconto dopo l’altro.

Si parte con Rex, che viene licenziato per aver rifiutato le avance del capo, mentre fuori sta per iniziare una guerra, ma la guerra passa in secondo piano rispetto allo sciopero selvaggio dei dipendenti dei mezzi pubblici, che mettono in ginocchio la città sotto la neve, costretta a far provviste come se fosse sotto assedio. Il nemico è il capo, o sono i sindacati, o è Rex?
Poi c’è Dean, che deve aiutare l’amico Roberto, immigrato irregolare che vive come un topo sfornando identità false per non farsi beccare dall’Immigrazione. Anche Dean è alle prese con gli autobus che danno un servizio pessimo e con degli amici di colore che finiranno per arruolarsi - la guerra si avvicina e iniziano le prime parate. Il nemico è l’Immigrazione, il caldo, il cinese?
Arriva Ike, che cucina hamburger e li brucia. Vorrebbe un aumento. Non lo ottiene. In realtà quello che gli dà fastidio è essere sempre il pubblico di qualcosa, mentre il tempo passa. Il tempo, la solitudine e il fallimento, in effetti, sono dei bei nemici. Forse arruolarsi sarebbe una soluzione. O cambiare lavoro. O accettare un passaggio dalla collega anoressica.
Quando Nick, che ha un bel lavoro da Walmart inizia a rubare dai camion la merce che dovrebbe mandare in negozio sappiamo che la guerra è appena iniziata (riga 1 del racconto). Nick ha iniziato a rubare dopo che l’amico Chip lo ha portato da Bildman, uno che vende la roba in tempo di guerra a prezzi rincarati, anche le bandierine americane che da qualche racconto appaiono fuori da tutte le case. Chip poi è stato chiamato al fronte, Nick invece ci vuole provare con Zlottie, la figlia di Bildman, talmente ortodossa da indossare sempre abiti neri e sheitel. Nick otterrà un appuntamento con Zlottie, ma si perderà anche Joey Joey, altro amico che ha scelto di arruolarsi. Il nemico è il nemico?
Ce lo dice Luke che è al fronte per l’ultimo giorno di missione. Un giorno in cui sulla collina avrà Un breve incontro con il nemico. È il racconto probabilmente più breve, l’unico che effettivamente si svolge in guerra. È anche il migliore di tutta la raccolta. Segna l’apice, il punto di non ritorno.
Perché poi Jake, il protagonista del racconto successivo, ci dice subito che quando tornò faceva freddo e che faceva parte del primo gruppo che tornava, quelli che venivano accolti da eroi. Solo che la realtà non ti lascia nessun premio, hai vinto un vuoto. Forse era meglio il nemico.
Forse è meglio qualunque altra cosa per Zeke, tutti i giorni le stesse azioni e le stesse chiamate a cui rispondere come addetto al Call Center. Wally, l’amico scemo, in fondo è tornato dalla guerra diverso. Allora anche Zeke partirà, anche se ormai per la sua partenza non ci saranno feste in grande stile: dal fronte arrivano solo bollettini di caduti. Il nemico avanza.
Per poco. Perché arriva la Vittoria finale. La mette a segno Max, col suo braccino deformato che gli permette solo di fare lo sguattero al Walmart. O forse era un centro commerciale. Boh. Però essendo storpio, la guerra non se lo prenderà. Arriverà la sua vittoria personale, mentre i colleghi lasciano uno a uno il supermercato di Montour Heights, incazzati essendosi arruolati in una guerra che forse pensavano non sarebbe arrivata mai, un po’ come tutti i protagonisti di questa raccolta.

Che sì, è una raccolta talmente uniforme che a volte ti confondi i dettagli di uno con l’altro. Lavorava al Walmart o al Kmart il protagonista? Ma poi, cambia? È tutto uno svuotarsi di fabbriche e grandi città che dovrebbero aprirsi al futuro, ma il futuro sembra sempre arrivare torrido o gelato, senza mezze misure a seconda della stagione. Senza pietà, né speranza.
Sono tutti protagonisti sospesi: ce l’hanno fatta, ma non del tutto. Erano quelli bravi a scuola, ma non nella scuola per diventare preside, solo insegnante, per diventare responsabile degli ordini del supermercato, non direttori del personale o proprietari del supermercato.
Ce l’hanno fatta a metà. Stanno meglio di tanti - si dice apertamente nel racconto centrale: in guerra sono quasi tutti immigrati o campagnoli, gente che non aveva alternativa. Ma non stanno mai abbastanza bene nella loro situazione, non stanno bene e basta.
Così, il nemico è come un deus ex machina che deve venire a spezzare qualcosa nella catena del quotidiano, permettere una redenzione o una morte decorosa che metta fine allo stato attuale. Qualunque cosa sia poi il nemico.

A me, è piaciuto e trovo coerente lo svolgimento, con tutte le ripetizioni del caso. Sembra sempre di leggere lo stesso racconto. Quello di una sconfitta. Ci si arriva in modo poco diverso, ma il risultato è sempre lo stesso.
Un passettino alla volta verso la redenzione, uno indietro verso il baratro.
È voluto questo eterno calcare sugli stessi elementi.
Per me, premio alla coerenza, e anche perché qualche racconto resta.

Cartografia ****
Paranoia ***
Appetito ***
Colleghi *****
Un breve incontro con il nemico *****
Incanto *****
Call Center ***
Vittoria ****

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like reading the same story over and over again. Each main character was exactly the same, indistinguishable from story to story. Except for the last one (he had a deformity and a sliver of something good in his life), every character was a passionless working class male, dissatisfied with his lot in life, living in an America at war, and failing at love. I got very bored by the halfway point, and stayed that way.

[Saleha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hard to find. As someone who worked retail for a good portion of my life and reads a lot of literary fiction, I think it was refreshing to read a collection of short stories about people working lower wage/entry level jobs. It's nice to read stories by an author from a middle eastern background that isn't addressing immigration or love and obsession for "back home". The short story "Cartography" spoke to me because people always expect men to fall into one specific category, especially in terms of what we call rape culture but people don't always recognize the men that are affected by it as well. I liked "Brief Encounters With the Enemy" too because it explores the futility of war and how some people see joining the army as way to earn popularity in a country that suppresses nonconformity.

[Roxane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good stories but, like many of the collections I've read lately, too much uniformity. The disaffected male narrators in these stories just blah, don't grab me and they are indistinguishable. There was an opportunity here, particularly in what this book has to say about war and how we respond to war from our quotidian lives, but alas, that opportunity was only half-realized.

[Jody Sperling · Rating 5 out of 5]

warm, Quirky, Fun

Not every story was five stars good, but victory, the closing story, was 10 stars good. I kept expecting it to go like Flannery O’Connor‘s story with a girl who has a wooden leg but it actually ended victoriously, maybe as the title would suggest, for the title character, and I really enjoyed that.

[Mohsenam · Rating 4 out of 5]

یه مجموعه درباره زندگی حاشیه نشین آمریکایی و داستان زندگی تباه شده ی آدم های معمولی.کل کتاب ترس جنگ بود یه جنگ بیهوده و بی اسم که هیچ جای کتاب اسمی ازش برده
نمی شه و می تونه هر جنگی باشه و در این جنگ هر آدم معمولیی می تونه کشته بشه و هیچ چیز تغییر نکنه.
نویسنده کتاب سعید صیرفی زاده دورگه ایرانی_آمریکاییه البته مجموعه داستانش کاملا آمریکاییه و به نظرم تقلیدی از ریموند کارور و دنیس جانسون بودند.

[Tailwinds Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

In W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the narrator embarks on a disturbing process of reflection in which the horrors of a colonial nation, perpetrated far from its borders, are projected back onto the geography of the homeland and its people—a projection that is apprehensible in both spectral and physical traces, subtle and obvious, carved into wood, flesh, and air. The connection between Belgium and the Congo is always there, simmering below the surface, alive in the minor, unbearable aspects of day-to-day life. Even in the 1960s, for instance, Brussels is still tainted, as it were, by the virus of a colonial past:

Indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere. At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year…The hotel by the Bois de la Cambre where I was then lodging for a few days was so crammed with mahogany furniture, all manner of African trophies, and pot plants, some of which were quite enormous among them aspidistras, monsterae and rubber plants reaching almost to the twelve-feet-high ceiling, that even in broad daylight the interior seemed darkened with chocolate-colored gloom.

Similarly, in Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s 2013 collection of grim and gripping short stories, Brief Encounters with the Enemy, we are confronted with the “chocolate-colored gloom” of chronic geopolitical conflict, refracted back onto a long-decayed home front. In counterpoint to Sebald’s works, Sayrafiezadeh’s visions take place in an American dystopia, a parallel universe consisting mainly of an unnamed urban sprawl at the end of decades of decline. A cook in a dead-end job with little hope of advancement becomes fascinated with a newly hired waitress who appears to be anorexic; a low-level manager at Walmart is compelled to steal merchandise in the pursuit of a sexual obsession, bracketed by the texts of former co-worker now serving in the war zone. A congenitally disabled janitor strives for a better life, lashing out against a patronizing society while seeking love. Alienated urban victims of a stagnant economy, immersed in dead-end work, react to their hopeless surroundings with soul-crushing ambivalence drenched in cynicism. Even when a young cartographer finds mildly satisfying work, it’s naturally offset by a hostile office environment and the urban decay that surrounds him.

In many ways, this material is age-old stuff, but with a twist: these depictions of lower-middle-class millennial malaise and hopelessness are set, in classical absurdist tradition, against the looming buildup, execution, and escalation of an ever-ubiquitous war (sound familiar?) in an unnamed foreign land. The distant war—frequently susceptible to fetishized, dubious-sounding events, like the taking of a “peninsula”—weaves itself into and out of the storylines: ever-present in people and places, infused in the atmosphere through varying degrees of omnipresent force.

Because of this creation of a coherent and frightening fictive world, the book’s collection, as a whole, succeeds in being more than the sum of its parts. Many of the stories have stood alone in the past, selected by a veritable “Ivy League” of publications, such as the Paris Review and the New Yorker. Read as a single body of work, the repetition of various tropes, characters, situations and phrases is starkly evident. Everyone works in a cubicle; everyone hates his onerous job; everyone is ultimately part of the machinery of war. In college-level academia, this type of recycling sometimes gets you hauled before the disciplinary committee; in writing, it’s seen as branding consistency, like Jasper Johns painting flags or Pete Doherty singing about being high. With a closer reading, the repetition in Close Encounters is additive and has a suturing effect, bringing together the collection as a cohesive whole.

The aggregation of the stories makes clear that Sayrafiezadeh has accomplished, depending on how you look at it, a feat that is either totally brilliant or too cute by half: using little more than formal conventions, he has made an actual war into a fictional one—and thus has effortlessly converted a boring and faceless urban environment from a realist set piece to a dystopia. The war, of course, is real; yet the very reluctance to name it, or to discuss it in recognizable topical terms within the real-life discourse, pulls it into the realm of a fake event, right up there with the destruction of the Death Star or the Elves departing Middle-Earth. And once we have a major fake event, nothing in the fictive world can be taken for granted. Specifically, it’s gloomily implicit to the reader—even if Sayrafiezadeh never abuses the point—that everything can get even worse than it is in real life. Potentially a lot worse. The war is woven in and out of each of the narratives as an ever-threatening beast of chance, rolling the dice of destiny: it doles out glory, death, or more often a generalized anxiety, subconsciously consumed by individuals and by society writ large. Baudrillard would be proud.
*
The government’s long arms are omnipresent, even if the relevant war zone is halfway around the world. In one story, a loner confronts racial fear, dysfunctional public transportation, and the crushing power of the state while dealing with the troubles of an undocumented friend. More obvious are the recurring stories of the ordinary people-- cubicle dwellers, mailroom boys, and unemployed—who find their lives somehow altered by the distant conflict. Disaffected young men join the military in search of identity and social approval. Back home, as if things weren’t bad enough in dystopia, the weather is always too hot or cold. As several of the characters state, it’s unfortunate that the soldiers have to come home during a spell of unusually cold weather; war is hell.

Close Encounters contains recurring instances of superficial and ubiquitous displays of nationalism, which are invariably accompanied by compulsive and unquestioning support for the prevailing foreign military policy. Micheal Billig, a prominent British social scientist, coined the “banal nationalism” to describe what he called “the everyday representations of the nation which build an imagined sense of national solidarity and belonging amongst humans.” This concept is repeatedly demonstrated by the hapless inhabitants of Sayrafiezadeh’s world, not least as a sub-textual critique of the nature of the American war-society:

"Sitting in the back of the J-23B with the air-conditioning barely working, I stared out the window as we crawled through residential neighborhoods whose houses were all hung with flags. There was no breeze, and the flags hung limply. Some of the homes displayed the MIA and POW flags from bygone wars, and every so often there’d be a sign stuck in a window that said PEACE or NO WAR or something to that effect, but those were few and far between, and for the most part everyone was on the same page."

In another piece, the narrator’s coworker hosts a party before his departure to basic training and then subsequent deployment to the war. The atmosphere is described in bland, devastating detail:

"Joey Joey was on the deck with everyone I hadn’t seen in a long time. Everyone had put on weight. The flag was out and it was waving in the breeze. The breeze felt nice. It was going to be a nice spring. 'If more people made an effort to keep the flag out,” someone said, “we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.' Everyone agreed."

The same protagonist is bombarded by propaganda on public transportation:

"I would recline in my seat with my cup of coffee and stare at the advertisements above my head of the handsome young men in their spotless uniforms, standing on the beach or a mountaintop, smiling at the camera and draping their arms around their buddies’ shoulders as if they were having the time of their lives. 'You too can help,' the advertisements read. 'You too can make a difference.'"

The nationalistic messages that permeate life lie in stark contrast to the onerous day-to-day life depicted throughout Close Encounters. These displays of patriotism go beyond mere cultural representation: they are part and parcel of a statist agenda by which dissent is muted and pressing domestic and local concerns are lost in the noise. The narrators in Close Encounters comment cynically about these nationalistic themes, but at the same time see no reason to cease passively consuming and accepting the government’s conclusions with spineless compliance. After all, that’s what everyone else is doing.

Perhaps relatedly, the collection’s strengths lie in evoking the sentiment of a distant war; on the single occasion when Sayrafiezadeh tries to depict an actual war, it’s awkward. Contrary to what some might say, this is not necessarily because, unlike actual veterans-turned-authors like Phil Klay of Redeployment fame, or the author of Fobbit, David Abrams, Sayrafiezadeh is an elite, latte-sipping New York man of letters who’s never been to war or spoken to anyone who has done such a thankless thing. Nor is it because Sayrafiezadeh lacks the adequate imagination. The fundamentally structural problem, we suspect, is that the war simply is not a part of the universe that Sayrafiezadeh has so cleverly constructed, which consists of the unrelenting impact of war on things that are not war. Or, put another way: in an imaginary (we hope) world where everything revolves around war, war is the Derridan center. Once you actually get there, there isn’t a hell of a lot to say about it. Perhaps we shouldn’t be trying.

Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s work is extremely compelling, well crafted, and compulsively readable. It forces the reader to confront the past 12-plus years of constant war and its effects on society. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald keenly observed the lingering effects of Belgian colonial oppression, which he compared to a cancer continuing to mestatize. Sayrafiezade’s examination of the incessant war drum, and its impact on the spirit of a nation, is not after the fact but real time.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Jerry Delaney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sayrafiezadeh is a good writer but Ive rated him lower because the book felt repetitious.The main characters of each story were hard to distinguish and had the same issues. On the other hand, these issues are important and not often examined- young working class men in war time and how they cope in this economy

[Robin Vigfusson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading over the reviews, I can see Sayrafiezadeh is a writer you either fall in love with or won't look at twice. I, myself, haven't been this excited over a collection of short stories since reading Deborah Eisenberg's. Deeply human, funny, and real, just by reading him, you learn about writing fiction. I can't get enough.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

"شب قبلش روی تخت دراز کشیده بودم و اخباری در مورد اتفاقات بد میپل تری هایتز را تماشا می‌کردم که اخبار با یک گزارش ویژه قطع شد: جنگ شروع شده بود. حمله به صورت زنده پخش می‌شد، کلی نور و انفجار و توده‌های کوچک دود از دوردست. تق ت‌ ت‌ تق. سربازها جای آنکه - همان‌طورکه به ما القا کرده بودند - در شبه‌جزیره پیاده شوند، داشتند از کوه‌ها پایین می‌آمدند.

استراتژی شبه‌جزیره فقط و فقط یک حقۀ استادانه برای فریب دشمن بود. کوه‌ها سه هزار متر ارتفاع داشتند. صدهزار سرباز از یک سمت کوهستان بالا می‌رفتند و از سمت دیگر پایین می‌آمدند. یک هفته طول می‌کشید تا از کوه‌ها عبور کنند. از خودم پرسیدم رسیدن به قله چه حسی دارد؟

تا دیروقت بیدار ماندم و از این کانال به آن کانال رفتم. همۀ کانال‌ها یک فیلم را نشان می‌دادند و تمام متخصصان با هم هم‌نظر بودند: «مقاومت بی‌فایده است.»

گویندۀ اخبار گفت: «خانم‌ها، آقایان، کافیه چشم بر هم بگذارید تا این جنگ رو از دست بدید.»

صبح اتومبیلم روشن نمی‌شد و مجبور شدم پیاده بروم. هوا یخ بود. عین زمستان. خورشید پنهان بود، باد سختی می‌وزید و پرچم‌ها را مثل شلاق تکان می‌داد. مردم با اتومبیل‌هایشان می‌گذشتند و همه با هم بوق می‌زدند."

[Ronald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sinds ik een door hem zelf voorgelezen verhaal hoorde, ben ik echt van de droogkomische stijl van deze schrijver gaan houden. Deze verhalenbundel stelde ook niet teleur. De terugkerende achtergrond van een (verder meestal vaag gehouden) oorlog verbindt de verhalen, evenals de rol van de underdog. Van genoten!

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 Stars. Another collection by Sayrafiezadeh. I really enjoy his stories, even if the characters and plot are somewhat bleak. While these stories are not interrelated, there are thematic similarities, and even a few redundancies that got tiresome by the final story.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seemed like the same story over and over. If the stories were linked or if there was some progression from one to the next, I couldn’t tell what it was.

[john · Rating 2 out of 5]

feels like the same character in various hard scrabble situations. The potential is there for much more. A little unfulfilling IMHO.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - I skimmed stories #5-7 (too much about war) but last story was the best.

[Steve Petherbridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another emerging talented young American author mastering the short-story genre with some aplomb. I've read a couple of mixed reviews, but, believe that the reviewers skipped over the stories or did not finish the collection. I'm pretty cynical about many so called, often modestly self-appointed, "professional reviewers", in particular, when they themselves are authors, or failed authors, and their review involves the work of a young author, probably viewed as a cocky upstart, trying to break into what is often perceived as a snobby and exclusive club!

The war is the backdrop to this collection, whether Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait or a war of the author's imagination. Feeding into this are a number of characterisations of the modern youth of America, mostly working class, some under-achievers, but, mostly directionless, cynical, introspective, maybe too deep thinking about daily life and what it should be offering instead of just living life, perhaps emotionally stunted, lonely and in dead-end occupations, but, with enough self-pride to seek some form of role in society and a degree of recognition from their bosses and the ruling coterie, inadequate self-serving corporate culture and 21st. Western society in general. The unnamed city, at times, seems like a Detroit-like city in decay, but, mostly seems like NYC on the Hudson and its surrounding environs.

I found the writing intelligent, especially, in the way Said takes a different tack in the subtle linking of each story to the next. There is an unusual consistency in this, expressed in the slightly different themes, characterisation of mostly youth within each tale and the similar backgrounds. Some critics have voiced this as a negative. We all beg to differ. To each his own. Said Sayrafiezadeh is here to stay as an artist and his carrier trajectory will be good to follow.

My bottom line was fulfilled: This reader enjoyed this book, and isn't that what literature,as a personal art, is all about?

You'll get bang for your buck.... Euro..... Yen..... Etc!
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Professional review: The Boston Globe 13/08/2013

"The title story, “Brief Encounters with the Enemy” (Sayrafiezadeh’s only actual “war” story), recounts a man’s final days in deployment. It’s a simple tale about soldiers building a bridge to get into enemy-occupied territory and the danger they are determined to avoid. But Sayrafiezadeh tells his modern war story with carefully placed despair and plenty of humor, like when planes fly overhead and the narrator, Luke, along with the rest of his platoon, jumps up and down, waving “as if we were on a desert island, hoping the pilots would give a signal.” The signal never comes as the platoon finds out they’ve been waving at drones all along. On his last day, Luke, alone on post, comes face to face with the enemy, an unarmed man. With his rifle on target, Luke arrives at a crossroads — to act or not to act — what he finds is that neither choice resembles heroism of any kind.

But most of the battle in Sayrafiezadeh’s carefully constructed collection is fought by his cast of “addressees” in restaurant kitchens, grim office spaces, Walmarts, and supermarkets. The enemy, mostly middle management despots, comes at you with reprimands and demotions, not guns or bombs. The fear of getting caught dead in some erroneous act is forever present in these narrators’ lives. And by some miraculous act of self-will, when faced with the enemy, they prevail."
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The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/boo...
"...... His stories, despite their meandering plots and feckless heroes, offer something more: a searing vision of his wayward homeland, delivered not in the clamoring rhetoric of a revolutionary, but in the droll monologues of young men who kill because they lack the moral imagination to do otherwise....."
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Washington Independent Review Of Books - http://www.washingtonindependentrevie...
"...... Sayrafiezadeh’s genius is not only in the way he almost painfully keeps our attention on the powers at play in these peoples’ lives, but in his sentences themselves. His deceptively simple prose has a grip that gently pulls but never slackens. The words and images pour in and the reader is pulled in, on and through these stories effortlessly, stories that seem to get better with each read....."

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

From The Millions:

I recently found myself compelled to revisit Tim O’Brien’s 'The Things They Carried' for lots of reasons, not the least of which was reading Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s remarkable new collection of war stories, 'Brief Encounters with the Enemy.' I wanted some context for the experience. In fact, after reading 'Brief Encounters…,' I asked several friends and colleagues if they were asked to suggest a work of war literature, what would it be? The responses were what you’d expect: 'The Naked and the Dead,' 'Catch-22,' some recent examples, like 'The Yellow Birds,' or 'Tree of Smoke,' but overwhelmingly the book suggested was O’Brien’s. It was the first book I’d thought of, too, and so I dug around for my copy.

The first thing that struck me was the epigraph, taken from John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary:

"This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest."

What struck me was how this epigraph could just as well work for Sayrafiezadeh’s book, for very different but no less relevant reasons...

More here: http://www.themillions.com/2013/08/ov...

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

For most of the book, I found the references to the war (primarily in the stories not about soldiers) heavy handed, distracting and not quite true feeling, but in the latter half I began to wonder if, perhaps, the author was making the point that the war should feel this present in our lives--something we mark time and our lives against--but that many of us don't even pay much attention to it (especially at this point) and that's a problem. Maybe I'm speaking for myself too much here and maybe it's because I was young when the war in Iraq started, but I never felt it in the looming way these characters do, except maybe for the beginning. The author sort of uses the war to trap his characters and readers--in endless cycles of fraught decisions and interactions that echo from story to story in a series of déjà vu moments that quite honestly got boring--but again maybe that's the point. In high pressure situations, we do all seem to echo each other, to utter platitudes, and that case the author is being quite true to life. Having said all that, I found this collection hard to relate to at times and a bit of a chore to read, except for certain stories.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up liking this quite a bit. It needs to be read all together—the stories are not so much linked as forming a kind of wallpaper, a zeitgeist of an unnamed 21st-century mid-American town and an unnamed 21st-century war, from the viewpoint of a series of mid-level-achieving young white men. They have vaguely antagonistic relationships with other guys, vaguely aspirational relationships with women, not much in the way of ambition. I realize that doesn't make them sound particularly attractive as subjects, but that's pretty much the point—they're both real and allegorical at the same time.

The stories themselves are a bit myth-like, in the way certain male writers at the beginning of the last century would write about the war in stories that were close to parables, but not quite. The key here being that Sayrafiezadeh has good control over both his writing and his myth-making, and the collection as a whole added up to something interesting. I definitely want to go back and read his memoir now.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unvarnished stare at urban white male reality in the United States; as interesting for the way the stories build the larger picture as it is brutally realistic, if not cynical.

These short stories link, in a way, as they are all set in the same unnamed city in the same unnamed country. The country is engaged in a long running war with the enemy and our city hems in our protagonists much like a prison. Each narrator is a typical white guy--not too aware, not very empathetic, overly concerned with their own selfish thoughts and desires, tending to view women as objects, and mostly pathetic. The interchangeable nature of each is intended, I believe.

Reading this was like a slow walk through the dreary city he describes, in the company of people that I don't like and wouldn't want to know. Still, as it builds, and as the stories are looked at as part of a whole, one glimpses the horizon, the sun going down on a place you are happy to be leaving.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

With an unspecified war as the backdrop, these stories of disaffected men show the anxiety and quiet despair of those without opportunity or prospects. The cities and towns they live in are indistinguishable from each other. It's the land of Walmart and big box stores. The why and what of the war with its seemingly perpetual nature, its vague progress and endless back and forth of increasing slaughter in both sides, seems a perfect reflection of the lack of direction and utter sense of frustration of the characters. The characters in fact come to be indistinguishable from each other, one bleeding into another. Not much happens for anyone here. And that seems pretty much the point of life in the post 911 America of these stories. The apparent sameness of the collection is what adds up to produce this view of late Capitalist America.

[Melanie Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://dakimel.blogspot.com/2013/08/2...

I reviewed new release Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezedah (The Dial Press, 2013) for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, so I don't want to repeat myself here. But I'm not steering you wrong when I tell you that this captures a very universal modern America via some every-men whose stories are told with captivating and forthright prose. I didn't cry, but I did laugh, and it did become a part of me. And I love this Edward Hopper-looking cover image (is that a Hopper?) - the outside looking in thing, quite perfect for this collection.

[Anne Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly, the stories here lope somewhat ineffectively around similar towns, similar characters, and similar sets of experiences, all within a few miles or social classes or days of each other. But the device was sharp in clarifying the few true moments of distinction, which ranged from particular instances of pain to particular instances of pleasure. Clever use of a too-easy trope is quite a feat; I was surprised to find the work provided the satisfaction of a novel—moreover, a novel about people I would never feel compelled to read about.

[Torben Henning, sf magazin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An der Sehnsuchts-Front
Den offiziellen Feind gibt es zwar, ganz weit weg in einem namenlosen Krieg. Doch die alltäglichen Gräben zuhause interessieren den US-Amerikaner Saïd Sayrafiezadeh mehr, wenn er acht junge Männer seine Konzept-Stories erzählen lässt.
>>> Besprechung ...
>>> Weitere Bücher Juli ...

[S · Rating 1 out of 5]

After each story in this book, I just had the thought "what was that all about?" After I finished the book, I had the same thought.
I wanted to like the book. The writing was very readable, but everything else lacked.
On the stories that did sort of have a story to them, it was predictable and easily seen through. On the rest, the story was just there and wasn't much of a story at all.
While perhaps that was the point, to have a collection of stories that didn't amount to much, it is not a book that I'll read again or recommend to just about anyone.

[Garlan ✌ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked a few of the stories in this collection, but overall, I was less than impressed with this effort. All the main characters seem to be disappointed with their lot in life. The main theme throughout the book was "the war" somewhere overseas; it showed up in practically every story, and involved someone other than the protagonist. Almost ALL of the stories felt like the same tale, just being told by someone else and at a different time chronologically. The best story IMO was the last one, "Victory". Overall just a somewhat meh read. 2 1/2 to 3 stars.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of these stories take place on the home front and they describe the banality of life while others do the fighting and dying. It's about 20 or 30 something guys trying to make a buck and living their lives of quiet desperation and pondering the what if's on life's journey. Well written but the story set in the war zone(title story) doesn't ring true and lacks the authentic feel of other war fiction.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I hadn't read it coming off a flawless Tom Perrotta collection, I might have enjoyed this one more. The characters are good, the writing is good, there's so much potential here but somehow it just never quite clicked for me. It gets better as it goes along and the way the stories fit together is really interesting but it never stopped feeling like maybe something was missing.

[Dan McKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting short stories with a recurring theme. Some of the stories have similar elements, making them even more connected even though they have different characters and different settings. I especially enjoyed the last story.