Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy

Tamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 1969, and he received a Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia. He has published more than 50 short stories, one of which earned him the O. Henry Prize in 2004. He was recipient of the inaugural Fulbright Research Chair in Creative Writing at New York University in 2009. He currently teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario.
Siege 13, a collection of 13 short stories inspired by the ways the siege of Budapest by the Russians in December 1944 impacted the lives of the Hungarian people, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2012. Part personal essay, part exploration of collective memory and identity maintenance, and part alternate world construction, these stories are above all else case studies of "the passing of trauma from one generation to the next" (p. 183).
There is no question that Dobozy is a master storyteller, and his characterizations are magnificent. My issue with this book is that it rapidly becomes too much of a good thing. Reading one or two of these stories would suffice, both in terms of satisfying and educating the reader and with respect to demonstrating the author's mastery. No need to obsess and saturate. I got bored; not by the writing, but by the inevitable sameness of these stories.
I enjoy reading short stories, and in reading this book I came to two realizations. First, I like my short stories to be short. Once they reach 3000 words, they are forced to move beyond singular events or circumstances and thereby cry out either to be divided into separate stories or to be expanded into a novel. Dobozy had enough material here to create a marvelous extended character study in the vein of some of the greatest late nineteenth and early twentieth century epic fiction. Second, I like short story collections to be comprised of works by multiple authors or, if from a single author, to be poly-thematic. Variety is the key, at least for me.
I would have had a much more positive response to these siege stories if I had encountered one as a standalone entry in a literary magazine, or as part of a collection of Canadian short fiction. However, to give the author his due, I have been sufficiently impressed by his writing that I will seek out other examples of his work.