by Peter Stamm & translated by Michael Hofmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2006
While Stamm doesn't discount the possibility of happiness and comradeship, there is invariably an ounce of joy for every...
Most of the individuals in these austerely written stories by Swiss novelist Stamm (Unformed Landscape, 2005, etc.) lead humdrum but desperate lives.
To read all 20, assembled from two volumes of stories published separately in German, is to visit a literary purgatory where a throng of dispirited characters cling to a comfortless bare rock of prose. His characters, whether Swiss or Costa Rican, visiting New York or working in London, share a world culture of Alec Guinness, Tracy Chapman, Walt Whitman and Star Trek that does nothing to bring them closer together. Many of these stories involve love that fails or a despairing plea for help or solace that goes unanswered. In “Like a Child, Like an Angel,” a wealthy Swiss accountant never responds to a letter from a poor colleague who needs an expensive medicine for his wife. In “The Wall of Fire,” an exploited outcast working for a carnival puts himself at risk to impress a girl to whom he means almost nothing. The narrator of “What We Can Do” rebuffs the embarrassed advances of a sad office mate to whom their mutual colleagues have given the cruel gift of a vibrator. “Black Ice” is perhaps the bleakest: Larissa, a young mother dying of a resistant strain of tuberculosis tells “everything she had thought in the last few months” to a journalist because no one else—not even her husband—has visited her for months. The misery radiates to the smallest details. Larissa mentions a neighbor with a broken TV “who keeps switching it on anyway and staring at the black screen.” In Stamm’s world, when three young friends laugh and sunbathe on a station platform, they do so only until a train pulls up to unload the corpse of a suppliant who has died on the way to Lourdes.
While Stamm doesn't discount the possibility of happiness and comradeship, there is invariably an ounce of joy for every pound of gloom.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-169-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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by Flannery O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1971
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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