CROWNING THE QUEEN OF LOVE: Stories

by Susan Welch ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 1997

An impressive debut collection that aptly demonstrates Welch's skill in composing prosaic yet haunting scenarios of love's dark country. Whether describing a retired prostitute coming home to her straitlaced family, or a woman mourning her domineering mother's death while touring royal tombs in Egypt, Welch employs an ominous, flat tone in her narratives--a tone that lends an unsettling quality to seemingly ordinary situations. Many of the nine stories take place in Minnesota, including the strongest piece, ""The Time, the Place, the Loved One."" The narrator describes her impetuous marriage to the quixotic, creative, and disordered Matthew. Matthew's clinging romanticism, however, moves from the quaint to the absurd, and the narrator eventually concludes that his mental illness is dominating (and destroying) their relationship. The collapse of their love is painful and chilling. A mother-daughter relationship is examined in ""Broken Music."" Here, Victoria escorts her mother Fania on a sort of pilgrimage to Auschwitz. Fania is the only one on the tour who was actually in a concentration camp. (The others are making the journey to honor relatives.) Everyone in the group regards the tattoo on Fania's arm as a badge of suffering; they want to see her as a tragic figure, but tough and funny Fania won't play to the crowd. They keep asking her how she survived. Finally, Fania confesses to a stunned Victoria that she was a Sonderkommando--she took the bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens. In ""The Oracle,"" Tracy, in the last stages of pregnancy, leaves her husband, who beats her, and stops in Reno on her way back home to the Midwest. She ends up betting her future on the unlikely promise of a blackjack dealer. Like many of the other stories, this one displays the author's splendid sense of balance between love's fictions and life's realities. A fine collection, deserving of attention.

Pub Date: April 30, 1997

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 225

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

Categories: FICTION