Those who will find Gilb’s stories slight might ponder this: So what are Cézanne’s apples except daubs that float over the...
Ten spare stories about Mexican Americans in El Paso and Santa Fe.
Gilb’s debut collection, The Magic of Blood (1993), won the Pen/Hemingway Award and was a Pen/Faulkner finalist. Here, his magic moments sometimes display sentences of crushed jewels: “Mrs. Hargraves’s tongue was blood red with deep blue veins on its underside.” In that story, “Hueco,” a young man passing himself off as a carpenter rents a cheap, powder-blue room from Mrs. Hargraves and finds himself sleeping in the mattress depression (hueco) where both Mrs. Hargraves’s mother and grandmother died and where he now makes love to Yvette, whom Mrs. Hargraves calls “that horror” when writing him a snappish letter. In “Maria de Covina,” an 18-year-old department store clerk who’s a flashy dresser and pretends to be 21 finds himself dazed by the breasts and perfumes of his fellow clerks while striving to be faithful to his 16-year-old lover; but then the bright surfaces of the store lure him into making easy thefts that undo him. Perhaps the most spellbinding tale is “Mayela One Day in 1989,” which drifts off into stunningly surcharged nightside surrealism in darkest El Paso (“Dark, so dark that the stars glare like streetlights, and the moon hovers as in wilderness. Through this sludge of night we cross dead, metal ribs of train tracks . . .”). The longest and most amusing piece, “Bottoms,” tells of a hetero young Mexican book reviewer at a public swimming pool as he struggles to read a homosexual novel despite multilayered distractions, lost trains of thought, and deep confusion: “It all reads the same, and anywhere I read it’s as though I’d read it before and not at all.”
Those who will find Gilb’s stories slight might ponder this: So what are Cézanne’s apples except daubs that float over the canvas? But marvelous, marvelous daubs.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1679-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some—but also with the knowledge that...
Love among the ruins—and with Ethan Frome, tennis, martinis, and Starbucks on the set as well.
As often in his fiction, Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013, etc.) immerses readers in a milieu that is achingly sensuous—and sensual, too—with not much regard for pedestrian ideas of what constitutes whatever normal behavior is supposed to be. Even so, his characters are often beset by moral agony over the choices they make in following their hearts. In the case of Paul, a definitively sensitive man of fleetingly passing years, just about everything is a Proustian madeleine: Greek and Latin, the glint of Mediterranean sunlight, “the cooling scent of coffee from the roasting mill that seemed to welcome me no differently now than when I ran errands with my mother.” Then there is music, so elegantly alluded to in the title, and the memories of men and women who have fallen in his path and bed and sometimes imparted wisdom along the way; as an early object of desire says, knowingly, “It could be life or it could be a strip of wood that refuses to bend as it should.” Paul bends easily in his pursuits, broadly catholic in his affinities. Aciman’s portrait of him and his world is thoughtful, sympathetic, and never prurient; Paul is very much, as a friend of his remarks, like Sicily in having many identities and “all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.” He is not at all reprehensible, yet he is not blameless, either; Paul’s quest for self-awareness, to say nothing of his quest for pleasure, carries plenty of collateral damage. Most of it he bears himself, though; as he says, with knowing resignation, “I think everyone is wounded in their sex…I can’t think of one person who isn’t.”
An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some—but also with the knowledge that such regret “is easy enough to live down.”Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14843-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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