Persistently engrossing tales even at their grimmest.
Characters experience loss and death and suffer isolation and insomnia in this bleak collection of flash fiction and short stories.
Readers should get a sense of the author’s subversion of genre with the opening story, “The City That Bleeds”: it’s a mere three sentences. Most of the tales are of the literary variety and tend to focus on emotion over plot. In “North Vermont and Lexington,” for example, a man’s post-college life begins on a plane bound for LA, where he meets fellow history major Andrea. Their mutual dreams of California may be diminished by the realization that, upon reaching their destination, anxiousness and hopelessness will remain. Other stories are equally fatalistic: a man’s serious (unspecified) illness may be too much for the woman he loves (“It Rained”), while an unfamiliar passer-by upsets the delicate balance of the idyllic neighborhood of “In Strides.” Hefty doses of somberness, however, aren’t off-putting. There’s a rhythm to LaValley’s (Despumation, 2016, etc.) book, starting with its structure: two microshorts, a short story, repeat. Likewise, recurring settings or predicaments link the tales literally and metaphorically. Cold winters chill characters in the same way as a disinterested lover (“Winter in Season”); others take long, sometimes-aimless drives alone, perfectly suited to an insomniac loner (“Sleeper’s Compass”). LaValley’s prose is uncompromising but lyrical: a character sees honesty in dilapidated homes, the outside “not hidden in a fake smile behind whitened teeth.” But it’s not all gloom. The author, for one, toys with expectations: the preachy, titular “Travelin Man” predicts an unusual doomsday event; and it’s difficult not to ruminate on the mysterious but miraculous tonic in “The Secrets of Dr. Sortelli.” There are also instances of buoyancy. At first glance, “Sand Bucket” is dire, a father’s apparent eulogy for his son Chris. But the story of a boy incessantly carrying and conversing with a bucketful of sand, like an imaginary friend, has a positive message of being oneself despite what others think.
Persistently engrossing tales even at their grimmest.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944044-39-8
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Sinister Grin Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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