One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive...
Seventeen stories by the Irish-born Canadian author (Slammerkin, 2001, etc.) ransack what Donoghue calls “the flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life” for razor-sharp vignettes of the fates of women in judgmental male-dominated societies.
The volume gets off to a flying start with “The Last Rabbit,” in which a duplicitous “man-midwife” persuades a poor countrywoman to claim she has experienced a miraculous birthing. It’s a tale inspired by a famous Hogarth engraving—as Donoghue explains in the first of the “Note(s)” (acknowledging sources) that follow each story. Next up is the nicely titled “Acts of Union,” about a drunken English soldier serving in Ireland who’s hoodwinked into marrying a wily apothecary’s spinster niece. You’ll think of Boccaccio and Chaucer (as well as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood) as Donoghue ranges among the lives of eminent figures, focusing, for example, on asexual art historian John Ruskin’s ludicrous nuptial night (“Come, gentle Night”); feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft’s failed career as governess (“Words for Things”); and the infuriating Elmer Gantry–like hypocrite, apocalyptic preacher Elspeth “Luckie” Buchan (“Revelations”). Equally telling are stories of the obscure: the smallest surviving baby ever heard of, exhibited as a freak of nature (“A Short Story”); a plucky victim of the barbarous practice of clitoridectomy, undertaken to combat “the disease of self-irritation” (“Cured”); two learned ladies who live in scholarly seclusion on the Norfolk coast, pausing from their mental exertions to rescue drowning sailors (“Salvage”); and, in the remarkable “The Necessity of Burning,” invincibly ignorant Margery Starre, an illiterate beldame to turns lustily to book-burning during the 14th-century Peasants’ Revolt against the intellectual tyranny of Cambridge University. These jewel-like stories vibrate with thickly textured detail and vigorous period language. Donoghue’s colorful, confrontational historically based fiction is making something entirely new and captivating out of gender issues.
One of the best books of the year thus far. Like Andrea Barrett, Donoghue has staked a claim to her own distinctive fictional territory.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100937-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
In Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid (the Flo and Rose stories), Canadian short-story writer Munro drew unusual strength and sharpness from the vivid particulars of growing-up with—and growing out from—a stifling yet intense Canadian background. Here, though a few of these eleven new stories reach back to that core material effectively, the focus is looser, the specifics are less arresting, and Munro's alter-egos have moved on to a real yet not-always-compelling dilemma: over 40, long-divorced, children grown, these women waver "on the edge of caring and not caring"—about men, love, sex. In "Dulse," an editor/poet vacations alone, away from a troubled affair—and is confronted by sensuality on the one hand and the "lovely, durable shelter" of celibate retreat on the other. Two other stories feature the hurt and compromise involved in "casual" affairs—casual for the man, perhaps, less so for the woman. And in "Labor Day Dinner," the divorced woman is trying again, but with a sometimes-cruel man ("Your armpits are flabby," he says) whose love must be periodically revived by her displays of (unfeigned) indifference. Still, if these studies of to-care-or-not-to-care uneasiness lack the vigor of earlier Munro (at their weakest they're reminiscent of Alice Adams), a few other pieces are reassuringly full-blooded: "The Turkey Season," about a teenage girl who takes a part-time job as a turkey-gutter and learns some thorny first lessons about unrequited love; the title story, in which a woman's trip to the planetarium illuminates her turmoil (a dying father, a rejecting daughter) with metaphor; wonderful, resonant reminiscences about the contrasting spinsters on both sides of a family. And Munro's versatility is on display in other variations on the caring/not-caring tension—between two aging brothers, between two octogenarians in a nursing-home. Only one story here, in fact, is second-rate ("Accident," an unshapely parable of adultery, guilt, and Fate); Munro's lean, graceful narrative skills are firmly demonstrated throughout. But the special passion and unique territory of her previous collections are only intermittently evident here—making this something of a let-down for Munro admirers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0679732705
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
IN THE NEWS
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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