Stein’s dilemma is emblematic of Keret’s method: The stories read like fragments of reality—personal, political and even...
Forty-six stories in a range of tones and styles, from slapstick to surrealism.
The stories vary in length between one and eight pages, and Keret (stories: The Nimrod Flipout, 2006, etc.) is able to squeeze a lot between the covers. Many of his characters are not overburdened by introspective tendencies. There’s Nahum, for example, whose childhood “seemed like a cavity in somebody else’s tooth—unhealthy, but no big deal, at least not to him,” and Mindy, who in answer to her husband’s query (why does she buy “crap” like superglue?) snaps back, “ ‘the same reason I married you…to kill time.’ ” Some stories, like “Hat Trick,” focus on the outré, in this case a magician whose climactic trick is the banal one of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. One day, in front of a bored and diminished audience at a child’s birthday party, he succeeds only in pulling out the rabbit’s bloody head, much to the consternation of the magician but to the delight and enthusiasm of the partygoers. He finds that with this new trick he’s much more in demand. “The Summer of ’76” looks at the serene and happy reality of a child oblivious to most of the craziness surrounding him. “Knockoff Venus” has a nameless narrator who confesses to his therapist that he “needed something I could believe in. A great love that would never go away.” His therapist recommends he get a dog. In “Not Human Beings,” a soldier named Stein tries to put together in some coherent way his impressions of what’s happening in Gaza: “He tried to put all the images together into a single, coherent reality, but he couldn’t.”
Stein’s dilemma is emblematic of Keret’s method: The stories read like fragments of reality—personal, political and even metaphysical. It’s hard to know how to piece them together.Pub Date: April 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-53105-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
A second collection from Kirschenbaum (after Married Life, 1990): l6 stories, some of which have previously appeared in magazines like Outerbridge and the Indiana Review, that self- consciously chronicle female city-sophisticates' quests for identity and meaning. With one exception, the pieces here, though often bearing significant titles—``History on a Personal Note,'' ``The Zen of Driving,'' ``Get Married, Get Divorced, Find Jesus''—and equally weighty intentions, are shallow reflections of PC orthodoxy. The title story, as it moves from 1984 Germany—East and West—to rural Virginia, chronicles the failed romance of Lorraine, an American, with Peter, a German travel operative, and offers glib opinions on US politics and European history. Lorraine reappears when, back home in Virginia, she marries Doc, a stereotypical redneck whose crudeness serves (in ``Halfway to Farmville'' and ``Rural Delivery'') to illustrate the finer sensibilities of the urban narrator and the horrors of poor Lorraine's sojourn in the benighted South. ``Get Married, Get Divorced, Find Jesus'' describes the quirky relationship between Harold, who seems to know everything, and Nadia, who ``prefers to think things are as they are not''; and ``The Zen of Driving'' tells of a woman, unfaithful to her husband, who fantasizes about different cars while learning to drive in the city. ``White Houses'' reflects on a suburban childhood during the Kennedy years as a way of making a commentary on racial and religious prejudice. The best story here, meanwhile, is ``Courtship,'' which movingly describes the narrator's parents' ``wondrous love'' for each other while ruefully acknowledging ``that for me, such a love would never be enough.'' The kind of narrowly focused writing that declares sophistication but, in its way, is as parochial as any.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-88064-169-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
From this gifted Irish writer (living now in Glasgow), nine crystalline, quiet stories—the voice here is never raised even slightly—showing that the simple stuff of plain life can make for the finest fiction. MacLaverty (The Great Profundo, 1988, etc.) punctuates his pieces with tiny interchapters about the daily life—apparently—of a writer that, while sometimes charming (a broken fountain pen, an incident at customs), may as often strike readers as distractingly trivial. The stories themselves, though, are another matter, whether or not informed by the troubled politics of Ireland, as in the title story (a nonpolitical man is kidnapped—and then disgustedly let go—by IRA members), or ``A Silent Retreat'' (a Catholic schoolboy hears unmitigated hatred in the talk of an uneducated prison guard). MacLaverty once or twice abandons his best powers, as in ``A Foreign Dignitary''—a thinly futuristic parable of totalitarianism—but he more than regains them in calmly observed and simply engineered Chekhovian stories of domestic life and sorrow. A husband of 25 years is grotesquely—and immaturely- -insensitive to his wife's desires (far deeper than his) in ``At the Beach,'' and a divorced mother comes to see the extent of her own loss (and angry jealousy) through her 13-year-old daughter's gift at chess (``The Grandmaster''). Best of all, though, are ``Compensations,'' about a boy's father dying—in one simple description of a lonely Irish living room, MacLaverty reaches as high as fiction can reach—and ``Just Visiting,'' about a man tending to the slow death of a friend. MacLaverty misses a few notes now and then. But on the whole he composes a quietly moving symphony showing that the sounds of the contemplative—and perfect—short story can still be brought to life and ring in sad, lovely, perfect tones.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03758-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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