A fine introduction to the short prose of a modernist master.
Appearing for the first time in English translation, these stories describe the struggle to find happiness and meaning in one’s life.
Gazdanov (The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, 2013) was born in St. Petersburg in 1903; during the Russian Revolution, he fought with the White Army before fleeing to Paris in 1920. There, he worked a series of more or less menial jobs, the longest lasting as a late-night taxi driver. When the Nazis occupied Paris, Gazdanov joined the Resistance. As for his writing, it has long gone overlooked, but a recent revival has begun to shower Gazdanov with the attention he deserves. This latest translation of his work into English collects a number of stories from Gazdanov’s early and late career, edited and arranged by his translator, Karetnyk. The collection is neither comprehensive nor representative, but, taken on its own, it forms a lovely little introduction to Gazdanov’s work. The stories range in date from the early to late 1930s; the last two were written in 1962 and 1963, respectively, just before Gazdanov’s premature death. In “Happiness,” a 14-year-old boy observes his new stepmother with suspicion; in “The Mistake,” a young woman grows bored with her husband’s “callous estimations of people, although they were almost always proved right”—to escape the tyranny of his “monstrous” intellect, she dives into an affair. In Karetnyk’s excellent translation, Gazdanov’s prose appears at the height of elegance. But as these stories reveal, that elegance can belie a certain heavy-handedness in theme and worldview. In “The Beggar,” Gazdanov describes “an old man in rags” who lives in a crate on the outskirts of Paris. No one would guess that he’d once directed one of the city’s wealthiest firms. “When everything he was obliged to do wearied and vexed him…he did retain one desire—freedom.” Gazdanov’s equation of homelessness with freedom may have aged badly, but his critique of power and wealth is more relevant than ever. We’re lucky to have these stories.
A fine introduction to the short prose of a modernist master.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-401-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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