Eleven stories that possess restraint and edge: a powerful combination.
Elegantly unsettling fiction by Flannery O’Connor Award winner Ochsner (The Necessary Grace to Fall, 2002), who charts some strange goings-on within emigrant communities.
There’s a touch of the darkly magical in stories like “Articles of Faith.” Set on the Finnish-Karelian border, it shows three miscarried children coming to haunt the awkward, ten-year-old union of Russian Irina and Finnish Evin. The desire for a child haunts another couple’s relationship in “A Blessing.” Siberian expatriates Vera and Nikolai, now living in western Oregon, adopt a dog in the hopes it will teach them about caring for the children they plan to have. But Vera is suspicious of the unusual-looking Shura, who reminds her of the forsaken wilds of Siberia. After a windfall of riches suddenly arrives in their lives and she becomes pregnant, Vera insists on getting rid of the dog, whose pale eyes reflect a landscape “she’d spent her whole life trying to get away from.” Another aspect of Russia shadows the Czech street-worker who narrates “Signs and Markings.” He ponders his nation’s sad history of occupations (most recently by the Soviet Union) as he tells of his love for a politically correct nurse who already has a child and doesn’t want another. When she finally leaves him, he must surrender the notion that happiness is about procreation and embrace the unremarkable life within his reach. In the chilling “A Darkness Held,” sadistic Sister Clement has been pushed by her students down a metal staircase outside the school where she has taught for ages. Recovering alcoholic Imogene McCrary, at 38 still bearing psychic wounds the nun inflicted on her as a schoolgirl, agrees reluctantly to teach the class in her former teacher’s absence. Imogene’s young charges react to the bad news with a verbal shrug: “Is this going to be on the test? Because . . . we always talk about essential mysteries on Wednesdays.” Ochsner’s keen eye for the macabre is frequently evident here.
Eleven stories that possess restraint and edge: a powerful combination.Pub Date: May 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-56372-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
