A welcome (if, alas, posthumous) introduction to a sui generis writer.
The first collection in English from the acclaimed Argentine short story writer (1936-2018) who possessed a well-trained eye for life’s idiosyncrasies.
Uhart’s stories often turn on the simplest of everyday settings: baking a cake at home, a trip to a hair salon, a day at an elementary school, a homeowners’ association meeting. Yet the delivery is just a touch off-center, as if her prose were microdosed: The narrator of “At the Hair Salon” imagines the woman washing her hair “rations out the assault like a cat” and figures the pedicurist “was destined for heroic deeds, like driving a tank in the steppe”; the homeowners’ meeting escalates from complaints about mail delivery to climate change. The offbeat observations are fitting for characters who tend to see the absurdity of existence: “Human beings are radically alone,” says one character; “the world was just one big prison,” thinks another. Sometimes Uhart's stories take a fablelike form, as in “The Wandering Dutchman,” about a foreigner’s bemused travels through the Argentine countryside (“the whole world was a concert of cows, doves, and frogs”), or “Mister Ludo,” about a man who hikes his family from town to town with six children in a line behind him, as if they were ducklings. But the stories are unified by Uhart’s interest in families, especially women’s roles within them. The opening “Guiding the Ivy” follows the narrator, who is going about her day while fearing becoming a woman whose “life was in a perpetual state of disaster”; in “The Light of a New Day,” an elderly woman fears for the neglect of her neighbor, who’s broken her hip. These stories rarely adhere to conventional plots, but as mood pieces they’re effective glimpses into the peculiarities of Uhart's characters, who crave order but usually concede that the world's default mode is disarray.
A welcome (if, alas, posthumous) introduction to a sui generis writer.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939810-34-2
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
None
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Brightwas from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned. But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
None NonePub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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