It doesn’t always happen, but whenever the commonplace and the sublime pair here, the result is absorbing.
Sly digs at society’s failings alternate with roundhouse swats while beauty and mystery hover nearby, in a wide-ranging collection of 18 stories by acclaimed British novelist Dunmore (The Siege, 2002; etc.).
The title piece, short and sweet, offers a flinty-eyed glimpse into the life of an über-model coming publicly undone, as she ignores the mantras of her personal trainer at a fête in her honor and succumbs to the creamy blandishments of her favorite, long-denied dessert. There’s more heft to “Leonardo, Michelangelo, Superstork,” a futuristic tale of government-controlled pregnancy and neighborhood subversives—in this case, a couple who conceive the old-fashioned way and are forced to flee for their lives after being exposed. Dunmore also slightly warps reality in “Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty,” which shows a parking meter dispensing good advice to a harried woman on her way to an appointment with her ex to argue about his dwindling support of their child. These stories pale, however, next to the normalcy and romantic subtlety of “My Polish Teacher’s Tie,” which involves a modest half-Polish school cafeteria worker and her pen pal, a poet and teacher from Poland who comes to England for a visit. Similarly engrossing are three pieces featuring a character named Ulli, a sort of Everywoman who experiences life on the edge and love in the afternoon spiked with swift, riveting turns. In “The Icon Room,” Ulli’s chance encounter with an unkempt, compelling lover of poetry leads her from a tearoom to another chamber throbbing with the color and intensity of icon paintings displayed floor to ceiling; she’s so unnerved and enraptured that she is more than accepting of what follows.
It doesn’t always happen, but whenever the commonplace and the sublime pair here, the result is absorbing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1733-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
A debut collection from Danticat (the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, 1994) that movingly brings to life the history, hopes, and human experience of Haitians. Separation is the central fact of life for Danticat's characters. The isolated speakers of "Children of the Sea" are lovers, one of whom flees Haiti on a rickety boat while the other remains on the island hiding from terrorizing soldiers. They are doomed never again to be together in the flesh. Yet the story itself — the very act of Danticat's writing (mirrored in the refugee's journal-keeping) — permits their union, grants a space in which their voices mingle in an elegant duet. Where writing can't serve as a weapon against oblivion, there is hope, though this is double-edged. For Guy, the unemployed factory worker in "A Wall of Fire Rising," a hot-air balloon represents an escape from devastating poverty, but the story ends by showing the bitter irony of his wish for flight. Most impressive is the dignity that the author reveals in her characters' spirituality. Omens and superstitions abound, which upper-class Haitians dismiss as "voodoo nonsense that's holding us back." Danticat shows the wisdom and poignancy of these beliefs. The red panties that the mother in "Caroline's Wedding" commands her daughters to wear serve ostensibly to ward off sexual advances from their dead father's spirit. They are also an intimate form of mourning his loss. "When you write," explains the speaker of "Epilogue: Women Like Us," "it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse strands and attempting to bring them unity....Some of the braids are long, others short. Some are thick, others are thin." The remark describes this young Haitian writer's restless style, which is lyrical and elegiac, gothic and simple, sometimes all at once. Consistent, however, is her powerful empathy for her characters. Danticat's fiction is an antidote to headline abstractions, giving readers the gift of narrative through which to experience a people and a country as more than mere news.
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-56947-025-1
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
In a word: magnificent.
Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection.
Each of its eight long tales in the Canadian author’s latest gathering (after Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001, etc.) bears a one-word title, and all together embrace a multiplicity of reactions to the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting, and confronting one’s mortality. Three pieces focus on Juliet Henderson, a student and sometime teacher of classical culture, who waits years (in “Chance”) before rediscovering romantic happiness with the middle-aged man with whom she had shared an unusual experience during a long train journey. In “Soon,” Juliet and her baby daughter Penelope visit Juliet’s aging parents, and she learns how her unconventional life has impacted on theirs. Then, in “Silence,” a much older Juliet comes sorrowfully to terms with the emptiness in her that had forever alienated Penelope, “now living the life of a prosperous, practical matron” in a world far from her mother’s. Generational and familial incompatibility also figure crucially in “Passion,” the story (somewhat initially reminiscent of Forster’s Howards End) of a rural girl’s transformative relationship with her boyfriend’s cultured, “perfect” family—and her realization that their imperfections adumbrate her own compromised future. Further complexities—and borderline believable coincidences and recognitions—make mixed successes of “Trespasses,” in which a young girl’s unease about her impulsive parents is shown to stem from a secret long kept from her, and “Tricks,” an excruciatingly sad account of a lonely girl’s happenstance relationship with the immigrant clockmaker she meets while attending a Shakespeare festival, the promise she tries and helplessly fails to keep, and the damaging misunderstanding that, she ruefully reasons, “Shakespeare should have prepared her.” Then there are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella “Powers,” which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive “reality.”
In a word: magnificent.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4281-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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