As much fun as its predecessors: a simple adventure, good pacing, a light touch, and a genuine feel for the period.
Turtletaub (The Gryphon’s Skull, 2002, etc.) continues the adventures of Menedemos and Sostratos, the ancient Greeks who here journey into the unknown reaches of Phoenicia on a business trip that, as usual, turns out to involve more than buying and selling.
Menedemos and Sostratos, as earlier readers will recall, are cousins from the island of Rhodes (sons of the wealthy merchant brothers Philodemos and Lysistratos) who serve as advance men for the family business, skippering their ship Aphrodite into the farthest-flung ports to peddle and acquire the rarest goods they can find for the best markets. Menedemos, the sailor, is as daring and aggressive as his scholarly cousin Sostratos cool and shrewd. So how is it, this time around, that they agreed to take a cargo of olive oil to Phoenicia (a bit like bringing bananas to Costa Rica)? As a favor to an in-law, basically—but they don’t expect the trip to be a wash. Sostratos has heard that a region of Phoenicia deep inland (Ioudaia) produces the best balsam in the world and can be sold for a fortune in the perfume markets of Greece. Everyone warns the two that the Ioudaians are tough customers, but, as Sostratos sees it, a merchant’s job is to turn aggravation into silver. He also, not coincidentally, wants very badly to observe the customs of these remote and little-known people. He sets off while Menedemos remains in port, where he tries to find a customer for his useless cargoes in those spare moments when he’s not seducing other men’s wives. Though as wily as Odysseus when on their home turf, Menedemos and Sostratos now begin to fear that the barbarians may get the better of them.
As much fun as its predecessors: a simple adventure, good pacing, a light touch, and a genuine feel for the period.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30037-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
Originally published in German in 1962 and touted more recently as a feminist's Robinson Crusoe, this somber classic from prize-winner Haushofer chronicles the experiences of a (nameless) woman cut off from her familiar city ways in a remote hunting lodge, after Armageddon has snuffed out all life in the world beyond. With the woman's diary of activities during the first two years of isolation as foundation, the story assumes the shape and flavor of a journal. Saved from instant death by a transparent, apparently indestructible wall enclosing a substantial area of forest and alpine meadow, the woman finds relief from her isolation in companionship offered by a dog, a cat, kittens, and a cow and her calf, making them into a family that she cares for faithfully and frets over incessantly with each season's new challenges. Crops of potatoes, beans, and hay are harvested in sufficient quantity to keep all alive, with deer providing occasional meat for the table, but the satisfaction of having survived long winters and a halcyon summer is undone by a second sudden and equally devastating catastrophe, which triggers the need in her to tell her story. Although heavy with the repetition of daily chores, the account is also intensely introspective, probing as deeply into the psyche of the woman as it does into her world, which circumstances have placed in a new light. Subtly surreal, by turns claustrophobic and exhilarating, fixated with almost religious fervor on banal detail, this is a disturbing yet rewarding tale in which survival and femininity are strikingly merged. Not for macho readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-939416-53-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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