A rich haul from a well of talent.
Gathered from six earlier collections, spanning more than three decades, 28 stories from the redoubtable English writer.
A youngish mother on a faraway beach. Staring into the water, a stranger with a familiar back. It’s Heneker! Ten years before, in London, Hetty had been his art student and mistress. Now she’s happily married and Heneker is a famous painter. Together they explore a painful paradox, leavened with humor: They’re soul mates but incompatible ("Hetty Sleeping"). Nancy and Clancy are soul mates, too, but there’s no humor attending these childhood sweethearts, for their future is darkened by heartbreak ("The Boy who Turned into a Bike"). Gardam’s stories range widely. She’s as good with the very old ("Old Filth," a postscript to her same-titled novel) as the very young ("Swan"). The upper classes, observed with a beady eye, come off unattractively: mean-spirited, oblivious to suffering ("The Tribute" and "Miss Mistletoe"). Gardam doesn't fare as well with the deeply depressed: "Rode by all with Pride" and "Damage" are uncharacteristically labored. She writes ghost stories with flair ("A Spot of Gothic," "Soul Mates") but is less successful with fantasy ("The Green Man," "The Zoo at Christmas"). One exception is her delightfully mischievous sequel to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic, in which the Little Mermaid’s littlest sister decides to check out the prince for herself. Her verdict? “Men aren’t worth it” ("The Pangs of Love"). In somewhat different territory there’s "Grace," about a man with a diamond under his skin; it’s a tall tale that’s markedly less tall by the end. The most attention-getting story is "The Sidmouth Letters": A hustling American academic is hot to buy correspondence which may provide a peek into Jane Austen’s private life, but a relative of the woman who owns the letters beats him to the punch. What happens next will thrill some Janeites and appall others.
A rich haul from a well of talent.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-199-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
IN THE NEWS
A lackluster debut collection by San Franciscan Chin. The sights of Chinatown come alive, though, in many of the stories here, as do memories of a China left behind, as a consistently female point-of-view (Chin's narrators, like the author herself, work in film production) explores the various styles of assimilation adopted by immigrants and survivors of the Revolution. In ``It's Possible,'' a young woman on her way to a film shoot in Hong Kong finds her plane diverted to Taiwan by a typhoon. There, she's unexpectedly united with a revered uncle whom she's never met before. The uncle, an exile from the Communist mainland, shows his niece every attention, touring her around in his chauffeured car. Later, when he's moved on to a new life in a California condo, she visits him again—and then, not much later, encounters him once more at his funeral. Uncle's rather speedy demise is caused by cancer, though whether physical or spiritual in cause remains uncertain. In a similarly bittersweet tale (``Beltway''), the narrator's father, after his retirement to the suburbs, attempts to navigate the highway circling Washington, D.C., finally succeeding in backtracking to the restaurant he once owned. The title piece, perhaps the best here, shares the musings of a young woman who feels caught between indulging in tradition (she's a compulsive shopper in Chinatown markets) and selling out to the fast-paced money game of her worldly brother. Chin's themes are compelling, but her pace and language are less so—slow, unmelodious, more akin to script direction than to storytelling. Still, in page-long vignettes before each tale, this first-timer displays her true potential, evoking scenes in a sensitively visual language.
Pub Date: Dec. 31, 1997
ISBN: 0-87286-331-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
Noted Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright Brown (A Time to Keep, 1987, etc.) celebrates the dark season of the year in the Orkney Islands with 18 always luminous if sometimes lifeless stories. Suffused with old Norse and Christian beliefs, the tales are all set in the northern islands once ruled by the Vikings. Many characters, like the stubborn farmer in ``The Paraffin Lamp,'' who uses the electric light only when he needs to fill his old lamp, still observe the traditional rituals, especially those of the Yule season, that ease the passing of winter. Inured to hardship and frugality, the islanders must contend with weather that is always changing (``one day is wind and flung spindrift, the next is loveliness beyond compare''). And this protean weather is sometimes center stage, as storms and blizzards dramatically take lives: In ``A Boy's Calendar'' and ``Dancey,'' two babies, the sole survivors of ships wrecked by terrible storms, are adopted by childless women and become islanders. In other pieces, the weather is simply part of the fabric of daily life: Men and women race to harvest crops before the rain comes, or to harvest fish before a blizzard strikes. Three notables are ``Lieutenant Bligh and Two Midshipmen,'' ``The Woodcarver,'' and ``A Boy's Calendar,'' in which, respectively, Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, visits the islands and signs on two local men; an imaginative husband, who finds refuge from his acerbic wife in drink and carving, becomes an unwilling cultural icon; and a young boy describes the round of work and celebration in a typical year. Stories such as ``St. Christopher'' and ``The Road to Emmaus'' give the saint's life and the Crucifixion a local setting, while ``A Crusader's Christmas'' recalls the Viking era. Cumulatively, an affectionate but muted portrait of a far place where both heart and spirit are strong, though the days are often short and bitter.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-7195-5435-7
Page Count: 246
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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