Still, the best stories are entertainingly inventive, doing more than just transposing contemporary characters onto familiar...
Fairy tales and folklore get clever modern realist rewrites from National Book Award finalist Thompson (The Humanity Project, 2013; The Year We Left Home, 2011, etc.).
Domineering parents, wicked siblings, wolves in sheep’s clothing—Thompson recognizes that one reason centuries-old children’s stories endure is because they’re readily applicable to any era. These eight tales apply the tropes of stories like “Sleeping Beauty” to hardscrabble Midwestern settings, and Thompson doesn’t feel beholden to the familiar plots; she uses them “only as a kind of scaffolding for new stories,” as she writes in the introduction. So the “prince” of “Inamorata” is a little slow thanks to a childhood head injury, while his “Cinderella” left her clear Lucite heels behind after a boozy party. The tendency of fairy tales to feature trapped and imperiled young women is of particular interest to Thompson. The teenage girl in “Candy,” juggling an interest in boys while caring for her ailing grandmother, is just coming to recognize how her sexuality both empowers her and makes her vulnerable, and the ending brilliantly complicates the notion of who’s Little Red Riding Hood and who’s the predatory wolf. “The Curse” and “Your Secret’s Safe With Me” are effective “Rapunzel”-esque tales in which (respectively) an overprotective father and arrogant intellectual foolishly labor to shield women from the outside world. And in the closing “Prince,” the strongest story of the batch, a mentally troubled woman bullied by her sister is redeemed in part by the stray dog of the title. Not every story works: “Faith” is a thin riff on “The Pied Piper,” while “Three,” in which three brothers can’t save their divorced father from the blowsy, shallow would-be stepmom he’s dating, sputters to a close.
Still, the best stories are entertainingly inventive, doing more than just transposing contemporary characters onto familiar tales.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-17058-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
A welcome gathering of work, some not often anthologized, by an unrivaled master of the short story form.
The indefatigable translating team of Pevear and Volokhonsky deliver a first-rate collection of Chekhov’s stories that highlight their “extraordinary variety.”
In his lifetime, Chekhov (1860-1904), physician and writer, was accused of immorality because he wrote of the lives of little people with little problems rather than taking the god’s-eye perspective of a Tolstoy. His reply: “What makes literature art is precisely its depiction of life as it really is.” Pevear and Volokhonsky (Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin, 2016, etc.) select stories—happily, one for each week of the year—that express that devotion to realism, even if sometimes broadly satirically. The first piece, from 1883, depicts the bursting-at-the-seams pride of a young man whose name has appeared in the newspaper, even if it’s not for reasons to be proud of: It seems that he was drunk and “slipped and fell under the horse of the cabby Ivan Drotov,” then was clonked on the head by the axle. He can’t wait to tell the neighbors. Chekhov notes that he’s a “collegiate registrar,” which, Pevear and Volokhonsky helpfully gloss, is at the bottom rung of the czarist civil service. In another story, “Fat and Skinny,” a difference in rank takes on great importance: Old friends meet. One, it turns out, is a “collegiate assessor,” a rung up the ladder, and forced to supplement his meager income by making wooden cigarette cases. “We manage somehow,” he sighs, while his portly friend allows that he’s “already a privy councillor,” third from the top and requiring the use of the term of address “Your Excellency.” Encounters between young and old, rich and poor, country and city people mark these stories, though perhaps the best of them is an odd, longish yarn called “Kashtanka,” about a young dog, “half dachshund and half mutt,” whose master, “drunk as a fish,” loses her, whereupon the dog undergoes a series of adventures worthy of Pinocchio. It’s a marvel of imagination.
A welcome gathering of work, some not often anthologized, by an unrivaled master of the short story form.Pub Date: April 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52081-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
What's most worthy in this hefty, three-part volume of still more Hemingway is that it contains (in its first section) all the stories that appeared together in the 1938 (and now out of print) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. After this, however, the pieces themselves and the grounds for their inclusion become more shaky. The second section includes stories that have been previously published but that haven't appeared in collections—including two segments (from 1934 and 1936) that later found their way into To Have and Have Not (1937) and the "story-within-a-story" that appeared in the recent The garden of Eden. Part three—frequently of more interest for Flemingway-voyeurs than for its self-evident merits—consists of previously unpublished work, including a lengthy outtake ("The Strange Country") from Islands in the Stream (1970), and two poor-to-middling Michigan stories (actually pieces, again, from an unfinished novel). Moments of interest, but luckiest are those who still have their copies of The First Forty-Nine.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1987
ISBN: 0684843323
Page Count: 666
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1987
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BOOK REVIEW
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