Moral tales full of love and irony written by a master.
A sweeping posthumous collection wrestles with faith, irony, and the redemptive nature of love.
In this compilation of new and previously published stories, L’Heureux (The Medici Boy, 2014, etc.) explores the beauty, pain, and grotesque humor of life in the world of an “ironic God.” In “Witness,” a statistician, professionally trained to measure the relationship between the hypothetical and the real, struggles to rationalize her terrifying new affliction: stigmata, which have appeared on her wrists. In “The Anatomy of Desire,” a soldier, skinned alive during a war and finding himself “desperate to possess and be possessed” by another human being, cuts the skin off his lover and wears it as his own only to realize, terribly, after the act is consummated, that “there can be no possession, there is only desire.” In “Communion,” which takes place during the years of the Vatican II Council, a change-minded young Jesuit finds himself assigned to a stodgy conservative parish where, to his surprise, he is forced to reckon with his deepest loyalties. The sheer creative range of this collection is impressive. It’s no surprise that L’Heureux, who was himself a Jesuit priest for 17 years, can render so convincingly the moral and emotional quandaries faced by aspiring priests, drunken priests, idealistic priests, adulterous priests, doubting priests, dead priests, priests who (like L’Heureux) would be poets, and priests who (also like L’Heureux) are abandoning or have abandoned the priesthood—but what’s wonderful is that he doesn’t stop there: In his relentless drive to capture the ironies and follies and tragedies of life, L’Heureux gives us abused housewives, bullied children, spoiled children, a ritualistically dancing pope, and dozens of characters who, contorted by their feelings or by the world, stumble—accidentally, briefly, and sometimes unconsciously—into versions (or inversions) of epiphany. It is typical of L’Heureux’s dark wit that his single most enlightened character may be the eponymous narrator of “The Torturer's Assistant.” “The work [of torture] is bad,” the assistant admits, “but I do what I can. I give comfort, I give love,” and then at night (“even torturers' assistants have a life outside the workplace”), he tucks his kids into bed: “I touch their small bodies gently, gently, because I know what can be done to them. No, mine is not a life I would have chosen in every respect, but whose is?”
Moral tales full of love and irony written by a master.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9982675-7-9
Page Count: 446
Publisher: A Public Space Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was 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.Pub 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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