A mixed batch from a superior craftsman.
Life is a minefield for the unsuspecting protagonists of nine wide-ranging tales.
Take the Moura family, in the title story, set in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship. Working-class folk, the Mouras have a small summer cottage on the estate of the Carvalhos, wealthy vineyard owners. After Carvalho prompts him to express his disgust for the tyrant, Moura gets a visit from the secret police. Fortunately, the regime is crumbling, and Gardiner describes a curious trajectory: The flight of the Carvalhos, the occupation of the mansion by the Mouras, and their eviction by their own daughter, married in secret to the Carvalho heir. Another trap is sprung in “Leaving Port McHair.” In 1967, in Washington, that “city of deception and stagecraft,” Paul, one of a small riverbank community of left-wing activists, is set up by an informer, while across the river in Virginia, retired widower Walter Paige is fighting a trumped-up lawsuit alleging child abuse 30 years before (“The Shape of the Past”). Young English schoolboy Tony Hoskins, crossing the dangerous Atlantic in 1941 to reach safe harbor in Canada (“The Voyage Out”), has to deal with his cabinmate’s attempts at sodomy; when his persecutor disappears overboard, Tony has a long struggle to affirm his innocence. Old Father Anthonie, a village priest in the Pyrenees seeking to protect his flock, is tripped up by the snares of the computer age (“The Doll House”). In his third collection (after The Incubator Ballroom, 1991), novelist Gardiner moves easily among the decades and the continents, though unfortunately there’s excess overlap between “Fugitive Color” (an art school in Provence) and “The Head of Farnham Hall” (a Pennsylvania girls’ school). Both involve anonymous death threats, a problem student, and an institutional reputation hanging in the balance. Gardiner is a busy writer, his controlling sensibility always in evidence, sometimes stifling his characters’ autonomy. Whether it’s Portuguese adversaries or radicals on the Potomac, they know their places in the well-choreographed dance.
A mixed batch from a superior craftsman.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-233-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
In Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid (the Flo and Rose stories), Canadian short-story writer Munro drew unusual strength and sharpness from the vivid particulars of growing-up with—and growing out from—a stifling yet intense Canadian background. Here, though a few of these eleven new stories reach back to that core material effectively, the focus is looser, the specifics are less arresting, and Munro's alter-egos have moved on to a real yet not-always-compelling dilemma: over 40, long-divorced, children grown, these women waver "on the edge of caring and not caring"—about men, love, sex. In "Dulse," an editor/poet vacations alone, away from a troubled affair—and is confronted by sensuality on the one hand and the "lovely, durable shelter" of celibate retreat on the other. Two other stories feature the hurt and compromise involved in "casual" affairs—casual for the man, perhaps, less so for the woman. And in "Labor Day Dinner," the divorced woman is trying again, but with a sometimes-cruel man ("Your armpits are flabby," he says) whose love must be periodically revived by her displays of (unfeigned) indifference. Still, if these studies of to-care-or-not-to-care uneasiness lack the vigor of earlier Munro (at their weakest they're reminiscent of Alice Adams), a few other pieces are reassuringly full-blooded: "The Turkey Season," about a teenage girl who takes a part-time job as a turkey-gutter and learns some thorny first lessons about unrequited love; the title story, in which a woman's trip to the planetarium illuminates her turmoil (a dying father, a rejecting daughter) with metaphor; wonderful, resonant reminiscences about the contrasting spinsters on both sides of a family. And Munro's versatility is on display in other variations on the caring/not-caring tension—between two aging brothers, between two octogenarians in a nursing-home. Only one story here, in fact, is second-rate ("Accident," an unshapely parable of adultery, guilt, and Fate); Munro's lean, graceful narrative skills are firmly demonstrated throughout. But the special passion and unique territory of her previous collections are only intermittently evident here—making this something of a let-down for Munro admirers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0679732705
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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