Unusual and charming stories that successfully revive a nearly forgotten form of storytelling. One hopes we will hear more...
Echoes of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholom Aleichem and S.Y. Agnon sound throughout this high-concept collection’s engaging stories.
Keats (The Pathology of Lies, 1999) frames the tales with a “Foreword” in which scholar Jay Katz summarizes the Talmudic concept of the Lamedh-Vov: those 36 righteous individuals upon whose continued existence the survival of humanity depends. He then offers 12 of their stories, gathered from as many villages. Later an “Afterword” announces Katz’s mysterious disappearance, but hints that the remaining 24 stories may be likewise “discovered.” The righteous encountered in these stories are humble souls burdened with responsibilities that prove to have broad universal applications. Examples include a naïve fisherman (“Alef the Idiot,” who rather too closely recalls Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”), gifted with an ability to love that transforms even his superior, shrewish wife into a wiser being; a failed circus performer (“Heyh the Clown”) whose ingenuous talent to amuse warms the heart and awakens the love of a melancholy monarch; and a simple bricklayer (“Yod-Alef the Murderer”), chosen by lot to introduce death into a village “once forgotten by the grim reaper.” Though each story is given a convincing folkloric texture, several do not persuasively develop their invariably intriguing premises. There are two brilliant exceptions. “Zayin the Profane” recounts the spiritual odyssey of an apothecary’s daughter who adopts her father’s employment of hopeful placebos, accepts responsibility for the “arrogance” she has thus shared and, in an entirely unexpected way, becomes a renowned healer. “Yod the Inhuman” concerns a widowed scholar who fashions from clay a beautiful and submissive golem. His creation endures severe hardships, achieves prosperity and high position and assumes a more-than-human compassionate humanity.
Unusual and charming stories that successfully revive a nearly forgotten form of storytelling. One hopes we will hear more of these Lamedh-Vov and their all-too-human struggles and triumphs.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7897-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.
Characters from the fringes of society grapple with desire and fury in this collection of short stories.
Early on in “The Pull,” a story about a young swimmer from a war-torn country, the narrator describes her childhood as the “kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” The stories here are exactly that kind: insistently visceral, pushing into, and past, the reader’s comfort zone. Many of the stories center erotic experiences. In “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Bosch works in a modern-day fish processing plant, and he finds boundless pleasure in the arms of a young male co-worker. In “Cusp,” a teenage girl smuggles drugs into a local prison and shares her body with the prisoners as a way of being closer to her incarcerated brother. But if these stories teach us about lust, they also flip to the other side of that same coin: These are narratives full of deep rage. Some of this rage takes place inside of intimate relationships, as in “A Woman Signifying,” in which the protagonist deliberately burns her face against a radiator to create a “symbol” of her anger at her lover. Sometimes this rage is social, as in “Drive Through,” about an encounter with a panhandler at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Yuknavitch (The Misfit’s Manifesto, 2017, etc.) keeps readers’ heads pressed against what is hardest to see, and this doesn’t always land. Some of the rage can feel self-righteous; some of the desire pushes deep into taboo and veers toward unpalatable. But where there are risks, there are rewards, and these howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity.
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53487-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
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