Essential, deeply satisfying fiction from one of the least known of the 20th-century’s greatest writers.
An important collection of 17 stories and (brief) novellas, all written between 1916 and 1940 by the Austrian writer whose superb novels (including The Silent Prophet and The Radetzky March) rank among the finest rediscovered fiction of recent decades.
Roth (1894–1939), a Jew born in Galicia, spent much of his brief life in exile, from the rise of Nazism and from his own ironist’s awareness of rigidly ordered old “worlds” collapsing (such as that of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy). Accordingly, his stories concentrate on ambitions unfulfilled and loyalties betrayed, as in the limpid “Barbara”(about a loving woman who means nothing to the men in her life, including the son for whom she sacrifices herself), and “April” (which might have been written by a clinically depressed Turgenev), about a young man on the make who quite casually moves on after his dalliance with a girl who’s too fragile to live. Roth’s genius for brisk characterizations and urgent empathetic voice effortlessly solicit our identification with such wounded and searching characters as the elderly nobleman (of “The Bust of the Emperor”) who continues to perform dutiful acts of charity even after a ruthlessly efficient (Polish) “republic” renders his commitment to noblesse oblige obsolete, and the eponymous protagonist of the Flaubertian “Stationmaster Fallmerayer,” whose romantic obsession with a Russian countess injured in a train wreck slowly, surely detaches him from all his responsibilities and relationships: it’s a compact tragedy of passion concentrated into a harsh, unforgettable 20 pages. Best of all is Roth’s last completed novella “The Leviathan,” about a coral merchant engrossed in a sustaining fantasy suggested by the curious exotic life forms that provide his livelihood, and eventually tempt him to ruin. It all turns on a masterly metaphor for the fragility of a life “that had not been linked to that of any other human being in this world.”
Essential, deeply satisfying fiction from one of the least known of the 20th-century’s greatest writers.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04320-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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