Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.
A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you’ve read before.
Wilson (English/Univ. of the South) displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity. One of the more resonant entries, “Grand Stand-In,” concerns a woman who joins a blossoming industry, playing grandmother to fractured families. Other stories sensitively document the emotional trials of adolescence: In “Mortal Kombat,” two teenaged boys do battle with their budding, bewildering sexuality, and in “Go, Fight, Win,” a reluctant young cheerleader muses that “sex seemed like chicken pox, inevitable and scarring.” Hints of Southern Gothicism may be found among these pages. One story, “Birds in the House,” details a bizarre ritualistic contest whose winner will inherit an antebellum estate, while another, “The Shooting Man,” finds a young man named Guster obsessed with that most rural of spectacles, the traveling sideshow. More often, though, the author tells stories that ring true, and that feature innovative plots and the wit of indie comedy. The best of the lot, “Blowing Up on the Spot,” concerns a man, Leonard, who works as a sorter at a Scrabble factory when he’s not coping with his suicidal brother, crushing on the girl who works in the candy shop and, well, worrying about what is, for him, the very real danger of spontaneous combustion.
Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-157902-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
Bergelson (18841952) was a Russian Jewish writer whose hopeful embrace of Communism persuaded him briefly to write according to the dictates of Socialist Realism, and whose subsequent disillusionment stimulated his passionate commitment to the dissemination and survival of Yiddish culture, leading to his arrest and murder in a Stalinist prison camp. His fiction—stark and pessimistic in the extreme—has heretofore appeared only piecemeal, in various story anthologies. The three works collected here, all written early in Bergelson's career, bring a grave and elegiac tone (very nicely translated) and a keen understanding of the psychology of alienation and despair to memorable portrayals of a homely woman's determined pursuit of her right to happiness (``Remnants''), a father and his adult daughters who seem to mourn themselves and one another even as they live (``Impoverished''), and a suicide that produces surprising changes in the lives of those left behind (the novella ``Departing''). Intense and uncompromising fiction from one of the great, neglected Yiddish storytellers.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-8156-2712-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Drab, elitist victimhood dressed up in glittery prose.
A third collection from Somerset Maugham–winner Simpson (Four Bare Legs in a Bed, 1992, etc.): nine bitter stories, many loosely interconnected, about upper-middle-class British women overburdened by family.
In “Golden Apples,” 17-year-old Jade wanders her suburban London neighborhood, scoffing at its bourgeois trappings and imagining how her life will be different She is particularly critical of her mother, a professional woman everyone else praises as “so amazing, what she managed to pack into twenty-four hours.” Then by chance Jade encounters the author’s first of many overwhelmed, overweight, falling-apart, stay-at-home moms whose intelligence is atrophying under the pressure of husbands and children. Listening to the despair of this unnamed woman, whose child has a bean stuck up her nose, Jade begins to appreciate her own mother’s elegant competence. Jade reappears only fleetingly in other tales, as babysitter or daughter, but her energy and blind hopefulness haunt the remaining pages, in which adult women lack anything resembling hope. Some can’t talk to each other, despite their shared experiences, because they have lost the ability to speak for themselves (“Café Society”); others, like Dorrie in the title piece, are so entirely dedicated to their families that they have no space left for self. The men are nonentities at best, and Simpson’s depiction of the children is even more disturbing. Considering their offsprings’ spoiled, whining, devouring natures, it’s no wonder Simpson’s mothers are miserable. (When Dorrie sees “the gleam in his eyes and teeth,” her son’s hungry, animal quality is apparent.) The several tales about working women offer no joy rides either. Jade’s highly efficient mother, Nicola, muses on her life with forced self-satisfaction during a long business dinner honoring “Burns and the Bankers,” while, in “Wurstigkeit,” two women sneak away from their professional lives for a secret, decadent shopping spree. But real happiness eludes them all.
Drab, elitist victimhood dressed up in glittery prose.Pub Date: June 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41109-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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