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REFERRED PAIN

Name: REFERRED PAIN
Author: Lynne Sharon Schwartz
ISBN: 1-58243-301-1

AND OTHER STORIES

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2004

With echoes of Cheever, early Updike, even Shirley Jackson, Schwartz (In the Family Way, 1999, etc.) is master of stories...

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Elegant, elegiac stories about people whose lives—like everyone’s—haven’t worked out quite as planned.

“Referred Pain” is a medical term for when “the place where it hurts is not the source of the trouble,” and the characters here struggle to find out why they ache. In the title story, a Kafkaesque tour de force, the son of Holocaust survivors cracks a tooth on an olive pit and turns his ensuing and labyrinthine dental problems into a test of suffering. In “Hostages to Fortune,” the painful realism of a middle-aged couple’s bickering over their children is oddly heightened by the reader’s growing realization that the children are imaginary. The children in “The Trip to Halawa Valley,” however, are all-too-real causes of distress for a divorced couple who come together briefly at their oldest son’s wedding. The two briefly recapture their old intimacy but with it their shared sense of loss and disappointment. The protagonists of “Sightings of Loretta” and “Francesca” are men who learn how little they know, or are known by, their loving wives. Several stories among the 12 here use the writing process almost as metaphor. “Intrusions” lays out an incident—the attempted robbery of the narrator when she was a young mother—then deconstructs and reconstructs the elements to find its real subject: fear of the choices made in a life. “The Word” not written down is lost forever. And the aging novelist of “By a Dimming Light” hires an assistant at the onset of blindness, and the more he depends on the younger man’s decency, the more paranoid he becomes. Many tales also venture into dreamlike surrealism, as in the parallel world of “The Stone Master,” the fairy-tale abstraction of “Twisted Tales,” and the myth-making of “Deadly Nightshade.”

With echoes of Cheever, early Updike, even Shirley Jackson, Schwartz (In the Family Way, 1999, etc.) is master of stories that reflect an era’s uneasy psyche: sad yet wryly comic, told at a slight remove yet deeply moving.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004

ISBN: 1-58243-301-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTHTELLING
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS IS WHERE WE CAME IN
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO-PART INVENTIONS
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.