A treasured staff writer for The New Yorker from 1949 to the mid-70s, Brennan, who died in 1993, receives fresh, well-earned attention in a collection of her 21 Irish stories, all previously published either in Christmas Eve (1974) or In and Out of Never- Never Land (1969,) together with a frank introduction from her editor William Maxwell. The stories appear in three groups, the first autobiographical, and the second and third concerning two separate families, each of whose quietly desperate circumstances is detailed in a series of overlapping vignettes. For Rose and Hubert Derdon, the state of things surfaces in ``A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances'' when Rose, as always, goes to a Mass commemorating her father's death, now 43 years ago, leaving Hubert, as always resentful at the upset of his morning routine. Later, he wants to make amends, and remembers a blue hyacinth he'd given her years before and how happy she'd been to receive it. The truce established between them when he asks her about it, however, collapses as his habitual criticism of her resumes. In the third group, the Bagots—Delia, Martin, and their two young daughters- -fare only marginally better: Martin sleeps in a separate room and has only minimal communication with his family; Delia keeps an immaculate home but hardly ever leaves it. The loss of their firstborn son three days after his birth was a shock they never recovered from. In the extraordinary title piece, Delia and Martin's wedding is remembered after their deaths by his twin sister, spinster Min, who took their furniture and his wedding ring to her flat the better to indulge her satisfaction at having survived Martin, whom she feels betrayed his family to marry. With an understatement often approaching brilliance, the suppressed emotions and diminished lives echoing here make clear that this voice of the last generation deserves to be heard anew.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-87046-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
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