A welcome reminder of this still-evolving writer’s steadfast mindfulness and clarity of vision.
Often concerned with themes of Catholic faith in both nonfiction (Joan of Arc, 2000) and fiction (Pearl, 2005), the versatile Gordon demonstrates her stylistic staying power in 41 stories written over several decades.
Twenty-two of them are “new and uncollected”; the rest appeared in Temporary Shelter (1987). Taken as a whole, the array demonstrates Gordon’s increasing narrative sophistication. The earlier collection’s title story, for example, deals in a rather flat, straightforward manner with the themes of ethnicity and heritage that dominate her work—in this case, the shame a Polish maid’s 13-year-old son feels for his mother in the presence of her sophisticated, educated employer. Also in the previous volume, “The Only Son of the Doctor” treats a familiar love affair between an urbane middle-aged journalist and a modest country doctor whose adult son ultimately reveals the fissures in their doomed relationship. Yet Gordon’s preoccupation with methods of storytelling, as evinced early on by her humorous reworking of classic fairy-tale themes in “A Writing Lesson,” morphs in the newer stories into several playfully self-conscious narratives. “I Need to Tell Three Stories and to Speak of Love and Death,” for example, begs the reader to help connect three seemingly unrelated tales that end in mortality and ugliness. Similarly, the narrator of “Vision” questions the kind of information a storyteller leaves in and takes out as she ponders a yarn her mother’s best friend spins on the front porch. The more recent stories also have a more muscular, socially conscious quality. The spare, nearly angry “Conversations in Prosperity” shows two older women relying on their easy friendship to shield them from life’s harsh, sad truths, while “Separation” is a dry-as-bones account of a single mother struggling between her love for her son and her own legacy of neglect and abandonment.
A welcome reminder of this still-evolving writer’s steadfast mindfulness and clarity of vision.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-42316-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
This grouping of stories, most of which were published previously, confirms Indian novelist and short-story writer Narayan (Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories, 1985, etc.) as a writer who views narrative as an infinitely superior form of intelligence to mere reason. Says the Talkative Man, the narrator of a story called ``Judge,'' to his dubious audience: ``You demand an explanation! Do you? You won't get it. I will only quote my friend Falstaff in Shakespeare's play. He was asked to explain how or why of certain episodes. His reply was a No sir. `If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion'!'' Narayan, a Talkative Man himself, writes out of a love of the sound of human voices trying to make sense of the world.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85220-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Once again, Kl°ma (Judge on Trial, 1993, etc.) skillfully explores Prague life under the Communist regime in the trying years before the Velvet Revolution. This time around, Kl°ma offers six stories in which a writer (the author's afterword suggests it is the same writer throughout) finds himself working as everything from a courier to an archaeologist to a surveyor. Sometimes the writer finds pleasure in his new employment: In ``The Engine Driver's Story,'' he dreams of driving a locomotive, despite the fact that his ``non-existent psychoanalyst'' insists that the dream is not about trains but about missed opportunities. Sometimes he finds his new job distasteful: In ``The Smuggler's Story,'' he consoles himself with the fact that ``in the conditions prevailing here, it is rare for someone to be doing what he was trained to do, or what he is suited for'' as he struggles to outwit the police with three bags of contraband books. But the beauty of this particular collection (after all, these themes of conscience, oppression, and expression are par for the course with Kl°ma) lies in the sense of liberty and hope it offers when the writer reaps the unexpected benefits of new experiences. A talentless painter-by-default draws his first true likeness when he must identify a young girl he saw just before she committed suicide; an archaeologist interested in human origins finds the courage to admit (at least to himself) to hearing the voices of the home spirits in a 2,500-year-old burial ground. Few writers have the talent or insight to infuse old themes with new life when, according to Kl°ma's narrator, ``we have declared progress to be our idol'' so that ``the furious hunt for novelty [has become] diseased and self-destructive.'' But in this piercing, rich collection, Kl°ma does just that. A master delivers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19727-8
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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