Masud’s compelling, sometimes obscure stories do not always fully reward the reader’s attention. But they’re usually as hard...
Cryptic suggestiveness dominates 11 stories gathered from three collections by the Indian author (who writes in Urdu) of Essence of Camphor (2000).
As we learn from the translator’s Introduction (itself fairly opaque), Masud is both a scholar of Persian and Urdu and a renowned translator of Kafka. The great Czech writer’s influence is felt throughout, especially in the rigorously compressed tale (“Resting Place”) of a nameless wanderer invited to become one of a welcoming household’s “priceless objects,” and the superb “Custody,” about a village shop whose successive proprietors succumb to madness, the (again unnamed) narrator who undertakes to run it and raise two apparently orphaned baby girls and a complex local history that expresses the truism that “one has to endure everything.” Stoical forbearance also characterizes the aging man whose increasing memory loss is temporarily arrested when he recalls a charmingly sociopathic family friend (“Allam and Son”); the clerical worker whose fortunes vacillate during ownership disputes over “The Big Garbage Dump” located inside a lavish domicile; and the house inspector whose thwarted love for his sister-in-law (and aunt) leads him inexorably toward a paralytic madness (“Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire”). Images that recur through several stories (a sheltering, perhaps smothering tree; an inchoate jungle bordering a cleared village; the limited efficacy of healers) intensify an overpowering impression of fatalism that’s perhaps best expressed in the eerie title story, an enigmatic parable of the danger inherent in nature, fear of the unknown and the inevitability of death and change; and the terse, limpid “Lamentation,” whose narrator finds in the “wasteland communities” he explores both a spectrum of indigenous responses to mortality and a summons he cannot ignore.
Masud’s compelling, sometimes obscure stories do not always fully reward the reader’s attention. But they’re usually as hard to forget as they are to comprehend.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56656-629-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Warm, generous stories.
A kind and earnest debut collection of connected stories set in blue-collar northeastern Pennsylvania.
MK and Colleen, former classmates at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, reconnect as middle-aged women, both working retail jobs in a mall that’s just months away from closing its doors. From the outside, they seem to live just on the edge of despair and economic ruin, except both have too much moxie. In "St. Christopher on Pluto," for example, Colleen entangles MK in a plot to ditch Colleen's car by the Susquehanna River for insurance money. While MK lectures Colleen on committing fraud, Colleen wisecracks and tells MK to lighten up. That's the setup of many of McKinley's stories: Bighearted, redheaded Colleen has a scheme (or a volunteer gig), and she wheedles practical MK, often the narrator, into coming along. These slice-of-life stories touch upon social issues on the verge of fracturing already economically stressed, conservative communities: immigration, America's never-ending post–9/11 wars, the HIV epidemic, drug addiction, and the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. In "Complicado," Colleen volunteers to photograph an ESL class graduation, but it turns out the women don't want their pictures taken for fear of becoming the target of a rising tide of jingoism. Once she understands, Colleen yanks the film from her camera, and the party ends with the church organist's offering her accordion to a young Mexican man, "the Latin sounds creat[ing] fusion in a room steeped with polka fests." While we yearn for such happy endings in life, they can seem a bit treacly in fiction. When McKinley resists the lure of “Kumbayah” moments, she delivers emotionally devastating stories about how places with bleak economic futures hurt good, ordinary people—as well as how such people quietly craft lives full of intangible bounty.
Warm, generous stories.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949199-26-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.
A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form.
Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers.
Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1167-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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