Carver's shrewd new publisher here repackages 30 stories—a few with new titles—from his four collections, and includes seven uncollected pieces, one of which has never seen print. This selection spans 25 years and provides the perfect opportunity to assess an acclaimed career. For the most part, Carver's seven new pieces add little to his inflated reputation. The trite imagery, the deliberately stale language, and the unintentional bathos—all the elements of Carver's common-man pose—continue to generate tales of failure and false promise, a neo-proletarian rhetoric of victimization and survival. His male narrators often wallow in self-pity, and their problems usually concern women. In "Boxes," a divorced man's mother—herself a lonely widow—moves nearby, making his life miserable with her constant complaining, though her packing up to move again only makes him feel worse. Another story with a single dominant, hard image—"Menudo"—is about "a middle-aged man involved with his neighbor's wife," a state of affairs that forces him to realize his failures with women: his mother, his ex-wife, his present wife. "Intimacy" elaborates on this theme for, here, the narrator shows up unannounced at his ex-wife's house where the shrew harangues him about the past—a past he's already exploited in his "work." More Roth-like reflections on success underpin "Elephant," in which the narrator complains about all those who rely on him for money—his "greedy" mother, his hapless brother, his former wife, his son in college, his white-trashy daughter with children. While this tiresome tale ends with a sloppily sentimental affirmation, "Whoever Was Using This Bed" finds no such hope for the husband and wife who obsess about "death and annihilation," and their bad health and habits. The only surprise in this volume is the final story—a fictional re-creation of Chekhov's death, based largely on memoirs, that's quite unlike any of Carver's previous work, and may signal a new stage in his development, away from the clichÉs of contemporary rootlessness. Regardless of Carver's actual achievement, his spare and simple style has set the tone for a generation of story writers, so that this. ample volume serves as the best introduction to what's happening in contemporary short fiction.
Pub Date: May 31, 1988
ISBN: 0679722319
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1988
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some—but also with the knowledge that...
Love among the ruins—and with Ethan Frome, tennis, martinis, and Starbucks on the set as well.
As often in his fiction, Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013, etc.) immerses readers in a milieu that is achingly sensuous—and sensual, too—with not much regard for pedestrian ideas of what constitutes whatever normal behavior is supposed to be. Even so, his characters are often beset by moral agony over the choices they make in following their hearts. In the case of Paul, a definitively sensitive man of fleetingly passing years, just about everything is a Proustian madeleine: Greek and Latin, the glint of Mediterranean sunlight, “the cooling scent of coffee from the roasting mill that seemed to welcome me no differently now than when I ran errands with my mother.” Then there is music, so elegantly alluded to in the title, and the memories of men and women who have fallen in his path and bed and sometimes imparted wisdom along the way; as an early object of desire says, knowingly, “It could be life or it could be a strip of wood that refuses to bend as it should.” Paul bends easily in his pursuits, broadly catholic in his affinities. Aciman’s portrait of him and his world is thoughtful, sympathetic, and never prurient; Paul is very much, as a friend of his remarks, like Sicily in having many identities and “all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.” He is not at all reprehensible, yet he is not blameless, either; Paul’s quest for self-awareness, to say nothing of his quest for pleasure, carries plenty of collateral damage. Most of it he bears himself, though; as he says, with knowing resignation, “I think everyone is wounded in their sex…I can’t think of one person who isn’t.”
An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some—but also with the knowledge that such regret “is easy enough to live down.”Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14843-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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