It's a mess (the concluding episode is especially disjointed and truncated), but Grandmother's sensual energies and fluent...
Another inveterate yarnspinner dominates this chaotically structured yet frequently entertaining third novel (Blessed Is the Fruit, 1997, etc.) from American-born Antoni, who grew up in the Bahamas.
The place is the village of Chaguarameras on the island of Corpus Christi, and the storyteller is the (unnamed) eponymous Grandmother, a 96-year-old powerhouse who regales her young grandson Johnny with lavish extended tales of her commercial (and, coincidentally, heavily sexual) adventures. Most of them occurred during WWII, when American soldiers were stationed on Corpus Christi, the whorehouse trade thrived, and Grandmother matched wits with two importunate adversaries and admirers: a self-styled "King" (of a traveling carnival) who tried to dupe her into financing the search for a sunken pirate ship laden with treasure, and a white-suited Kentucky "Colonel" who helped her build a fast-food pizza enterprise, then later marketed Grandmother herself—as calypso singer "Lady Lobo." Neither of them is quite what he seems, and there's a similar abundance of unreality in Grandmother's hair-raising stories about a prowling "tiger that liked to eat cheese," a gorgeous seductress who murders and mutilates her lovers, an adopted girl and a "slaveboy" who shape-shift respectively into an iguana and an anaconda (the novel’s best sequence), and even a story set in "the old old time" of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Spanish conquistadors (which Grandmother claims to remember clearly). All this is more than a bit oppressively lush, but this time out Antoni reins in the Caribbean patois, and offers several delicious contrasts between the islanders' uninhibited carnality and American sexual timidity ("where . . . [the U.S. soldiers] came from, it was against the law even to play with yourself before the age of twenty-one").
It's a mess (the concluding episode is especially disjointed and truncated), but Grandmother's sensual energies and fluent loquacity make this Antoni's most accessible and enjoyable fiction nevertheless.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1687-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
Nine varied, lively, and beguiling stories from the ever-improving author of, most recently, Carolina Moon (1996). If you still think southern fiction is all about decaying antebellum mansions, miscegenation, and disturbing family secrets, you owe it to yourself to read McCorkle. Not that she shuns such matters—it’s just that her amiably unstrung characters keep reminding us that, even while psyches and marriages are collapsing, dishes pile up in the sink, and sometimes dirty laundry is, well, just clothes that have to be washed and hung on the line. She’s wonderful with beleaguered or comically resourceful women: a pregnant one trying to quit smoking and shape up generally (“Life Prerecorded”); an entrepreneur who markets funerals for “the soon-to-be deceased” (“It’s a Funeral! RSVP”); and, most memorably, a single mother obsessed with her own and her young son’s vulnerability (“A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World”). If McCorkle stumbles with a monologue addressed by a man’s mistress to his wife (“Your Husband Is Cheating On Us”), suggesting the two murder him together, she shines when widening her lens to examine (“Paradise”) the seriocomic chemistry between a New York Jew (Adam) and an Atlanta fashion designer (Eve) hung up on “the North-South thing,” or a young clergyman’s uncertain ministry (“The Anatomy of Man”). She has a deadly eye for endearingly ludicrous detail (weddings and funerals bring out her best), a genius for piquant first-person narration, and a finely tuned ear for the accents of exasperated domesticity (“If Jesus were here he would take that child outside and wear his butt out”). Her stories meander even when they’re comparatively tightly plotted—but it’s always a pleasure staying with them just to hear her people rattle on. The work of an accomplished comic writer who’s continually refining her skills and expanding her range. McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty.
Pub Date: June 2, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-204-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
A first collection of 13 quirky and occasionally fabulistic stories by the author of the complex brainteasing first novel Hallucinating Foucault (1996, not reviewed). Several pieces, including the lyrical title story, are only vignettes: glimpses of islands of calm (such as those “lemon trees”) standing aloof from the contemporary social muddle, or, more pointedly, expressing the polarities of male (conquest and exploitation) vs. female (escape or retaliation). “This is the way we see things,” explains a character in “The Crew of M6” (about documentary filmmakers who unwisely focus on a lesbian community), “there is a state of war, undeclared war, between men and women.” These briskly confrontational, aphorism-studded tales are, accordingly, dispatches from the front—including a flimsy piece about a feminist lecturer who rescues a bird from her cat’s clutches (“Gramsci and the Sparrow”), a woman’s surreally violent farewell to her condescending husband (“The Glass Porch”), and an erotic monologue (“The Woman Alone”) that’s also a declaration of primal female sexual power. The gender emphasis grows wearying, but Duncker’s best stories playfully vary the mix. “The Storm,” for example, a Kafkaesque parable set in an otherworldly “College,” recounts the tug of wills between an authoritarian Master and the callow author of an impertinent iconoclastic Book, whom the Master recognizes as —one tiny fragment of pure freedom that had defeated us.” And Duncker’s finest piece, the novella-length “The Arrival Matters,” offers (in addition to its witty title) a teasing revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: A small girl named Miranda is raised on a Caribbean island among a society of women, under the watchful eye of an ironical mother-figure who seems herself torn between the opposing claims of the (ordinarily) battling sexes. Potentially monotonous fiction redeemed by its author’s phrasemaking skill and inventive power. Duncker can get under your skin, but she’s an original and she’s worth reading.
Pub Date: April 27, 1998
ISBN: 0-88001-604-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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