Stories in which laughter is sometimes the only response to sorrow, beauty is strange, and love is fierce and unending. A...
Mark (Tsim Tsum, 2009, etc.) turns her poet's eye to the sublimely surreal in this collection of domestic oddities.
Over the course of 24 short, strange tales, Mark exposes the reader to the woman who loses her baby in the blizzard created when his caretaker begins to snow; the woman who marries Poems; the woman who becomes a tree to float her giant daughters to safety; the woman who does not eat the child. Though each of these characters is embroiled in a different danger, the sense of them as archetypes (the woman rather than a woman) and further as facets of the author's own lived experience filtered through a private symbology renders the stories at once both more universal and more personal. It is a fine slight of hand which Mark performs over and over throughout the collection: Language as precise and bitter as a pill is used to describe both the unknown and the unknowable; utterly impossible characters remind us uncomfortably of ourselves. The stories drift in the way of the best fairy tales—released from dependence on narrative sensibility to become both more odd and more true than any mere fiction. Many utilize a dream's abrupt authority. "Louis C.K., my husband, piles all my seahorses in the middle of our king-sized bed and starts shouting," begins "Let's Do This Once More, But This Time with Feeling." Other stories deploy a poet's love of words for words' sake in long, luxurious taxonomies: "The husband doesn't want his seventh wife to be sad and so he brings her Flounder. He brings her Mullet, Snook, Pickerel, Salmon, and Perch. He brings her Grunt. He brings her Bitterling and Milkfish. He brings her Tuna." Regardless of their form or feel, each is a fully rendered exploration of impossibility that loses nothing in its translation from the author's imagination to the reader's eye. It is a common cop-out to label the vagaries of nontraditional fiction written by women as experiments in language or voice and thus dismiss their agency in the "real" world in which plot-based fictions thrive. This collection, however, through both its humor and its sorrow, rings a universal chord. How to make sense of a world that refutes all sense and yet murders us when we cannot anticipate its next move? How to love in a world that uses our love as a weapon?
Stories in which laughter is sometimes the only response to sorrow, beauty is strange, and love is fierce and unending. A necessary book for our perilous age.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9973666-8-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Dorothy
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Nine stories, six of which have been previously published, that successfully explore the tensions and confusions that so often muddle relations between East and West. Divided into three groups, the stories are a reminder that Rushdie (Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1991, etc.), the accomplished postmodern fabulist, is also a splendid realist storyteller who describes the human heart with clear-eyed sympathy. Grouped under the heading "EAST," the first trio describes an encounter between a young Pakistani woman and an advice expert, who doesn't understand why the young woman is happy when the British Consulate rejects her application to join her aging fiancé in England ("Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies"); a poor young man, who has "the rare quality of total belief in his dreams" of moviedom success and who is sterilized because he believes the Indian government will give him a free radio ("The Free Radio"); and two children who try to have their greedy father robbed of a precious religious relic he is determined to add to his collection ("The Prophet's Hair"). Of the three stories in "WEST," the most accomplished is "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," which describes a world where auctioneers "establish the value of our pasts, of our futures, of our lives" as they auction off movie memorabilia and cultural icons that help us be what "we fear we are not — somebody." The stories in the final section, "EAST, WEST," are all set in England. A young Indian learns too late of a betrayal by a now-dead English friend ("The Harmony of the Spheres"); two Indian diplomats, Star Trek fans and old school chums, have a prophetic conversation while posted in England ("Chekov and Zulu"); and a young Indian, recalling the unlikely friendship between his ayah and an elderly chess player in London, refuses to choose between East and West ("The Courter"). A product of both worlds, Rushdie builds a safe passage over the seemingly unbridgeable with generous insight and wry humor in this distinguished collection.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43965-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Fragola, a broadcasting and film profressor, links seven light and likable stories about growing up Sicilian in Syracuse, New York, a subject familiar to readers of Jerre Mangione’s classic Mount Allegro, which shares the same nostalgia for a lost way of life in nearby Syracuse. These elegiac fictions focus on the relationship of a boy and his immigrant grandparents, especially his grandmother, with whom he spends most of his time, since both of his parents have to work. In —Feast of the Dead,— the grown-up narrator remembers Gram’s cooking and sayings, along with his youthful resistance to her old-country ways and superstitions. Despite himself, he comes to recognize the ghost of his maternal grandfather, long gone, as this specter inhabits the boy’s body on All Hallow’s Eve. Until he’s seven, the narrator sleeps with Gram (—In My Grandmother’s Bed—) and even conspires to prevent her remarriage, which would take her away from him. Later, she convinces him of the evil eye’s power (and tells how to counter it) and also teaches him how to i.d. a witch (—The Evil Eye— and —La Strega—). His sadness for the passing of tradition surfaces in —Ceci-Nuts—: he realizes there’s no one to replace the old couple who—ve sold roasted beans for years on end at the annual feast. In the moving memoir of his paternal grandfather (—The Garden—), the narrator finally comes to understand the old man’s bitterness, and begins to appreciate his magnificent terraced backyard, which goes to ruin after his death. —In Exile—,the last piece in the collection, smartly disabuses the college-aged narrator of any romantic notions concerning the old country: On a trip there in his 20s, he finds little but squalor and suspicion. Fragola offers family memories in no-frills prose. Anyone partial to the heady aroma of tomato sauce simmering on the stove will want to savor this modest volume; others might be less impressed.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55071-036-2
Page Count: 108
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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