Admirably pushes boundaries.
Diverse collection cuts a broad swath through the L.A. literary scene with fiction ranging from sparklingly edgy to patently peripheral.
It’s a mixed bag, sampling authors both established (McSweeney’s contributor Aimee Bender, novelist Rachel Resnick) and relatively unknown (Venezuela-born Anita Santiago, author of the remarkable “Flying Blind”). The stronger pieces are generally able to carry the rest, offering images and impressions sure to linger in readers’ minds. Most of the stories address life’s big questions through its minutiae, plotting the points of existence on a human map of banality writ large. In Karen Horn’s “Levinium,” an elderly man dying of cancer looks back on the “very personal matrix of his life” as a series of facts on a grid, obscuring the hugeness of the work he contributed to the Manhattan Project. The collection favors the time-worn themes of aging, death, motherhood and love in its various incarnations. The characters are not the traditional women these themes might suggest, however: They’re brash, thoughtful, intelligent, sassy. The tough lesbian protagonist of Bender’s “Debbieland” is a bully who grows up to collect the tears of her lover in a vial, poignantly preying upon the sorrows of others. In “Contraband,” Los Angeles Times Book Review poetry columnist Carole Muske-Dukes brings a refreshing subtlety to the age-old debate between political idealism and lived reality. Co-editor Ortale’s “Milk” spins a hauntingly surreal tale of a septuagenarian woman who starts to lactate, depicting her unlikely miracle with an impressive lack of sentimentality. Resnick’s images of rotting meat and a decaying relationship resonate in “Meat-Eaters of Marrakesh.”
Admirably pushes boundaries.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59264-125-3
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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