In recent years, several important critics have suggested that Scottish author Mackay (The Artist’s Window, 1999, etc.) is...
The romantic, bizarre, and sometimes murderous underpinnings of seemingly drab suburban lives are deftly revealed in ten densely written tales..
Mackay’s distinctive trick of inhabiting multiple points of view in even comparatively brief compass gives her stories an arresting and wonderfully tangled texture, and her vivid confrontational style is richly seasoned by spectacularly acute and amusing sidelong observations (e.g., a neighborhood busybody is “a pillar or something smaller, such as a hassock, of a local evangelical church”; a tarty young woman’s bold countenance is like “a cat’s, who rubs up against your legs while knowing there is a dead bird behind the sofa”). The terrors of domesticity are memorably skewered in the edgy title piece, about an unwelcome relative’s return “home” from Hong Kong and the resumption of his poisonous effect on his brother’s family; “The Last Sand Dance,” in which a faded actress and a failed playwright compulsively erode the flimsy fabric of their loveless marriage; and especially “Barbarians,” a withering portrayal of a “serial adulterer” complacent in his own (fourth) marriage of convenience, casually exploiting all the children he produces and encounters. Larger “worlds” are explored in a savage lampoon of pompous aging-male bonding (“The Wilderness Club”); the tale of a lonely shopgirl victimized—and moved to vengeance—by a loathsome molester (“A Silver Summer”); and the superbly imagined “The Day of the Gecko,” which features a woman editor whose fixation on a Bruce Chatwin–like writer-traveler blossoms into a fever dream fantasy complete with wickedly funny allusions to Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana.
In recent years, several important critics have suggested that Scottish author Mackay (The Artist’s Window, 1999, etc.) is one of Great Britain’s, if not the world’s, best writers. This fifth brilliant and exciting collection shows us exactly why they think so.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55921-247-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A debut collection from Danticat (the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, 1994) that movingly brings to life the history, hopes, and human experience of Haitians. Separation is the central fact of life for Danticat's characters. The isolated speakers of "Children of the Sea" are lovers, one of whom flees Haiti on a rickety boat while the other remains on the island hiding from terrorizing soldiers. They are doomed never again to be together in the flesh. Yet the story itself — the very act of Danticat's writing (mirrored in the refugee's journal-keeping) — permits their union, grants a space in which their voices mingle in an elegant duet. Where writing can't serve as a weapon against oblivion, there is hope, though this is double-edged. For Guy, the unemployed factory worker in "A Wall of Fire Rising," a hot-air balloon represents an escape from devastating poverty, but the story ends by showing the bitter irony of his wish for flight. Most impressive is the dignity that the author reveals in her characters' spirituality. Omens and superstitions abound, which upper-class Haitians dismiss as "voodoo nonsense that's holding us back." Danticat shows the wisdom and poignancy of these beliefs. The red panties that the mother in "Caroline's Wedding" commands her daughters to wear serve ostensibly to ward off sexual advances from their dead father's spirit. They are also an intimate form of mourning his loss. "When you write," explains the speaker of "Epilogue: Women Like Us," "it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse strands and attempting to bring them unity....Some of the braids are long, others short. Some are thick, others are thin." The remark describes this young Haitian writer's restless style, which is lyrical and elegiac, gothic and simple, sometimes all at once. Consistent, however, is her powerful empathy for her characters. Danticat's fiction is an antidote to headline abstractions, giving readers the gift of narrative through which to experience a people and a country as more than mere news.
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-56947-025-1
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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