A fascinating mix of the exotic and the familiar.
Debut collection spotlighting the little-known but centuries-old culture of the Bene Israel community in the author’s native India.
Judah’s 19 stories follow the Jewish inhabitants of a fictional town in central India from the 1890s to the near present, by which time most have immigrated (as the author herself did) to Israel. The first two tales, set in the years between 1890 and 1930, display a humorous yet mythic tone reminiscent of family histories handed down orally over generations. As time passes, the fictional edges become sharper, the sociology and psychology more contemporary. In “My Friend Joseph,” for example, narrator Bentzion charmingly describes how he and Joseph met and wooed their wives after serving in the Boer War. Many years later, in “A Girl from My Hometown,” the two friends stand helplessly by while their grandchildren’s marriage arrangement falls apart after Joseph’s grandson announces his plan to emigrate. Still later, an aged, lonely Joseph meets another grandson, raised in Israel, who visits India on a lark after finishing his military service (a frequent motif here). Two stories in the 1930–64 section lightheartedly follow the evolution of Benjamin and Hannah’s childhood friendship into love and marriage despite class differences and the snobbery of Hannah’s mother. Tragedy strikes the couple, and later their offspring, in tales that take place from 1964 to 2000. The third main narrative strand follows Jude Paul, born Judah Saul, the illegitimate son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother who left him at the local Catholic Church to be raised by a priest. In “My Son, Jude Paul,” the priest worries about Jude’s bitterness toward his father, but Jude matures over the course of subsequent stories into the most complex character here, a successful, yet emotionally sensitive military officer.
A fascinating mix of the exotic and the familiar.Pub Date: March 27, 2007
ISBN: 0-8052-4248-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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