Of these ten stories, another volume in the Illinois Short Fiction Series (see Burgin and Costello), two that dazzle concern sons who reach maturity through relationships with, or reminiscences of, their fathers; the rest either mark time or overreach. ``Madagascar'' (a Nelson Algren Award winner) is a marvelous reminiscence of a father's past as a Jew in Gestapo-controlled Amsterdam juxtaposed to the narrator's painful growth into adulthood. The story covers a lot of ground quickly through incisive instances. The other dazzler, the title story, wonderfully evokes a love that has lasted through the years. The narrator, after the death of his mother, helps his elderly father move. Together, they trace down a woman the old man barely knew long ago. When they find her, she's mostly senile, but the father brings her home anyway for a candlelit dinner and a heartrending summarizing image: ``He strokes her hair, then looks up at me and tells me with his eyes to mourn us all.'' Of the remaining pieces, the best include ``Summer Love,'' a Sixties-era saga about coming-of-age as a waiter at an aunt's hotel in the Catskills; ``Navajo Cafe,'' the story of a cross-country trek of a ten-year-old daughter and her father after the girl's mother dies, a journey that results in an accident as well as in some healing. ``Q 12081011,'' however, is a cluttered attempt to combine a tenth-grader, his gym class, his parents' divorce, the Holocaust, and cosmology as a metaphor for survival; ``Other Lives'' is a contrived surreal piece about a man whose car breaks down in a small New Mexican town; and ``Return With Us Now to Those Thrilling Days'' is a stale effort about a Sixties nostalgia party and a midlife crisis interrupted by a man in a gas mask with a knife. Schwartz is at his best when he forgoes cutesiness or needless complexity for honest fictional reminiscence. Some of these first appeared in Antioch, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Literary Review.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-252-01815-X
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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