Tolstaya demonstrates an impressive range in these 23 stories, most having first appeared in On the Golden Porch (1989) and Sleepwalker in a Fog (1992), together with some newer work.
That range encompasses political satire, flights of surrealism and realistic urban and domestic dramas, nearly all set in the Soviet era. The longest story, “Limpopo,” is outright political satire, a scattershot peppering of a rule-bound society run by individuals who think in categories and blinkered comrades who travel to Italy and find gloomy people under gray skies. The satirical and the surreal blend perfectly in “A Clean Sheet”; here, the profoundly depressed Ignatiev visits a hush-hush clinic for the removal of his “diseased organ,” and emerges a new man, brutally assertive. Such transformations elude most of Tolstaya’s characters. They suffer the indignities of life in communal apartments in Moscow or Leningrad, or live miserably on the outskirts, like the married couple in “The Fakir,” who worship at the shrine of a dilettante who has his own place in central Moscow (heaven!). Tolstaya’s favorite theme is an inexhaustible one: the passage of time, often accompanied by a potent regret for opportunities lost. Alexandra Ernestovna, 84, has survived three husbands, but it’s her abandonment of her passionate lover that still gnaws at her (“Sweet Shura”). Middle-aged Natasha had one chance at love, blew it, and became a dull teacher (“The Moon Came Out”). The governess Zhenechka, a trusting soul, is recalled after her death by a former pupil; teased by her charges, exploited by employers and relatives, Zherechka deserved far better; “Most Beloved” is a moving tribute to simple goodness, flecked by remorse. The best expression of this theme is the marvelous “Fire and Dust.” Newly married Rimma sees “enormous happiness” in her future as she contrasts her life with that of Pipka, a crazy disaster-prone bohemian, but somehow Rimma’s life crumbles into an empty marriage while Pipka lands on her feet.
Children, old folks and the struggling in-betweens—Tolstaya sees into all their hearts. Remarkable.Pub Date: April 17, 2007
ISBN: 1-59017-197-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
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: Sept. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES
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