A talented newcomer who, one hopes, next time out will reveal more clearly the secrets she’s kept to herself in these...
A debut collection of 13 stories that explores with authority the internal landscape of girls and women struggling for redemption.
Colored by the Catholic experience, the females in these pieces suffer from emotions that the nuns, despite their fervor for obedience and order, have failed to suppress. Death and sex, disappointment and disability abound. Sometimes the terror is real, as in “In Houses,” where the narrator’s face is slashed (“I have had a new face for three months now, three months since my old one was cut”), and “Nice Girl,” where the accidental drowning of an eight-year-old haunts her younger sister’s life (“My mother says I screamed . . . I lay on the edge of the pool screaming down into the water at my sister for our mother who became, that day, my mother”). But more often, that terror is as subtle as a teenaged girl contemplating her attractiveness (“Quiet”) or an abandoned woman waiting for a visit from her young son (“Here in the World”). Lancelotta, who’s published in the Threepenny Review and Glimmer Train, among other places, sets up interesting and out-of-the-box situations: a blind man taken home as a lover from a bus stop in “The Guide,” and a girl who is moved by her immigrant grandmother’s story of being molested by an uncle in “The Gift.” The pervading sense of distance and estrangement between couples, family members, and neighbors is palpable throughout the collection, with the strongest entries being those told in the first-person by nameless narrators who bare their souls in taut muscular prose. But while Lancelotta’s voice is powerful, it is also self-conscious, and the reach for literary expression more often than not obscures the tale .
A talented newcomer who, one hopes, next time out will reveal more clearly the secrets she’s kept to herself in these poetically written but ultimately aimless stories.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-099-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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BOOK REVIEW
The book is pure fun, although slender. Another volume of Maud’s misdeeds would be most welcome.
Five connected stories about a murderous old Swedish lady.
Maud has a good thing going. At age 88, she’s lived in a large apartment rent-free for 70 years because of a clause in an old contract. Never married, she loves to travel alone and to be alone. In the first story, "An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems," a rare event happens: Her doorbell rings. Jasmin Schimmerhof, a 40-year-old avant-garde artist who lives in the building, stops by to say hello. The daughter of celebrities, her past includes drugs, multiple divorces, and tragedy. Her current art project strives to “unmask the domineering tactics of the patriarchy,” meaning that her small apartment is filled with phalluses—some even hanging from the ceiling. She is delightfully overbearing as she constantly tries to weasel her way into Maud’s good graces. But Maud isn’t stupid or senile, and she knows Jasmin is up to something. Once Maud figures out what it is, her solution is drastic, funny, and final. Maud is a seasoned world traveler who once, at age 18, had been engaged to Lt. Gustaf Adelsiöö. He’d emphatically broken off their engagement on learning her family wasn’t rich. Now, in “An Elderly Lady on Her Travels,” she reads in the newspaper that he is a wealthy 90-year-old widower about to marry the 55-year-old Zazza, whom ex-teacher Maud knows as her long-ago student, a schemer and a failed soft-core porn actress. When Maud arranges to get near her at a spa and then overhears Zazza’s plans to take control of Gustaf’s estate, Maud devises an emphatic countermeasure. And then in “An Elderly Lady Seeks Peace at Christmastime,” she deals with “The Problem” in the apartment above her. Maud’s murders always have plausible motives, and she is a sympathetic character as long as one keeps a safe distance. Each story takes its sweet time to develop and concludes with a juicy dose of senior justice.
The book is pure fun, although slender. Another volume of Maud’s misdeeds would be most welcome.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64129-011-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Not as ambitious as Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), but sharply observed and...
From the author of Drown (1996), more tales of Dominican life in the cold, unwelcoming United States.
Eight of the collection’s nine stories center on Yunior, who shares some of his creator’s back story. Brought from the Dominican Republic as a kid by his father, he grows up uneasily in New Jersey, escaping the neighborhood career options of manual labor and drug dealing to become an academic and fiction writer. What Yunior can’t escape is what his mother and various girlfriends see as the Dominican man’s insatiable need to cheat. The narrative moves backward and forward in time, resisting the temptation to turn interconnected tales into a novel by default, but it has a depressingly unified theme: Over and over, a fiery woman walks when she learns Yunior can’t be true, and he pines fruitlessly over his loss. He’s got a lot of other baggage to deal with as well: His older brother Rafa dies of cancer; a flashback to the family’s arrival in the U.S. shows his father—who later runs off with another woman—to be a rigid, controlling, frequently brutal disciplinarian; and Yunior graduates from youthful drug use to severe health issues. These grim particulars are leavened by Díaz’s magnificent prose, an exuberant rendering of the driving rhythms and juicy Spanglish vocabulary of immigrant speech. Still, all that penitent machismo gets irksome, perhaps for the author as well, since the collection’s most moving story leaves Yunior behind for a female narrator. Yasmin works in the laundry of St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick; her married lover has left his wife behind in Santo Domingo and plans to buy a house for him and Yasmin. Told in quiet, weary prose, “Otravida, Otra Vez” offers a counterpoint to Yunior’s turbulent wanderings with its gentle portrait of a woman quietly enduring as best she can.
Not as ambitious as Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), but sharply observed and morally challenging.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59448-736-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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