Stegner's versatility is already well proven, and this volume of wholly unstandardized short stories is but further evidence. The stories range from realistic anecdotal material with a folk quality to perceptive, sensitive psychological studies of adolescence and childhood. The scenes shift from Vermont to California, from Saskatchewan to Mexico. There's humor and pathos and occasional irony- but there's none of the sordidness, the disillusionment that marks so much of contemporary short story telling. Some may even call his stories old fashioned. I found them hearteningly American, without ever being either corny or sentimental. I'd suggest for sampling, to give you a flavor distinguishing these stories from the average collection, the following:- Beyond the Glass Mountain, the story of two one-time school chums meeting years later, when roles were reversed; Goin' To Town, a study of anticlimax; Two Rivers for contrast in mood; The Colt, a story of a boy's love for a colt- and the tragic aftermath; The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples for the flavor of rural life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1949
ISBN: 0803291108
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1949
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This new blank verse translation of the first “Canticle” of Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece compares interestingly with some of the recent English versions by American poets, though it suffers particularly by comparison with Allen Mandelbaum’s graceful blank verse one. Its aim to provide “a clear, readable English version . . . that nevertheless retains some of the poetry of the original” is only imperfectly fulfilled, owing partly to moments of unimaginative informality (“In Germany, where people drink a lot”), though these are intermittently redeemed by simple sublimity (“Night now revealed to us the southern stars,/While bright Polaris dropped beneath the waves./It never rose again from ocean’s floor”). Translator Zappulla, an American Dante scholar and teacher, offers helpful historical and biographical information in an Introduction and exhaustive Notes following each of the poem’s 34 “Cantos.” Readers new to Dante may find his plainspoken version eminently satisfying; those who know the poem well may be disappointed by it.
Pub Date: April 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44280-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.
A young Muslim’s American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author’s first novel, Moth Smoke (2000).
It’s presented as a “conversation,” of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a café in the former’s native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’ businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.” Changez’s success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all “foreigners” objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions (“I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward “non-whites” all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (“. . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done”) and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense.
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.Pub Date: April 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101304-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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