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THE WOMEN ON THE WALL

Name: THE WOMEN ON THE WALL
Author: Wallace Stegner
ISBN: 0803291108

by Wallace Stegner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1949

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON TEACHING AND WRITING FICTION
by Wallace Stegner

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNEASY CHAIR
by Wallace Stegner

- BOOK REVIEW
MARKING THE SPARROW'S FALL
by Wallace Stegner

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THE LAST SAMURAI

by Helen DeWitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2000

Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A...

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In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother’s refusal to identify his father.

Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London’s Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo’s father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn’t have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa’s film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man’s son. While these efforts are enlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does.

Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-7868-6668-3

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Hyperion

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SOME TRICK
by Helen DeWitt

- BOOK REVIEW
LIGHTNING RODS
by Helen DeWitt

- PERSPECTIVES
Best Books of the Century (So Far): Fiction

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THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

by Muriel Spark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 1961

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An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird) pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion, and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose. Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over an extended — and interrupted — period (thirty years) during which Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her removed. Finally the girls grow up — and Monica, Rose, Eunice, Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes) separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death, marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is a central focus — who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own.