Offbeat yarns from a sui generis author.
A clutch of stories set in the author’s native Chile—and surrealist parts unknown.
Originally published in 1937, this collection by Emar (1893-1964) arrived at the height of the Modernist movement; his eeriness and fluid, satirical approach to storytelling put him in league with better-known European and North American contemporaries. Indeed, his work seemed to anticipate the elliptical style that would make Borges world famous. These 10 stories are placed in a sensible sequence—“Four Animals,” “Three Women,” “Two Places,” and “One Vice”—but any concept of order is deceptive, as each story finds an unusual approach that sometimes only barely adheres to its supposed subject. “The Green Bird” concerns a taxidermic parrot the narrator received while living in Paris, but what starts as a cool remembrance of youth soon takes an absurd and violent turn. “Papusa” concerns a tsar holding court with a ghost, a jester, and the woman of the title—a scene the narrator observes through an opal on a ring. “The Hotel Mac Quice” centers on a man and his wife out for a stroll on vacation before becoming separated because of the man’s sudden urge to find his toothbrush. “The Unicorn” opens with a notice in the paper by a man who is looking for the safe return of “my best ideas and my purest intentions,” launching a satirical trek to the Egyptian pyramids and Ethiopia, home to the mythical creature. Clearly, plot summary only goes so far; the best stories here thrive purely in Emar’s language, which can be richly synesthetic; “Damned Cat,” the most potent story here, starts with a nature walk that features stones that store heat, a weed that “smells of interplanetary distances,” and a cat observed with a peculiar geometric rigor. Veteran translator McDowell doesn’t attempt to make these stories adhere to logic, but they all possess a certain clarity—concerned with violence and loss, thoroughly sensual, but questioning what our senses tell us.
Offbeat yarns from a sui generis author.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780811232074
Page Count: 176
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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