Elegant stories full of a dry and subtle wit, intricately observed scenes, and a full range of emotion.
A definitive collection of stories by a Portuguese master of the form.
The stories that make up this remarkable volume are united by their quiet intensity, their commitment to internal turmoil, and their enduring interest in the lives, hopes, and miseries that are unique to women. They were originally published between 1959 and 1967 but for the most part, and except for a few small details, feel as fresh as if they’d been written just now. “He could have been a traveling salesman, a train conductor, or a sailor,” Carvalho writes at the beginning of “Life and Dream.” “However, he was none of those things because we do not make ourselves; we are shaped by circumstances.” In “A Love Story,” the narrator asks, “Did anyone admire or envy them; could anyone look at them without smirking?” An especially pathetic—and especially badly dressed— couple is being discussed, and while the story comprises fewer than 10 pages, Carvalho manages to pack it with pathos, humor, bitterness, wit, and a surprise ending as well. In many stories, Carvalho takes on heavier topics—murder, adultery—but no topic is too light or too small for her attention. In “Miss Arminda,” for example, the narrator takes the time to distinguish between the “people who knew her” and those “who thought they knew her only because they saw her pass by every morning.” This insistence on the apparently mundane is further proof of Carvalho’s masterful eye—and her abiding faith, whether stated or unstated, in the inherent dignity of women’s experiences. That’s not to say that she focuses only on women, but her gaze does tend to land on subjects that likely would have been labeled frivolous at the time she was writing.
Elegant stories full of a dry and subtle wit, intricately observed scenes, and a full range of emotion.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781949641516
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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PERSPECTIVES
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