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Sto caricando le informazioni... Something That Feels Like Truth (Switchgrass)di DONALD LYSTRA
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Donald Lystra's first novel, Something That Feels Like Truth, was the winner of the 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction. This volume gathers a bracing selection of short stories by Lystra that are cut from the same cloth as his highly acclaimed novel. The stories in Something That Feels Like Truth confound expected plot turns, and Lystra develops his characters patiently and naturally, bringing them into convincing and honest actions. Every plot point in every story here holds an integral part in the imbuing of its beauty and meaning. You can also tell Lystra has read a lot of Hemingway and Chekhov: and that he aspires to be an inheritor of their effectively concise tradition. But there's a touch of Cheever in Lystra's stories as well: what that master storyteller did for the suburbs of New York, Lystra does for the Midwest. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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This yearning quality, this "Is That All There Is?" feeling permeates many of Lystra's stories, beginning with the first, "Geese." Its protagonist, Glenn, tries to remain aloof from the scary spectre of his brother-in-law's "exploratory" surgery, but then, in agreeing to put down the man's ailing old dog, is suddenly confronted with his own fear of isolation and death. "Nothing about today seemed normal, nothing at all," Glenn thinks as he talks to his wife on the phone. "I heard her breathing on the wire. My heart was going like crazy. 'Don't hang up yet.'"
That wondering if there might be more to life continues in other stories: with Tom, a laid-off factory worker in "Marseilles;" with Norm, a night shift bus driver in "Hesitation;" and with Eleanor in "The Five O'Clock Train."
The theme of the heart, as a fragile physical organ, crops up throughout the collection too. One of the stories, about a bitter, divorced architect is titled, for obvious reasons, "Bypass." Following a visit from his ex-wife, Frank touches his scarred chest, feeling "deep within, the reassuring buck and shudder of his imperfect heart." And the protagonist of "Speaking of Love Abstractly" has undergone an angioplasty. Recently separated from his wife and tentatively attracted to his much younger French tutor, Harold asks his doctor if his heart is healthy enough for sex. The tutor is young - and French - enough that she doesn't know who Walter Cronkite is. She's given no first name in the story, identified only as "Mademoiselle Carnot." Puzzled, I wondered fleetingly if perhaps this were a gentle jest on Lystra's part, combining carnal (as in carnal knowledge) with Bardot (as in the French sex-kitten actress from the fifties that only older men like myself and Lystra might remember). Nah, probably not.
There is too a push and pull between innocence and experience found scattered among the stories. Several could be considered coming of age tales - "Reckless" concerns a young boy on a hunting trip with his father; in "Treasure Hunt" a seventeen year-old grapples with family loyalties; in "Scout" a boy worried about his father's serious illness discovers a derelict's dead body. And in "Family Way" (the story which spawned Lystra's critically acclaimed novel, SEASON OF WATER AND ICE), twelve year-old Danny's attention is divided between his own sexual awakening, his parents' failing marriage, and a new friend, a pregnant teenager.
The final story in the collection, "Bridge," will make comparisons to Hemingway inevitable. In it, a sixty-something year-old makes a long-postponed pilgrimage to Seney in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to retrace the journey of Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River," the story first published in Hemingway's collection, IN OUR TIME, more than eighty years ago. The protagonist in Lystra's story, identified only as "the old man," is hoping to find something out about the truth of Hemingway's story, to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, and in so doing, to make some sense of the choices he's made in his own life.
Hmm ... Looks like I've somehow managed to invoke Thoreau, Blake, Hemingway, and even Peggy Lee. But the truth is these pieces are pure Lystra - every one a perfectly polished gem of storytelling. There are no fillers or discards. In fact, each of these sixteen stories holds, somewhere within it, SOMETHING THAT FEELS LIKE TRUTH. If you are looking for serious fiction for grownups, read this book. I recommend it highly. ( )