Foto dell'autore
10+ opere 49 membri 4 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Opere di Joe Ashby Porter

Opere correlate

The Best American Short Stories 1972 (1972) — Collaboratore — 26 copie
Fiction, Volume 2, Number 3 — Collaboratore — 1 copia

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Utenti

Recensioni

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In these eight stories, the state of Kentucky becomes a state of mind—a semi-mythical realm of the heart's fidelities and predelictions, of violence, fear, and love. It is a land where the commonplace takes on a new and marvelous glow as quixotic individuals explore the enduring puzzles of human existence.

Joe Ashby Porter brings a distinctive freshness to universal themes: the commerce of love and abandonment, the sometimes mysterious influence of a place on events, the relationship between pride, humility, and justice, and the rewards of allegiance and persistence. His characters—innocents all—resolutely pursue their life's goals through picaresque tales that are continually unfolding from surprise to surprise. From the urbane twins of "In the Mind's Eye" to the isolated mountain family of "A Child of the Heart," Porter's protagonists share a stubborn optimism and trust and a readiness to see things through to their conclusion.

In Porter's half-lost and half-remembered Kentucky, only fiction is true. I beckons the reader with all the promised adventure and exhilaration that drew Daniel Boone to a similarly unexplored land two centuries ago.

My Review: Clearly Porter heard and absorbed the maxim, "Begin as you mean to go on." Eight stories in the collection, and all of them are juicy. Faithful to the Bryce Method, I'll offer a small hit on each one of the stories.

"Bowling Green" offers a practical country woman's take on the nature of expectations and the role of hope in life. "She was practically a virgin—she'd only had to do with her brothers." The narrator offers this on page three. 4.75 stars

"Murder at the Sweet Varsity" is a fifty-year-old memory of a violent crime resulting from sordid criminality, told from the viewpoint of the unjustly accused. It's a taut twenty-page murder mystery, and darn good too. 4.5 stars

"A Child of the Heart" is about the sad endings that follow happy beginnings. "Only a fool will deny that an abundance of flowers can quicken a woman's blood, and that continuing sun can burn years off a man's back. The poverty of life here augments the power of those influences. We lose our vision, and move like wooden toys: one year we wash the curtains, the next we plant a row of cabbages behind the house; and then comes a summer like that one, with grass soft as rabbit fur, and flowers." Of course a price must be paid for abundance and glory. 5 stars

"The Vacation" takes us into the heart of the human condition: It is human nature to hate those whom we have injured. Tacitus said it two thousand years ago. It's never been not true. 4 stars

"Nadine, The Supermarket, The Story Ends" purports to be three interconnected shorter pieces about the end of the world...in many ways eerily prescient, as with Ebola and numerous limited wars spreading and metastasizing, and in others a product of the 1970s/80s in which it was written...but in the end not coming together as a satisfying whole, and not strong enough in its parts to reach the heights surrounding it. 3 stars

"In the Mind's Eye" completely wigged me out...twins raised by a very loosely wrapped widow, sharing one name and one identity, not learning any sense of time because they were each Victor for only one day, then switch, then switch, then...you know, it makes my head hurt to think about it. Sort of a less horrible, less plausible version of Room. I don't know if I've absorbed its real and total implications, or ever can expect to. 4 stars

"Bright Glances" recounts the simple events of a calm life spent unhurriedly. Vale, Margaret Rideout Utley Kercheval Smoot. I will remember you. Thanks for wishing me well. 4 stars

"Yours" is a charming valedictory to a quiet journey, and to a little loved companion, and to a time and a place that aren't conceivable in the Internet age. Seek this collection of small gems out and bask in its lovely words, its truthsome stories, and its vanished people.4 stars


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
… (altro)
½
1 vota
Segnalato
richardderus | 1 altra recensione | Aug 31, 2014 |
The first title here, “Merrymount,” is the name the septuagenarian, “rosarian” Thea Hunt has chosen for her new prize rose; Thea shares the story with three characters in the greenhouse who actually do the work of growing her flowers and who are more interesting, especially Ollie, the black gardener who, like Thea, is mourning a lost mate.
“Solstice,” the second-longest story, has characters that vaguely reminded me of Annie Proulx’s, but with surprises—people getting along and making the best of a world where they are not the pets of fortune. Gooding Knowles, erstwhile philosophy major and now wind farmer in Wyoming, finally gets together with his old friend, lighting electrician Penny St. Clair, but there’ll be no hanky-panky because their sexual preferences point in opposite directions. At the end, Gooding soars off on a hang-glider toward Colorado, with Penny following in a chase car.
“Pending” takes place on the campus of a university in “Greensborough,” where librarian Eric Lytle has a homosexual encounter in a sauna.
“Reunion Eve” brings together a class of engineers trained in Abu Dhabi twenty-five years after their graduation—the time seems to be the near future.
“Dream On” is set in an indefinite future when sex-change operations are routine and may soon happen in “home changing rooms’ instead of hospitals. it is not an attractive time, since reading has almost disappeared and torture has become on of the standard job descriptions of some people in the military—though the victim in this case may possibly be a cedar tree, and the “secrets” the torturers are after an anecdote about childhood.
The last and longest story and in some ways the strangest is “Forgotten Coast,” about a talkative fifty-five-year-old, a widower for twenty years who’s just discovered his wife was unfaithful with another woman, who goes in search of a daughter he’s deliberately lost touch with, and finds instead her husband and son, who has Asperger’s syndrome.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
michaelm42071 | Sep 6, 2009 |
Ten short stories; I started with the shortest, “In the Mind,” in which the narrator, in his youth a mind inspector, descends with an older guide into one level of a mind (“I watched in vain for signs of ore, and in fact saw none during my tour, for it lay deeper than the level I explored”) where miners extend their maimed hands and there are hints of Virgil’s and Dante’s underground explorations. The underground opens up and the narrator trains to a Mexican village and a house where the musician proprietor, whose work the narrator has long admired, tests him by making him stare at a bright light, a test which he passes. The story has something to do with Borges, but I’m not sure about the details.
“A Man Wanted to Buy a Cat” is the first story; he’s a ski-shop owner and the cat belongs to the woman who makes hats across the way. His wife is allergic; the milliner doesn’t want to sell her cat, but the man obsesses about it anyway until his wife buys him a rabbit on Easter and he seems content again.
In “Naufrage and Diapason,” Porter cuts back and forth between an Alaskan salmon fisherman on his last sail and a woman operating a sewing machine at the Carolina hosiery mill—sewing, snipping thread à la The Fates.
In “Schrexx and Son,” the lottery-playing widower of the title lives with his son and successfully limits his life to the older man’s idea of a good time.
“Bone Key” is a conversation observed among a hair-wrapper and others—a woman of eighty, a homeless heckler—on a warm evening on the Key’s main street.
"A Pear-Shaped Woman and a Fuddy-Duddy," Lucille and Elmer, head for Biloxi for the character festival, where they stay with six others and a group leader for the character seminar, going out each morning in search of characters, and sharing their notes at night. It's sort of about the observation of the writer, but the writer as tourist, and though there is a poet from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the emphasis seems to be more on collecting and theorizing character rather than on James Joycean going from notebook to novel.
“Icehouse Burgess” is the name of the narrator, who “grew up in a Kansas City icehouse, loving dogs,” and who ends up living under a bridge over the Loire in Tours, in a tent, with a dog named Oh-oh, whom he hopes, on the morning the dog “wakes to find me rigid,” will “have the presence of mind to go looking for a kind soul to tend to us both.” The narrator likes disguises, real and imaginary, under which he goes through the world like a flâneur.
“An Errand” has a man driving to and walking into a new landfill under power lines, where he gets briefly lost and finds an abandoned cabin or playhouse with old magazines and a stamp album in the drawer of a desk. I didn’t get it.
“In the Mind” is the eighth story.
“Scrupulous Amédée” Conti is a lighthouse keeper on an island, Le Galite, off the coast of Tunisia in this, the longest story in the collection. He was in love with Laurence but marries Carmen, has two children, goes off to war and is captured, then repatriated when very ill. To make more money, he moves to a lighthouse on Tabarka, where he witnesses a card game between Jehovah (Amédée recognizes him from Michelangelo’s picture, which he has seen in a photo) and Satan. Then dancers appear around his bed, and his teeth start to fall out. Over the next several years he follows directions about sex and money given by the nocturnal apparitions. Eventually, on a return visit to a new-deserted Le Galite, Amédée writes his own death certificate and is found completely desanguinated.
Then the story shifts to Anne, Amédée’s sister, who goes to revisit Tunisia when her oldest son Yves, who’s gone to live in America, comes to visit. They go see Laurence, who tells them the real story of Amédée’s choosing to marry Carmen rather than Laurence: the barkeeper Conchette, who had introduced Amédée to sex, induced Laurence’s father to put a spell on Amédée, whom he had always feared would inherit his father’s tendency toward suicide.
“Touch Wood” is a story about contingency. An American woman fails to reconnect with her Moroccan lover. But then the story becomes like a chain letter, from which some profit and others, ignoring it, suffer.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
michaelm42071 | Sep 6, 2009 |
Joe Ashby Porter
for Bet
- all best from Joe Carter in Key West
1/93
 
Segnalato
chestergap | 1 altra recensione | Jul 29, 2017 |

Potrebbero anche piacerti

Autori correlati

Aurelie Sheehan Contributor
Sesshu Foster Contributor
John Noto Contributor
Steven Duplij Contributor
Rimma Gerlovina Contributor
Ted Grossman Contributor
Andrew Koopmans Contributor
Valery Gerlovin Contributor
Lynne Butler Oaks Contributor

Statistiche

Opere
10
Opere correlate
3
Utenti
49
Popolarità
#320,875
Voto
½ 3.5
Recensioni
4
ISBN
13
Lingue
1