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Sto caricando le informazioni... Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (originale 2011; edizione 2011)di Edith Pearlman (Autore), Ann Patchett (Introduzione)
Informazioni sull'operaBinocular Vision: New & Selected Stories di Edith Pearlman (2011)
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. This is quite a collection of short stories, many with similar themes. They are closely observed and some of them are fascinating but many didn't quite hit the spot for me. The ones I did like were the shorter ones that were perfectly formed vignettes of a moment. An annual evening dinner with your daughter-in-law's family or a recurrence of cancer. These were just ten pages or so of outstanding writing. But the longer stories seemed to ramble or have similar themes and I found many of these hard going. I read this for a second time after Pearlman's death. I thought I might get more out of it, but many of the stories were still difficult for me to understand. Her word choice is excellent, and her choice of characters is interesting. "The Story" was my very favorite. I did feel as if I knew many of the characters in a variety of the stories. Edith Pearlman, a relatively obscure Brookline, MA author, just died a few weeks ago at age 86. The short stories in this collection are such perfectly observed, concise, humane gems that she can be comfortably compared to the renowned queen of the genre, Alice Munro. All 34 stories are told by women or girls, or by women when they were girls, encompassing inner layers and outer occurrences in perfect proportion, and some even conclude with pleasing surprises and stunning shocks. A little lost girl in Harvard Square; refugees and immigrants; the delivery of a Torah from a destroyed Czech village to a midwestern temple; shoplifting; affairs conducted and affairs resisted; deaths by disease; and, most remarkably, a suicide so vividly described that one might assume that the author had lived through it. Each story is so finely tuned that it's next to impossible to put this collection down until all have been read. My favorite is "Allog", about a Filipino newcomer who becomes indispensable to the wary residents of an Israeli apartment building.
"My only challenge," acknowledges Ann Patchett in her charming introduction to "Binocular Vision," describing the experience of reading one of Pearlman's stories in public, "was to keep from interrupting myself as I read. So often I wanted to stop and say to the audience, 'Did you hear that? Do you understand how good this is?'" Patchett is not alone. As I made my way through "Binocular Vision," I kept stopping to read passages aloud to my wife, my friends, anyone who would listen. "Did you hear that?" I would ask them. "Do you understand how good this is?" Pearlman writes about the predicaments — odd, wry, funny and painful — of being human. Her characters are sophisticated, highly literate, relatively affluent and often musical. They travel, they read, they go to museums and concerts: they take pleasure in what the world offers. They’re also principled, and moral responsibility plays an important part in their lives. Pearlman’s prose is smooth and poetic, and her world seems safe and engaging. So it’s arresting when, suddenly, almost imperceptibly, she slips emotion into the narrative, coloring it unexpectedly with deep or delicate hues. Premi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
"No matter the situation in which her characters find themselves--an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of memories unearthed by an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, the deathbed secret of a young girl's forbidden forest tryst with the tsar, the danger that befalls a wealthy couple's child in a European inn of misfits--Edith Pearlman conveys their experience with wit and aplomb, with relentless but clear-eyed optimism, and with a supple prose that reminds us, sentence by sentence, page by page, of the gifts our greatest verbal innovators can bestow" --Inside flap. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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That being said, this is a very long, dense collection of short stories, many of which are contemplative and intense. I read short stories like poetry, stopping at least for a moment after each one to process. I feel like I've been reading this book for years, and that near-weariness is not a good feeling, especially as an introduction to a new writer. I would have preferred a more winnowed selection. ( )