Pulse Points
Stories
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
September 1, 2018
Stories about moments of being and losing and loving and living.Down's (Our Magic Hour, 2016) first short story collection plumbs the depths of life's misfortunes: suicide, illness, miscarriage, sexual violence, infidelity, and death. Spanning continents and cultures, the 14 stories center around the domestic and ordinary. Down deftly balances hope and sorrow--a tightrope walk that makes even the banal seem salient. In "Vaseline," a young girl with potential to burn acclimates to life without her mother and brother in a dead-end town: "I had rage in my veins. If I were a boy I might've run around shooting things up." Told from the blasé perspective of one of the teens, "Dogs" follows a gang of unrepentant teenage boys who brutally terrorize girls; this is an already disturbing story that feels especially devastating in the era of #MeToo. In "Vox Clamantis," a woman joins her ex-fiance on a road trip to visit his dying mother. In "Eternal Father," two young women (each with her own emotional trauma) care for each other after a night gone wrong. Where a less capable writer would descend into the saccharine, Down writes about love and friendship with an emotionally resonant sparseness: "We were discovering in each other new shapes and colours, strange prisms of blue that we never knew existed" and "Love was small-town adventure, it was our knees touching beneath tabletops." Rather than offering answers to life's big questions, the stories offer glimpses into people tackling them--lending them a (mostly) successful snapshotlike quality. After proving her ability to write with nuance and depth, Down unfortunately ends a few stories too abruptly, which leaves the collection feeling a bit uneven.A collection pulsing with emotion; a writer crackling with potential.
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November 1, 2018
In Peaks a six-year-old niece intrudes on her young aunt's early-morning reading. She wonders what the book is about, and the aunt responds, It's a lot of short stories . . . mostly about sad men. This story, among 14 in Down's first collection, offers a clue to the book's themes. There are moments of sadness: a sister makes an offering, among many others, in a heavily shadowed forest near Mount Fuji, where her brother committed suicide; a couple realizes that they've come to an end in a city that celebrates love. There are moments of violence: two men who have loved each other through a parent's loss of faculties discover someone left for dead; boys play a sadistic game with the neighborhood girls. But there are also moments of love: estranged sisters bond on an English hilltop. By using a diverse array of speakers, and by merging the exquisite with the horrendous, Down has expertly and candidly captured memorable characters and predicaments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
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