Australian newcomer Wilder offers a pocketful of stories that read
by and large like apprentice pieces culled, say, mainly from
writer-to-be student days. "Beach Report" is a word-sprightly
satire in the manner of Barthelme, about a TV-jaded society whose
members are happy to have their thinking taken over for them by
-visitors in flying saucers; "The Vampire's Assistant at the 157
Steps" (a maker of cheap movies overstays his welcome in a friend's
cliff-house) follows in the sometimes revelatory real-is-surreal
path; and what may be the best piece in the book ("The West Midland
Underground") creates a pensive collage of self and place and
history as its narrator contemplates a legendary rail system. Nods
in the direction of science fiction, though, end up as
self-limiting exercises, as in "The Man of Slow Feeling" (a man
finds that his sense-responses are delayed for three hours after
any stimulus) and "See You Later" (another sees things only from a
point 200 years too early in time). "The Girl Behind the Bar is
Reading Jack Kerouac" is a slight story that eats its own tail, as
the reader of a girl's stories gets drawn into a reenactment with
her of the sexual events she's predicted-created in them. "Joe's
Absence" overprepares its way to its jejune and unconvincing point
that a young man is more interested in a sneak-peek at a
writer-friend's stories than in a chance with the writer-friend's
girl; "Hector and Freddie" chronicles the sexual confusions of two
repressed Oxford students, trying for thematic height and sexual
candor but hitting short of the first and generally trivializing
the second; and the callow and undergraduate-toned "Aspects of the
Dying Process," about sex and unrequited love among the very young,
takes itself seriously in a way its people and material simply
can't sustain (" 'How do you get your jeans faded like that?' he
asked her"). Deeply uneven, wanting more time to age. The title
story, by the way, in case you're wondering, is an ironic little
one-pager, deliberately flat as a pancake. (Kirkus Reviews)
This is the story of two poets, one an elderly Belgian woman known
to the world as Jean Latour, the other a young Englishman. When
Mark Taylor finds his life and art broken up by his love for an
older, married woman, he turns for help to the poems of Jean Latour
and finds the help he craves in the poet herself. In this early
work we see the first flowering of May Sarton s special ability to
depict sensitive people who find they must travel new pathways if
they are to discover their true selves."
General
Imprint: |
W W Norton & Co Inc
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
October 1991 |
First published: |
July 1991 |
Authors: |
May Sarton
|
Dimensions: |
211 x 140 x 18mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
252 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-393-30785-6 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
0-393-30785-9 |
Barcode: |
9780393307856 |
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