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Showing 1 - 4 of 4 matches in All Departments
Rupert is an honored American poet; Gemma a retired architect. They live happily and comfortably in a Greenwich Village apartment; the setting, for over thirty years, of their married life. Each with a previous marriage behind them - which left her with two daughters and him with the promise of greatness - they are now facing the challenge of old age together. Both, in their own way, defy the inevitability of death, and yet both are busy preparing for it. The alternating entries of their private journals, which make up the body of Calisher's text, tell a story of familiarity and the fear of loss, love and uncertainty of the future, meanings and habits. With rare verve and panache, Hortense Calisher has confronted a difficult and often neglected subject - and has triumphed magnificently.
A "tattoo" is a bugle call, a summoning that lingers in the ear.
Although Hortense Calisher's family eventually migrated north to
New York City, the echoes of their days as a slave-owning Jewish
family in the South still resonate with this acclaimed author, who
uncovers a part of history never before so strongly and tenderly
revealed.
Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "stand ing] vividly with
Cather and Fitzgerald" (Cynthia Ozick). In this, her latest and
most lauded novel, she explores a family united in blood yet
divided by ideas. Son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice;
family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; art expert
Erika has a nose job; and artist Zach has two wives. Their mother,
infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no
longer rich, is bound to a past that never quite dies. The buried
history of this extraordinary--and very American--family comes to
light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as a wife the
woman who, years ago, joined the family circle, then mysteriously
disappeared.
One afternoon in the early seventies Carol is sent out for Chinese food, and, while she is away, the explosive device which her revolutionary student friends are busy constructing, accidentally goes off, causing enormous damage. Her friends get away - she is incarcerated. Twenty years later, she has a small, unfurnished flat in New York, a fridge stocked only with the pills supplied by her social worker and an irresistible urge to slip away and live somewhere unencumbered by memories, names and all of her other false possessions. When she finally discovers that even her social worker is taking pills in an attempt to cope with life, Carol gathers a few essential belongings into her backpack and sets off to sleep rough on the city's streets again. Turning away from her dependence on drugs, Carol finds that memories, histories and responsibilities slowly return to her. In the Slammer with Carol Smith is a tough, hip novel by one of America's most outstanding living authors. It has the steady rhythms of the street as well as the haltings and hesitations experienced by the strong yet vulnerable Carol as she rediscovers herself. In fits and starts, the wild terrain of a life spent wandering under distant, unknown stars is mapped out. Carol's journey is both a rediscovery of emotional hiding-places and a search for the path that leads back into a world of normality without illusions and of sanity devoid of compromise.
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