Unrelenting and sometimes heavy-handed, at their best Seghers’ stories are also moving and deeply intelligent.
A collection of stories spanning Seghers’ accomplished career.
Seghers, a German Jewish writer, left the country in time to avoid the worst of Hitler’s excesses, but in her many novels and short stories, she dedicated herself to a stringent and ongoing analysis of fascism: its victims, its resisters, and, occasionally, its admirers. Most of the stories included in this collection are concerned with the war. In “A Man Becomes a Nazi,” Seghers traces the life of a man who did indeed become a Nazi; she may have meant the story as an attempt to at least understand, if not sympathize with, at least one individual from a mass of many, but the result is somewhat flat-footed. When her character starts attending political meetings, he “learned that the cause of all his problems was the Versailles Treaty created by the Jews and the Free Masons in order to enslave him.” Seghers probably meant to humanize him, but her character turns out, instead, a caricature. She was by no means a subtle writer. Seghers was concerned with major questions, and she pursued those questions in her fiction relentlessly. What does fascism do to a person’s soul? she asks again and again. In the title story, one of Seghers’ best known, a woman imagines herself with her old schoolmates on a class trip to the Rhine. As “Netty” (Seghers’ own nickname) scans the scene, she intersperses her descriptions of the children in the years before World War I with the lives they grew up to endure. “Marianne and Leni, of whom one would later suffer the loss of her child because of the other,” she writes, “were walking out of the little seesaw garden, their arms thrown about each other’s necks.” It’s a poignant and affecting story, even if Seghers underscores her point several times over. The collection also includes stories from early in Seghers’ career as well as tales based on myths rather than war (“Tales of Artemis,” for one), but the main thrust of Seghers’ obsession remains clear, and some stories are more successful than others.
Unrelenting and sometimes heavy-handed, at their best Seghers’ stories are also moving and deeply intelligent.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68137-535-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.
Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275959
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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