A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness.
A stark collection of short stories from a Brazilian writer who creates specks of beauty with every stroke of the pen.
In Abreu’s collection of 18 stories, readers navigate through a Brazil lost in time, stuck in the impasse of tragedy, and gasping for air in a space void of it. In the opening story, “Dialogue,” Abreu sets a scene that determines the rest of the book. Two genderless interlocutors declare their friendship for one another in an ever revolving cycle of affection. Such is the binary that Abreu develops in all his stories: Two individuals struggle to find the words to identify their feelings, communicate with affect and sensations, and ultimately find peace in not knowing. Known for his often dizzying syntax and provocative imagery, Abreu writes with an ease that sticks and with an intention that triggers. “Too much culture kills people’s bodies, man, too many films, too many books, too many words, I could only consume you by masturbating, there was the entire Library of Alexandria keeping our bodies apart,” writes the narrator of “The Survivors.” Struggling through the surplus of material to make sense of their existence, Abreu’s characters prefer to put on a record, light up a cigarette, and watch time pass. “The room was still under that burgundy shade, dull, stagnant, with the old yellow cushion shining in the dark, strangely greenish now, in the blue streetlight. He gestured toward the telephone. He even took one step forward, as if he were about to go back. But he didn’t move.” They speak on the phone to their loved ones, they drink copiously, they dance, they sweat, they have sex, they die. Some might live their entire lives without looking beyond the cloud of cigarette smoke hovering directly in front of them. Some might collect funerals. Abreu remarkably captures a feeling that escapes definition, a proximity to death so palpable that the words scream its song. Abreu’s prose is still, rich, and full of time lost and time future.
A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953861-20-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.
Their daughter’s wedding stirs up uncomfortable memories for a divorced couple.
The day before the ceremony, the bride’s mother, Gail Baines, second in command at the Ashton School in Baltimore, learns that not only has she been passed over to replace the retiring headmistress, but the new recruit is bringing her deputy with her. The lack of people skills that have cost Gail this promotion are evident even in that initial scene; she’s a classic cranky Tyler protagonist, given to blurting out her opinions with little consideration for others’ feelings. Her first-person narration also reveals her to be touchingly vulnerable, convinced that daughter Debbie, prettier and more polished than she, will inevitably prefer husband-to-be Kenneth’s overbearing, better-off parents. Although her divorce from Max was amicable, Gail considers him a bit of a slacker, and isn’t best pleased when he turns up with a rescue cat in tow and says he has to stay with her because Kenneth is horribly allergic. A startling revelation from Debbie, fresh from her pre-wedding “Day of Beauty,” immediately divides the exes, who have very different opinions about how their daughter should handle this crisis. It also leads to Gail’s revelation of the infidelity that led to their divorce, though not in the way readers might imagine. Laid-back Max is the only fully fleshed character here other than Gail, and the novel is very short, but Tyler’s touch is as delicate, her empathy for human beings and all their quirks as evident in her 25th work of fiction as it was in her first, published an astonishing 60 years ago. Gail’s acerbic observations about the wedding and all its participants, her wistful memories of her odd-couple romance with Max, and her account of their enforced intimacy over the three days surrounding the wedding alternate to poignant effect. The closing pages offer a happy ending that feels true to the characters and utterly deserved.
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803486
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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