It's easy to see why Stefan became a German feminist icon after the 1975 publication of the novella ``Shedding,'' and equally easy to see why her influence has waned with stories like those collected under the title ``Literally Dreaming.'' ``Shedding'' paints an intimate portrait of a woman learning to exist without men. That idea must have seemed shocking at its inception, and even today the fluid prose exerts a strong pull through its laid-back, unnamed, first-person narrator. She outlines her sex life, beginning with a painful ``first time,'' but is primarily concerned with what women do and how they act when they no longer need to serve as emotional intermediaries for men. Eventually, a loving, almost maternal bond develops between the narrator and a woman named Fenna, who grope desperately for language to express what is happening between them. Not a single word of this tale of one woman's consciousness being raised sounds dated almost 20 years later. The short stories, however, are pale, ineffective repetitions of that powerful exploration of nascent feminism. They inhabit the world that the narrator of ``Shedding'' aims for—women living together out in the country without men—but lack the natural structure and tension provided by the novella narrator's sexual evolution. In an interesting essay appended here, ``Euphoria and Cacophony,'' Stefan recalls that ``Literally Dreaming'' was unpopular in Germany because ``nothing sensational happens; there's no action, no sex scenes, no struggle against men''—however, the interchangeable stories' endless nature scenes and incomplete sentences may also have had something to do with the negative reaction. With the exception of Stefan's essay, which is cluttered with lines like ``But I'm anticipating myself,'' the translations are solid but overly cautious. An afterword by Levin provides useful background on international feminist literature and Stefan's place in its spectrum. Experimental writing with a 50% success rate.
Pub Date: Dec. 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-55861-081-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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