Evocative depictions of work, confinement, and the fantasy of escape.
Yearnings from East German writer Hilbig (1941-2007).
Work and nature wrestle everywhere in these stories, first published in 1982 and newly translated from German. Hilbig’s background as a millworker is present throughout the collection, often only by implication; the more peripheral his occupation is, the more interesting the stories are. “Idyll” begins like an Impressionist painting, indulging a naïve scene of “enticing grass” and water that takes “the form of a noise suspended over the surroundings”—before a declension to labor and drudgery: “How dreary, how pathetic to work…how tiresome to know what country I live in.” “Thirst” depicts, in similar detail, the ritual of getting drunk downwind of a soap factory. The narrator conjures “the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers”—the soap is composed of animal fat—and then says, “You must drink until all memory of that repulsive gas yields.” When the story concludes, “He’d prefer the stench of a stable on the fields’ edge,” the daydreamed countryside is a foil for an absurd, industrial life. Later stories featuring a fugitive and a “pedo” prisoner offer new settings but similar vivid accounts of places that exist only in the characters’ minds. The mechanical description of pedophilia—“a sexual predilection for immature things, botched techniques, devices rendered nearly unusable by their incomplete construction”—mirrors Hilbig’s proposed explanation of factory work to a “visitor from Mars”: “producing machines to manufacture machine parts for assembling machines to manufacture other machines,” and so on. Each is a trap to escape. Hilbig wrote poetry as well as prose, and his tone is often conversational, his grammar loose with long or unfinished sentences. Sometimes, though, the simplest turns of phrase delight. Indulging a daydream, he writes, “I said it as though I were learning to talk.”
Evocative depictions of work, confinement, and the fantasy of escape.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781949641615
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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