Verwandte Artikel zu A Hard Time to Be a Father: Stories

A Hard Time to Be a Father: Stories - Hardcover

Weldon, Fay

 
9781582340111: A Hard Time to Be a Father: Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1582340110 ISBN 13: 9781582340111
Verlag: Bloomsbury USA, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Fay Weldon won the Silver Pen Award for her last collection of stories, Wicked Women.

Here are nineteen sparkling new tales about the way we live now, as lovers, partners, children, parents. Or alone. Stories of passion, desire and necessary restraint; of the near future, the recent past; of old habits, new technology; of won't-be mothers and would-be fathers; of houses ancient and modern. Stories, in fact, to enlighten us to the true and timeless nature of the human condition, in this new age of self-knowledge.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

FAY WELDON is an English novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who, at the age of sixteen, lived in a grand London townhouse as the daughter of the housekeeper. In addition to winning a Writers' Guild Award for the pilot of the original Upstairs Downstairs, she is a Commander of the British Empire whose books include Praxis, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; The Heart of the Country, winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize; Worst Fears, shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award; and Wicked Women, which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She lives in England.

Rezensionen

In this collection of short stories, Weldon (Big Girls Don't Cry, LJ 8/98) presents 19 vignettes of extended, blended, related, and unrelated relatives and their struggles to maintain or terminate relationships with other people. Most of her characters are the product of relationships based on unequal amounts of affection. Undaunted, they go on to new romances and families. "The thing you love wants to destroy you?so what? Except you find you want to live and take steps to save yourself." Her characters all learn surprising things about people they think they know well. While the stories, set in England and New Zealand, are well written and very readable, most of her male characters are dolts, rogues, and/or chauvinists. There is a depressing sameness in the inability of most of Weldon's characters to maintain a stable relationship with a spouse but a sense of optimism in their willingness to keep trying. Recommended.?Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch Hill
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The prolific Weldon (Wicked Women) is at her wry, risk-taking best in this broad collection of 19 stories. The tight and cohesive work is built on a matrix of recurring characters intersecting with variations on themes (betrayal and loss, truth and scandal). In her signature style, Weldon peoples many of these pieces with women who wreak catastrophe in ways that thrill the misanthropic reader: from the art critic in "Inspector Remorse," who seduces a painter's husband out of jealousy, to Stella in "Once in Love in Oslo," who tells the woman who stole her husband that she, too, is being cheated on. Scruples and sentimentality have no role here, and the result is pure fun: when Elspeth in "Percentage Trust" learns that her lover Aziz is not a mogul but a chauffeur, she simply joins him in his bunko life. Dark humor pervades, especially in choices of names: Damask Vale-Eden and her sisters Chenille, Velvet and Caledonia are characters in "What the Papers Say"; Jude Iscary is the aptly named protagonist of "GUP or Falling in Love in Helsinki"; the derivation of the names of former husband and wife Imp and Trixie in "Noisy into the Night" is hilarious. Only the title story tries too hard to be wry. A tale called "Pyroclastic Flow" works far better in this context than in Forever Sisters, a multiauthor anthology also in current release. As always, Weldon takes no prisoners.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nineteen new stories from Weldon (Wicked Women, etc.) that, even when fragmentary, sizzle with intellectual energy and acerbic wit. Weldon is noted for her tales of the war between the sexes, a war where victory doesnt always go to the strong or the deserving. Like a war correspondent, her dispatches from the battlefield both shock and instruct, but, as sex may be just one big cosmic joke, humor and satire often relieve the underlying bitterness. Pieces such as Percentage Trust and Inspector Remorsedescribe, respectively, a woman who coolly calculates every action in percentage terms during her affair with a man, whom she rightly doesn't trust; and a married woman and art critic who sits in church on Good Friday trying to decide whether shes a sociopath because she feels no remorse for the suicide of the wife of the artist she seduced. The wittiest story here is What the Papers Say: a successful model and a married movie star have an affair, which, when discovered, becomes headline news. Their careers are ruined, and their lives change in unsuspected ways, but by the time mitigating facts are revealed, other talesof an air crash, of a royal divorcehave risen to take their place. In the title story, a mordant modern allegory, Weldon mocks bureaucratic contemporary health care, fatherhood, pop psychology, and even feminism when a prospective father faints, sickens, and is rushed to a local emergency room upon hearing the word ``baby.'' Other standouts detail parents' scandalous behavior that fortuitously prevents an unsuitable marriage (A Great Antipodean Scandal ); a mother's contradictory admonitions that finally make sense (My Mother Said); and a haunted house exorcized by the marriage of its owner to a man who feels that he has mistreated his own house (Spirits Fly South). Some unevenness, but always bracing and full of zest. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Verlag
Bloomsbury USA
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1582340110
ISBN 13 
9781582340111
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
264
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
WordUnited GmbH
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