Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature Series)
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Amazon.com Review "We are all homeless women, crash victims, chance survivors," Kate Braverman announces in her lush, atmospheric collection of short fiction, Small Craft Warnings. Or, put another way, "Sometimes women must go traveling." The disassociated protagonists of these stories are travelers of a psychic if not a physical sort, homeless women by nature if not in fact. Living through the long, bright California of the soul, they find themselves seduced by the possibilities of simply walking away. An aging soap-opera star struggles to cope with her brain-damaged mother in "Our Lady of 43 Sorrows"; the teenager of "Hour of the Fathers" chafes at her visits to her newfound father, a disabled, mentally ill Vietnam vet. Oddly passive, these women dream of escape, not action. Even when the young homeless mother in "Pagan Night" plans to abandon her baby, it's as if she were reading about something that had already happened. Braverman's prose is something of an acquired taste. An accomplished poet, she writes in highly rhythmic and figurative language, in metaphors that shimmy from concrete to abstract and back again in a way that can be disorienting, even claustrophobic. Why use one noun when three in a series will do? Mesh; aviaries; the odors of citrus and vanilla; porcelain teacups; candles, perfume, and blood: these are the incantations in Braverman's curious fictional spell. "Sin becomes a kind of flame, a blue friend warm in your hand," proclaims the grandmother in the title story, and if this sort of dialogue strikes you as contrived rather than lyrical, Small Craft Warnings may not be for you. For the less literal-minded, Braverman rewards the reader's attention with linguistic pyrotechnics that read like no one else writing fiction today. --Mary Park Read more From Publishers Weekly The women depicted in poet (Postcard from August) and novelist (Wonders of the West) Braverman's unremarkable new collection have fallen out of love with the self-destruction that marked her characters' lives in previous work. Underneath the seemingly tidy existences of her female characters, whether teenaged or middle-aged, lies (still) a host of precarious fragilities, though the women have moved beyond recovery from substance abuse and are often groping for freedom from within freighted relationships with grandmothers and mothers. In the title story, for example, the 13-year-old narrator learns on a visit to her ailing grandmother to defy death. " 'What if one life isn't enough?' " her grandmother suggests. " 'What if three dimensions aren't right?' " As Cassidy O'Shea, an aging soap-opera actress in "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows," manages her brain-damaged mother's life, she recognizes that the older woman no longer has to deal with "failed marriages, abandonments, or lies"?a fact that makes Cassidy's mother "the happiest woman she knew." Like the California landscape that her characters inhabit, Braverman's prose is densely layered. Each moment is charged with significance; however, the inevitable epiphanies that her characters undergo seem labored, and the generalizations that these imply too often verge on the banal. Braverman's characters have healed themselves of the maladies that made them distinctive; perhaps as a result her writing seems sadly to lack its former urgency. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review "We are all homeless women, crash victims, chance survivors," Kate Braverman announces in her lush, atmospheric collection of short fiction, Small Craft Warnings. Or, put another way, "Sometimes women must go traveling." The disassociated protagonists of these stories are travelers of a psychic if not a physical sort, homeless women by nature if not in fact. Living through the long, bright California of the soul, they find themselves seduced by the possibilities of simply walking away. An aging soap-opera star struggles to cope with her brain-damaged mother in "Our Lady of 43 Sorrows"; the teenager of "Hour of the Fathers" chafes at her visits to her newfound father, a disabled, mentally ill Vietnam vet. Oddly passive, these women dream of escape, not action. Even when the young homeless mother in "Pagan Night" plans to abandon her baby, it's as if she were reading about something that had already happened. Braverman's prose is something of an acquired taste. An accomplished poet, she writes in highly rhythmic and figurative language, in metaphors that shimmy from concrete to abstract and back again in a way that can be disorienting, even claustrophobic. Why use one noun when three in a series will do? Mesh; aviaries; the odors of citrus and vanilla; porcelain teacups; candles, perfume, and blood: these are the incantations in Braverman's curious fictional spell. "Sin becomes a kind of flame, a blue friend warm in your hand," proclaims the grandmother in the title story, and if this sort of dialogue strikes you as contrived rather than lyrical, Small Craft Warnings may not be for you. For the less literal-minded, Braverman rewards the reader's attention with linguistic pyrotechnics that read like no one else writing fiction today. --Mary Park Read more From Publishers Weekly The women depicted in poet (Postcard from August) and novelist (Wonders of the West) Braverman's unremarkable new collection have fallen out of love with the self-destruction that marked her characters' lives in previous work. Underneath the seemingly tidy existences of her female characters, whether teenaged or middle-aged, lies (still) a host of precarious fragilities, though the women have moved beyond recovery from substance abuse and are often groping for freedom from within freighted relationships with grandmothers and mothers. In the title story, for example, the 13-year-old narrator learns on a visit to her ailing grandmother to defy death. " 'What if one life isn't enough?' " her grandmother suggests. " 'What if three dimensions aren't right?' " As Cassidy O'Shea, an aging soap-opera actress in "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows," manages her brain-damaged mother's life, she recognizes that the older woman no longer has to deal with "failed marriages, abandonments, or lies"?a fact that makes Cassidy's mother "the happiest woman she knew." Like the California landscape that her characters inhabit, Braverman's prose is densely layered. Each moment is charged with significance; however, the inevitable epiphanies that her characters undergo seem labored, and the generalizations that these imply too often verge on the banal. Braverman's characters have healed themselves of the maladies that made them distinctive; perhaps as a result her writing seems sadly to lack its former urgency. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
2019-07-06 04:54:15