The Complete Fiction by Francis Wyndham
2009; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 83; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2009.0366
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Studies and Diaspora
ResumoI > ^1 I z ^1 I <^1 I D H I ? H I ^1 Sethi skillfully handles Pakistan's political tensions. ReferencestoZulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution, Benazir Bhutto's disappointing legacy,and General Per vez Musharraf's coup d'etat work their way into the narrative, but they never overwhelm Sethi's primary focus on complex personal relationships. Zaki's return to Pakistan after two years at Harvard is tinged with an uncertainty reflectedinPakistan itself: "The drive homewas tooshort, the bridgetoosmall, thetrees nothigh enoughon thecanal." There are moments when the novel fal ters?the trip to Spain seems contrived, and Zaki's grandmother's memories of Partition are unmotivated?but in gen eral Sethi writes with assurance and empathy. When Zaki earns admission to an elite secondary school because of a story he wrote, his grandmother says, "Itwas Allah's doing.My mother said itwas talent. And [greataunts] Suri andHukmi said it was allvery well but storiesalone couldn'tget you through your life." Forreaders of this and future novels by Ali Sethi, let'shope Zaki's aunts are wrong. Jim Hannan Le Moyne College HylkeSpeerstra.De K?lde Kr?stocht. Gorredijk, Netherlands. Bornmeer. 2009. 192 pages. 25. isbn 978-90 5615-210-9 The year 2009 in Friesland is dedi cated to the one-hundred-year jubi leeof thesociety "The Frisian Eleven Cities." That society is directly con nected to the Eleven-City Skating Race, a famed two hundred kilome terrace thatisheld whenever a hard frost freezes the Frisian canals and lakes to accommodate the thousands of would-be champions. Besides the planning ofmany festivitiesfor the year, the jubilee committee com missioned the well-known Frisian author Hylke Speerstra, who him selfparticipated in several of these marathon races, towrite a commem orative book. The result isDe K?lde Kriistocht (The cold crusade), a col lection of eleven ice-race connected stories. To be commissioned to write ice stories fora jubilee year might tax the powers of imagination of even the best writers. Speerstra, the best selling author of such sagas as De Oerpolder, isup to thechallenge.As a masterful storyteller, he knows how to move the reader to tears, some times through heartbreaking loss and sometimes through hilarious comedic touches, as he does in this volume. There are the poignant tales of thedrowning of an only child and of a lonely immigrant's returntohis motherland, where he discovers a son he didn't know he had. Speerstra also knows how to paint vivid physical portraits, like theRubenesque Woltsje with huge silken-soft milker's hands thathave cows seeking her out tobe milked, and romantic heroes like the hand some skipper,Wiggele, skating his way through the night toward the open arms of Woltsje, climaxing ina celebration of love and passion wor- ^^^J thyof a Vivaldi symphony. But there are also stories of thwarted love,of intrigue,ofbetray- ^^^J al and revenge. And there is the wildly imagined concluding story, a futuristic sci-fi tale (the setting is 2018) of two unlikely characters hitting it off and planning a race with thehelp ofRussian technology, only to find themselves defeated by Mother Nature. Speerstra's most engaging sto ries feature three-dimensional char acters whose plights elicit human sympathy orwhose human mystery evidences itself in an inexplicable obsession with the marathon medal lion,making themwilling to sacri fice even their hard-earned reputa tionand integritytoobtain it. De K?lde Kr?stocht comprises an ice race through the twentieth century and beyond, through times of hardship, class prejudice, war, emigration, and affluence. Hylke Speerstra tells the "story" of that marathon race in all four modes of literature: romance, comedy, trag edy, and irony. It's yet another wor thyachievement of Friesland's most popular storyteller. Henry J.Baron Calvin College Francis Wyndham. The Complete Fic tion. Alan Hollinghurst, intro. New York. New York Review Books. 2009. xii + 403 pages. $16.95. isbn 978-1 Previously published in 2008 as The Other Garden and Collected Stories, this represents a life's work in fic tion of an author better known as a reviewer for the Sunday Times, as an editor who revived interest in Jean Rhys, and a publisher who helped discover Bruce Chatwin. But Francis IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 70 1 World Literature Today 1835 As a teenager during World War II, he wrote fifteenstories that make up almost half of thisvolume. When he shopped the collection, titledOut of the War, in 1945, it was rejected all round. Discouraged, he published one story ina little maga zine and shoved the rest into a draw er, to be forgotten for twenty-seven years. He took up a journalistic career thanks to the one published story that caught the attention of the righteditor. In 1972he rediscov ered the stories,got thempublished in 1974, and started writing more stories, collected in 1985. A novel, The Other Garden, followed in 1987, winning the Whitbread FirstNovel Award. A book of essays, The Theatre ofEmbarrassment, was published in 1991. SinceWyndham, now eighty five, admits he loves "sitting still/' it remains to be seen whether this publication will stimulate a returnto writing fiction. In an interview with Rachel Cooke, published August 17, 2008, in theSunday edition of theObserv er,he described a view thatseems to accordwith his own quiet and, some would say, underproductive career: "What I've always wanted to do in fiction is towrite about the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people's active years. It seems to me that it isn't sufficiently celebrated." Indeed, the early stories inOut of the War arewritten from theper spective ofpeople whose lives are in a kind of suspension. Some mirror his own case:Wyndham leftschool, waited to be called up, broke an ankle in basic training, was discov ered tohave TB while recuperating in a military hospital, and never made it to active duty. As a whole, they present small-town life as ratherdreary and unfulfilling.Even though they are quite well crafted and contain very shrewd character studies, especially of young women, one can understand why publishers' readersmight have seen the stories as hitting thewrong note in 1945. Of the later stories, "The Ground Hostess" is a gem. A woman approaching middle age loses her mother, determines she is now free to try writing, decides on a memoir of hermother, but phone calls from well-meaning friends and her own natural lassitude block her from beginning. She invents two lovers, one for each of her two most insistent callers, hoping to secure evenings of peace so she can write. But thingswork out differently.It's an admirable story, all the more for teasing the reader to speculate possible endings along the way. "Ursula" and The Other Garden best display Wyndham's considerable talents in drawing character, par ticularly women as considered and admired bymuch youngermen. My one disappointment in these stories is thatwhile those observed change and reveal different sides of their characters through the years, their = observers are curiously static. They = seem lost in being ones on whom = nothing is lost. = The introductionby Alan Hoi- = linghurst rightly situates Wynd- = ham's fiction in the tradition of man- = ners, "from Jane Austen to Henry = James." But Wyndham's later fiction = represents what became of that tradi- = tion, when theprivileged understood = thattheyhad lostpower within soci- = ety.Wyndham combines thepathos = of a Katherine Mansfield?and her = ear for dialogue?with the satiric = perspective of an EvelynWaugh. All = ofwhich is tosay thatFrancisWynd- = ham is very worth discovering. = W. M. H?gen = Oklahoma BaptistUniversity = Verse C. P. Cavafy. Half an Hour and Other Poems. George Economou, tr. London. Stop Press. 2008. 50 pages, ill. isbn 0-9547603-1-X This spare, vibrant selection of twenty one poems by the Greek poetConstan tine Cavafy contains an eclectic range ofwork, includingboth early and late verse. It is an arresting, unusual presen tation that offers the poems in an evoca tivevisual format two drawings fora bust ofCavafy that was never executed are on the cover, and several poems are paired with intriguingillustrations by Greek artists. As Cavaiy's international popular ityhas continued to grow, so has the weight ofbibliographicscaffolding sup porting theconstructs ofhis translated poems, and it is George Economou's explicitlystated intent here to remove theobstructiveclutterof classifications like //collected,,, //uncollected,,, and "rejected"aswell as overly longhistori cal glosses. By presentingthepoems in ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ...
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