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Loading... In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs: Stories (original 1981; edition 1996)by Tobias Wolff
Work InformationIn the Garden of the North American Martyrs: Stories by Tobias Wolff (1981)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Tobias Wolff's first collection is an excellent and diverse mix of stories that all hit their mark in different ways. Whether it's an old couple who's love has been lost/never rendered in "Maiden Voyage" or a man navigating his sense of judgement in "An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke" Wolff approaches his characters with grace, humor, and honesty. What's really pleasing is the sense of completeness with each of these stories and the moment of turning, where you are wracked with the craftsmanship of a truly wonderful storyteller, in each and every piece. As with any collection of stories, some appealed more than others. However, all the characters are vividly drawn and are each put in situations in which there is a moral dilemma, some with more serious consequences than others. How they will meet these dilemmas becomes the question. I liked several stories in this volume. But the title story, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, is the one I liked the best. Mary, a history professor, loses her job when her college closes. Although she finds another job, she must move to Portland Oregon. The weather there is wet and rainy, and though she is happy to work, she is unhappy there. An old colleague contacts her about a job in upstate New York and her application results in an interview, where she discovers a deception. Her dilemma involves how to handle the attitude of the colleague and the search committee. She resolves it with panache and has the last laugh! In this case, the rating answers the question "Did you like it?" rather than "Is it good?" There's a difference; Wolff is a very good writer and these are skillfully written stories, but I found them depressing and overall less than enjoyable to read. That's not to say I wouldn't read something else by Wolff.
In this, his first book, Tobias Wolff avoids the emotional and stylistic monotone that constricts so many collections of contemporary short stories. His range, sometimes within the same story, extends from fastidious realism to the grotesque and the lyrical. In these 12 stories, Wolff's characters include a teen-age boy who becomes a compulsive liar on the day his father dies, an elderly couple who try to maintain their dignity despite the travesties of a golden anniversary love cruise, and an obese man whose surreptitious eating makes him feel as duplicitous as a spy. He allows these characters scenes of flamboyant madness as well as quiet desperation, moments of slap-happiness as well as muted contentment. ContainsNotable Lists
Among the characters you'll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the offensive conviviality of the ship's social director. Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff's characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path." No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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This is a very short story from a clearly talented and lauded author about a woman going to interview for a job at a college as a concession to their statute about at least interviewing women. When she discovers she never had an actual chance at the job she goes off script in her guest lecture, going on a racist and unsubstantiated tirade about the torture and murder of a preacher by the Native American people whose stolen land the college is on. Like, I'm all the way in for sticking it to the man and highlighting the plight of anyone in academia who isn't a cishet white man, but an (assumed) white woman going on a demonising and felacious rant about what I understand to be a confederacy of multiple tribal nations as if they are one inhuman people is not the way to go about it. Honestly, it feels like she basically did the thing the Kramer guy did -- going on an abhorrent outburst of racism because of a perceived wrong.
I just...don't know about this one folx. It's bad to be a sexist POS, but being racist or bigoted in any other way is also absolutely unacceptable, and suffering one kind of discrimination doesn't give you the right to do that to another group, regardless of intersections. It makes a mockery of what seemed to be the point of the story, and the way her lecture is handled and how it abruptly ends feels triumphant for her, so it doesn't seem to be making any commentary on how those who lack certain privilege still discriminate those who have equal or less privilege.
Am I way off here? No one else seems to have really addressed this issue, beyond one review saying she says some 'un PC stuff'. Maybe this is a case of this being the first thing of this author I've read and many others already being spellbound by his other work? I don't know. ( )