Elegy on Kinderklavier
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
“[An] impressive debut short story collection . . . These haunting stories deserve a wide audience” (Library Journal, starred review).
Winner of the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award
The stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child’s body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway’s stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.
“Story after story, this collection surprised me and set my mind ablaze.” —Alan Heathcock, author of Volt
“Arna Hemenway writes a fiction whose satisfactions are not merely narrative but musical, and it is a pleasure to listen to his stories as they rise into song.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
“Death is an imminent, lurking presence in this debut collection of seven stories, which explore the confluence of fate and circumstance that places men in situations of anguish and despair.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Death is an imminent, lurking presence in this debut collection of seven stories, which explore the confluence of fate and circumstance that places men in situations of anguish and despair. The tales unfold in slow motion with moments of acute sensitivity. "The IED" is a 22-page depiction of the "paroxysms of memory" that a soldier undergoes as he steps on an explosive device. A homeless veteran suffering from PTSD continuously relives his combat experiences in "The Fugue." Hemenway's prose is dense and often quite beautiful at the sentence level, but the pacing slows momentum. "In the Mosque of Imam Alwami," the war in Iraq and the subsequent violent tide of fundamentalism affects the lives of three Kurdish friends in devastating ways. In the heartbreaking title story, Hemenway spares no grim details in depicting the anguish of a father watching his eight-year-old son dying of a glioma on his brain stem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vividly portrayed through the story of the death of a two-year-old burned to death by zealots in "The Territory of Grief," which takes place in a futuristic town called New Jerusalem, located in the disputed territories and populated only by mourners. In "The Half Moon Martyrs' Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas" an Army recruiter is blamed for the mortality rate of his town's soldiers in Iraq. Hemenway's earnest desire to reflect historical forces that tragically impact individual lives is admirable, but the collection is best read in small doses, and the cumulative effect can be overwhelming.
