Cardinal Numbers
Stories
-
- £9.99
-
- £9.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Inner Tube and Odditorium, a book of strikingly original, convention-defying short stories
Cardinal Numbers is a posthumous collection of brilliantly enigmatic short fiction by Hob Broun, written with the aid of a respirator when the author was paralyzed from the neck down. Witty and full of minimalist surprise, these stories flirt with fragment, fabulism, and collage. In "Rosella, in Stages," an old woman's experience is movingly charted through the voice of her writing in six different life stages—and in six pages, no less. "Highspeed Linear Main Street," a standout tale and an artistic credo of sorts, centers on a photographer's fixation on highway life, while the surreal "Finding Florida" features a Che Guevara who becomes struck with longing for a librarian and receives some unwelcome news from a fortune teller.
Powerfully felt as well as mordantly funny, Cardinal Numbers is a freshly singular contribution to the American short story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though written when the author was confined to a respirator, paralyzed from the neck down, these short stories crackle with life. Broun (Odditorium, Inner Tube), who died last year, uses New Age techniques to describe the disconnections that deflect ordinary lives. "Ice Water'' shows us an elderly, celibate antiquarian bookseller drinking glass after glass of ice water as he watches the nightly rituals of a woman standing naked in the window opposite. ``Finding Florida'' imagines that Che Guevara, gazing at a red-haired librarian, is ``struck by desire as sudden and acute as asthma,'' and later is told by a fortune teller that he will die for love. Denser and trickier is ``Blood Aspens,'' a story of the Wild West, with casting directions for real-life actors (Andy Devine and Marlon Brando). Desperados ride through Old Western towns, killing anyone who gets in their way; one rides off with the victim's ears dangling from his belt. ``Cows on the Drag Strip'' takes a fundamentalist salesman from the jazzy distractions of the city to the rural backwater where he was born, the messages of Jimmy Swaggart and Revelations pounding in his head. The denominator common to these vignettes is their combination of intellectual fancy and up-to-the-minute factthe echoes of centuries-old poetry synchronized with jazz, cinema, the slipstream of jets. Precisely detailed as to time, place and activity, they cannot fail to pique the curiosity.
