Eyes
Novellas and Stories
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling new collection—two novellas and four short stories from one of the most revered writers of our time, author of seven books of fiction, among them The Tunnel (“An extraordinary achievement”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Middle C (“Exhilaratingly ingenious”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review, cover); and Cartesian Sonata (“The finest prose stylist in America”—The Washington Post).
It begins with "In Camera," the first of the two novellas, and tells the story, which grows darker and dustier by the speck, of a Mr. Gab (who doesn’t have the gift) and his photography shop (in a part of town so drab even robbers wouldn’t visit), a shop stuffed with gray-white, gray-bleach photographs, each in its own cellophane sheet, loosely side-filed in cardboard boxes, tag attached . . . an inner sanctum where little happens beyond the fulsome, deep reverence for Mr. Gab’s images and vast collection, a homemade museum in the midst of the outer maelstrom . . . until a Mr. Stu (as in u-stew-pid) enters the shop, inspecting the extraordinary collection, and Mr. Gab’s treasure-filled, dust-laden, meticulously contained universe begins to implode . . .
In the story “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” the upright piano from the 1942 Warner Bros. classic Casablanca is interviewed (“I know why you want to talk to me,” the piano says. “It’s because everybody else is dead. Stars go out. Directors die. Companies fold. But some of the props get preserved. I’ve seen my friend the Vichy water bottle in the storeroom as wrapped up as the Maltese Falcon. We’d fetch a price now”) . . .
In another story, “Charity,” a young lawyer, whose business it is to keep hospital equipment honestly produced, offers a simple gift and is brought to the ambiguous heart of charity itself. In “Soliloquy for a Chair,” a folding chair does just that—talks in a barbershop that is ultimately bombed . . . and in “The Toy Chest,” Disneylike creatures take on human roles and concerns and live in an atmosphere of a child’s imagination.
An enchanting Gassian journey; a glorious fantasia; a virtuoso delight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An "eye," the epigraph to Gass's (Middle C) new story collection informs us, is "the point where an underground spring suddenly bursts to the surface." It is evident from these tales that the 90-year-old's creative fount is far from dry. The book opens with two novellas, each of which coaxes sublimity out of wry, misanthropic portraits. In the first, "In Camera," a gruff art dealer zealously guards his invaluable photography collection from prying eyes. He is less interested in profits, or people, than luxuriating in the infinite grays of his black-and-white prints and their representation of the "world as it is rescued by the camera and redeemed." Like his On Being Blue, the second novella, "Charity," demonstrates Gass's extraordinary ability to riff on the philosophical, spiritual, and earthly materializations of an idea. Here a young lawyer besieged by panhandlers, fund-raising groups, and scam artists all seeking contributions ruminates on "creation's constant need for charity." In a free-flowing, associative, and often ribald narrative, Gass anatomizes a cultural phenomenon that only vaguely resembles the charity St. Paul lauded in his famous epistle. The stories that follow don't reach the same heights. Particularly belabored are two comic exercises, "Don't Even Try, Sam," in which a prop piano narrates its experience on the set of Casablanca, and "Soliloquy for an Empty Chair," in which a barber shop's folding chair divulges the secrets of its sedentary life. Much better are the previously unpublished "The Toy Chest," alternately acerbic and nostalgic, and "The Man Who Spoke with His Hands," which balances its whimsy with a vague sense of menace in an account of a music professor whose expressive hands have a life of their own. For most of this collection, Gass proves himself a master diviner, able to tap into the deepest and most mysterious reservoirs.
