Let Me be the One
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Intimate and unforgettable, these eight stories play with themes of great emotional intensity: infatuation, tenderness, resentment, hope. The perceptive gallantry of a man in his early twenties leads an older woman to fall more than a little in love with him. While interviewing a woman painter who boasts about her sexual conquests, a journalist pictures the parts of the city where her husband goes to meet his mistress. A group of nurses play word games that symbolize the more lethal games played at the hospital where they are students. Sparkling, disarmingly honest, these remarkable stories evoke the thrilling and confounding predicament of being human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A mistress of subtlety, Harvor (Women and Children; If Only We Could Drive This Way Forever) has a remarkable ability to worm her way into the mute regions of the soul and paint their secrets in brushstrokes notable for their exquisite use of indirection. These eight short stories concern women on the verge: single mothers, middle-aged divorcees struggling with dreary jobs, young women getting started, women adrift in their uncertain futures. "There Goes the Groom" and "Freakish Vine That I Am" follow the trials of the same crumbled family-the woman a meditative slob, her ex-husband moving on, the two sons caught in the middle, with the small wars prompted by divorce looming on the horizon. "Invisible Target" contrasts a "good" girl with a "bad" girl via the context of a cloistered nursing school. "How Will I Know You?" sends an insomniac on a wild ride with a (possibly) deranged herbalist who offers help, though few manners, and a limited grasp of promptness. "Two Women: The Interviews" is a study of a libertine and a neurotic, with the latter quietly announcing herself as the voice of the "sexually shy." "Through The Fields of Tall Grass" is the collection's real kicker, a recollection of incest and abuse rendered so beautifully and with such weary knowledge of the dissonance between what therapy reveals and what it cures that the story's final lines draw unexpected blood. These are astounding, pitch-perfect stories of such resonance that they come off as almost creepy, so trenchant are the author's numerous insights. FYI: Let Me Be the One was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1996.
