Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79753 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
Much of the appeal and savor in McGahern's writing is in watching him navigate, in perfectly balanced sadness, through the colorless fogs of ordinary lives, lives that offer nothing to cheer about except for plain endurance. That certainly holds true for two of the ten stories here: "All Sorts of Impossible Things" - about two men friends and their timor mortis, the younger one with a bad heart (on the wrong side of his chest), the older one losing his hair; and "The Wine Breath" - a priest's sudden, slightly terrifying immersion in a series of sensory temps perdu. But also here is the faintly tendentious, abstract truth-telling that seemed like an element of parody (the narrator's weakness, not the author's) in McGahern's oddly affecting last novel, The Pornographer. "We assemble a love as we assemble our life and grow so absorbed in the assembling that we wake in terror at the knowledge that all we have built is terminal, that in our pain we must undo it again." This reliance on pious summation alone sinks one or two stories, burdens some others, and effectively schematizes most of the rest. McGahern's risk - lavishing attention on people involved in situations that can almost never lead to solutions - stays noteworthy and rare; but the new touch of obvious cement in his work is unfortunate and off-putting. (Kirkus Reviews)