Word: griefs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gradually does it become clear that the italicized passages contain the "real story": someone named John is writing these short stories in order to make sense of the loss of his lover, someone named Martin, to AIDS. The short stories we read emerge as one sustained cry of deflected grief, of pain mediated through fiction. From these stories, a sketchy narrative arises: John's violent childhood in Kansas, his adolescence spent as a hustler in New York, the meeting with Martin--and the final move back to Kansas, where Martin dies and where John begins to write...
...details and striking imagery: a drunken mother ensconced in a dark room "looked like an ice cube in rum;" on the open prairie "the sky gap(es) like an open mouth." Peck's language renders, "My face felt swollen and shapeless, like a moldy orange, as though grief had been shoved into my mouth like a handful of seeds, but I didn't know what to do, whether to spit, or just swallow...
...book progresses and the narrative gains coherence, the purposes of Peck's structure becomes clearer. The stories express grief by talking around painful, precise facts; it's easier to imagine the way things might have been than to remember exactly the way they were. Is Beatrice John's mother who dies after a miscarriage, as the narrator of "Blue Wet Paint Columns" tells us, or is she his lonely step-mother, as we read in "The Search for Water"? Is Martin a runaway boy who shows up at John's Kansas house one day, or a grade school teacher...
...like William Faulkner? He. Who's that, someone you slept with? She No, he's a famous American author, he wrote beautifully. Listen. "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief." What do you think? He. show me your toes...
...whose plots it borrows: the juggling of passion and politics in Doctor Zhivago, the muddle of racial emotions in A Passage to India, the grandiose failure of colonial outsiders in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But Indochine's vision is essentially feminine; its ample grief is that of a mother mourning her lost children in a land shifting and receding under her feet...