Customer Reviews

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Great books stay with you long after you've finished them.It's been two weeks since I read Amy Bloom's newest book and I simply can't get her stories out of my mind. Driving to vacation on the Cape, I started thinking about her characters Julia and Lionel, a mother and stepson who spent one horribly mistaken, horribly understandable night in bed together and continue to pay the price for years to come. Waiting for my dinner reservation,I looked around at all the romantic couples, and wondered how many were hiding the sort of pain and desperate erotic desire that ripples through Bloom's "The Gates Are Closing," a story about a woman who must confront her lover's gradual deterioration from Parkinson's disease. The truly startling thing about Bloom's stories is not the subject matter (transvestitism, incest, etc.), but the way the characters come so fully alive, you feel as if you've been given full access to their most intimate thoughts and feelings. At a time when more and more Americans are tuning in to "peeping t.v." shows like Survivor and Big Brother, I'd humbly suggest that we'd all fare much better by reading this short story collection because the chracters you'll encounter are far more complex and intriguing than any you'll find on television. Bloom distills the moments in life when we are at a rawest and most vulnerable. She paints our most human dilemmas with empathy and true artistry. Bloom possesses a wise overarching vision that makes the nitty-gritty aspects of life oddly, resonantly beautiful."Survior" is brain candy while this story collection is the meat and potatoes.

I loved Ms. Bloom's previous two books Love Invents Us and Come to Me. I actually read them very slowly, savouring each sentence and allowing her words to take me on my own personal journey. A Blind Man has been another delight. The stories are touching, heartbreaking, scary, human and passionate. The topics were incredibly human and intimate. I felt that I was pulled into Bloom's character's most intimate world, broaching topics that I generally don't allow my mind/thoughts the priviledge of contemplation. While reading A Blind Man... I paused several times to think about my own children and my deep love for them, pausing frequently and eagerly returning to Bloom's words. I felt exhilarated yet vulnerable. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have recommended it to a few of my close friends. Most important in a time when so many books seem unbelievable and lacking in authentic humaness, empathy and vulnerabilty, Bloom's characters felt very real, touching and her powerful words stayed with me for hours and days after reading them, they fueled my conversations with friends and made me think twice about my reationships with my loved ones. What more can one want from a good book. Bravo! Ms.Bloom

This book is Bloom's best yet. Her characters are real, flawed, human, sometimes despicable, and unescapabley pieces of the shadows we love and hate in ourselves. Each story provides a new view into a life sometimes we are too scared to see and always are blessed enough by this talented and insightful writer to be invited into. I feel lucky to have read this book, lucky to know the characters and hear their voices in my head, as Bloom provides consice, believable dialogue as only would suit her masterfully created characters.

One critic described A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU by Amy Bloom as a non-sentimental look at love. These stories are non-sentimental, but I want to stress the word 'love' because Amy Bloom writes about love.

Once upon a time I taught church school and as part of my teacher training was exposed to the many ways the Greeks defined love. Although we were taught to stress the form of love called 'agape' with our students, I don't recall any discussion of love as unconditional. Agape as I understood it was detached love--the love one tries to have for a neighbor.

Later in life, after a few hard knocks I discovered love was not about keeping people at arm's length. My son-in-law died of a heroin overdose. I was upset about the manner of his death and the affect of his living and dying on the lives of my daughter and grandchildren. In spite of all the "bad" things he had done, however, I discovered that I still loved him. One does not love another because of what they do or don't do, one just loves--unconditionally.

Amy Bloom writes about unconditional love, which is the only kind of love there really is. Everything else is an illusion. She writes of the love of a stepmother for her stepson and his stepson; the love a lesbian for her married friend dying of cancer--and her love for her friend's husband. She writes of a mother's love for a dead baby and a boy nobody wants. She writes of love involving a physical connection that allows a mistress to help her dying lover. Love is tough and unconditional and it is possible to love more than one person.

Bloom's prose is exquisite. He plots are tight and her characters well developed. She not only enables the reader to feel the sorrow and joy each character experiences, she portrays them so lovingly, you will recall many of them long afterward--an amazing feat for short stories.

Anyone can be blindsided by love. Love leaves one disarmed and vulnerable, and sometimes it hurts like hell. In the end, it is the reason for living.

"A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You" by Amy Bloom is a wonderful collection of short-stories. Her brilliant use of language, texture, and storytelling lead the reader on a course of discovery. Each selection and character is well-rounded and multi dimensional. She doesn't cut corners on any story or persona that is expressed. She can tell a story like no one else. She has such a talent for condensing a very involved story and breaking it down to it's core and making it so powerful that you want to continue with them for years to come. You have a real belief that these characters that Bloom created are so strong, that they will survive even faced with the sad and difficult circumstances they faced. She makes you believe in compassion and ultimate success. A wonderful collection and well worth the money.

Author Amy Bloom continues to display mastery of the short story form. The collection of eight compelling stories is inhabited by real people, flawed and admirable, struggling to overcome obstacles confronted throughout life; the characters are revealed slowly and surely by an author who displays rare insight and compassion. The richly subtle photograph on the book jacket is a visual poem that speaks of both vulnerability and hope -- an image that reflects the insights of the psychotherapist/author.

The title in and of itself is arresting. But within the covers are stories layered with intimate relationships put to the test by time, circumstance, and expectation. Bloom is at her best when recounting how illness influences romance and emotional attachment. Her sentences are meant to be plucked out and written on spare envelopes and matchbook covers -- reminders of how language has the ability to arrest, unsettle, and captivate.

Bloom's second collection of short stories is another intimate glance into the intricacies of relationships. As in Come to Me, Bloom writes without judgement, simply sharing pain, hope, fear and love felt by ordinary people. Her language is exquisite and her stories memorable. My favorites of the collection include:

Stars at Elbow and Feet - After the loss of a child a woman, not feeling worthy of life, finds a new reason to live.

Hold Tight - The story of father and daughter reconnecting after cancer takes the family's wife and mother.

The Gates are Closing - A man asks his lover, not his wife, to help him end his battle with Parkinson's disease.

Despite the grim circumstances these characters are under, Bloom has a way through her luminescent prose of bringing hope and peace to both the characters and the reader. If you pick this up, which I highly recommend, make sure you read Come to Me first. Two of Bloom's most compelling characters in Come to Me, Lionel and Julia, make a repeat performance in this second collection and provide closure to their long-held secret.

In Amy Bloom's second collection of short stories, some of her characters include the mother of a transsexual, a teenaged girl with a dying mother, and a man who is tormented by the night he had sex with his stepmother after his father's funeral. En masse, these characters and their circumstances may seem outrageous, but Bloom's honest portrayal of their inner-lives provides us instead with a window into the universal experience of love and pain. Though the suffering of these characters is palpable, Bloom's writing remains witty, lyrical, and always sharp-never allowing a single moment of these unlikely stories to seem exaggerated or out of place.
In "Rowing to Eden," for example, we are presented with a No Exit kind of situation. A woman in her final stage of Chemo Therapy is living in the same house with her lesbian best friend and her doting but dopey husband. As it is with all the other stories in this collection, the defining moments of characterization come with little action. Instead, we understand the story in terms of the delicate relationships and interactions between the three people involved-their slight dialogues, embarrassingly awkward at times, but always poignant and telling. As it is in Sartre's play, Bloom's characters seem trapped, bound together in a sad and fruitless triangle. Bloom boldly takes her readers on a tour of this triangle, allowing us to look in on it through descriptions of dinners and sunsets until suddenly we find ourselves inside the head of the guilt-ridden patient who finds her husband pathetic despite his efforts to help her beat cancer. We also manage to see the situation through the eyes of the husband, a man who just wants his beautiful healthy wife back, and from the perspective of the wife's best friend, a lesbian whose devotion to her friend is steadfast if not obsessive.
The beginning of "The Gates Are Closing," examines the experience of a woman helping her lover who has Parkinson's Disease paint the synagogue that his wife presides over. Initially, this may seem absurd, but once Bloom has painted her picture in full, we are forced to notice all the subtle shades of pain and longing that exist behind this scene, as Bloom deftly fills in the spaces between what her characters think and what they do.
Ultimately, although Bloom's characters seem capable of anything, including surprising themselves with their own ability to overcome unusual hardships, neatly packaged endings where vexed people find solace and conflicts are smoothed out into oblivion don't show up in this collection-and thankfully so. Instead, as disturbing as the circumstances that dictate each story may be, Bloom makes it all believable-even somewhat hopeful-reminding us that as humans it is the details of our tumultuous relationships that bring our love for one another to life.

Being a psychotherapist, Ms. Bloom focuses on stories of people with...certain ailments. But not to worry, these are not 'disease of the week' soap operas--her stories are witty, sometimes outrageously so, often told by characters with their own reasons for bitterness about the world. But the truly inspiring thing about Ms. Bloom is how, one way or another, she allows her characters to struggle on with some hope, some humor, and some love.

The title story is first; it's the longest and the funniest. But for me the story immediately following is the most touching, and the most uplifting.