Bringing together eight previously published stories the bestselling author of The Bird Artist explores the lives of a range of characters who share a sense of loneliness and obsession. In the title story Tokyo-born Mrs. Moro is driven every day by her chauffeur, Tuttle Albers, so that she can walk the beach in hope of seeing white pelicans while her driver reads the Japanese authors she lends him and falls in love with a zoologist; in "Jenny Aloo" an Eskimo woman believes her missing son's soul is trapped inside a jukebox; and in "Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad" the narrator keeps track of a woman by whom he once spurned for nearly a decade while everything around him changes.
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Editorial Reviews
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"Consummately crafted stories set in places where solitary souls look for kinship, for connections, for a reason to believe . . . A marvelously controlled writer with a playful ear for dialogue and a penchant for odd, quietly subversive plot-lines . . . Set in the 1950s and '60s, the writer's tales glow with both an aching melancholy and a winsome humor."—Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Quirky and buoyant . . . By layering his work with surprising visual and psychological detail, he manages to create entertaining and unique narratives, generous stories both comic and tragic."—Mark Bautz, The Washington Times
"Like their counterparts in The Northern Lights, Howard Norman's critcally acclaimed first novel, the people in these finely sculpted stories lead quite isolated lives . . . connected to the rest of the world by only the radio and the overnight train . . . Mr. Norman delineates these inarticulate lives with tenderness and compassion."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Quirky and buoyant . . . By layering his work with surprising visual and psychological detail, he manages to create entertaining and unique narratives, generous stories both comic and tragic."—Mark Bautz, The Washington Times
"Like their counterparts in The Northern Lights, Howard Norman's critcally acclaimed first novel, the people in these finely sculpted stories lead quite isolated lives . . . connected to the rest of the world by only the radio and the overnight train . . . Mr. Norman delineates these inarticulate lives with tenderness and compassion."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
About the Author
Howard Norman is a National Book Award finalist for both The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist. His other works include The Museum Guard and The Haunting of L, his most recent novel. He received a Lannan Award in fiction. He resides in Vermont and Washington D.C.
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More About the Author
HOWARD NORMAN is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, and Devotion. His books have been translated into twelve languages. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont with his wife and daughter.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad revisited.,
By ALISON P PRICE (Clarendon, South Australia Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Chauffeur: Stories (Paperback)
All but the title story in this volume were published in 1989 as Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad. If you missed these stories the first time, try them now. They are not dated as Howard Norman's storytelling is timeless or even 'out of time' as the characters exist almost in their own dimension of time. Norman's characters are always so finely drawn. Although they lead quiet and even bizarre lives, Howard Norman's prose is so quietly hypnotic that you cannot fail to be drawn into their world, into their time.
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