The Curse of the Appropriate Man (Harvest Original) [Paperback]

Lynn Freed (Author)

Book Description

Series: Harvest Original | Publication Date: September 1, 2004

These fourteen short stories, written over the past ten years but never before collected, deal with the struggles between mothers and their wayward daughters, the often preposterous bonds that tie men and women together, and the complex games masters and servants play with one another. In spare, elegant prose, Freed delivers surprise after surprise as she shakes the truth from life. Whether it's her portrayal of a mother mired in senile dementia in "Ma," a young girl experiencing her first sexual encounter with an itinerant knife-sharpener in "Under the House," or a young woman incapable of loving conventionally in "An Error of Desire," Freed portrays the absurdity, the delusions, the dramas, and the dignity of her characters' lives. These masterful stories reinforce her reputation as one of our most fearless and sophisticated explorers of sexual and filial love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Women's relationships—with their mothers, their lovers, their culture and their own sexuality—are the subject of the 14 stories (written over nearly 20 years) in this fine collection. Freed, the author of five novels (The Mirror; House of Women; etc.), creates achingly real women and lovingly rendered misfits, and she reports straightforwardly and without judgment on their unconventional urges and questionable decisions. "Under the House" recounts a young girl's first sexual encounter with a traveling knife sharpener in the crawl space under her house and her subsequent memories of what should have been a traumatic event for her but was in fact something much more ambiguous. "The Widow's Daughter" tells of a young woman, possibly abused as a child, discovering and then flaunting her sexual power, much to her mother's horror. In the affecting title story, a middle-aged woman ponders how "half a lifetime of appropriate men can leave a woman parched for adventure." She dates two eccentric men but, finding herself still longing for the exotic, travels to Asia. On her way back, she meets a friend who's taken the opposite tack, marrying for convenience ("Quite acceptable, once you get over the death of the heart"). A few of these stories are schematic in their briefness, but most are quietly devastating and deeply resonant.
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From Booklist

The apparent simplicity of each story belies the shocking power and underscores the soothing beauty resonating throughout Freed's luminous collection. United by women--some haughty, some humble, others imperious or innocent--the stories insinuate themselves into one's consciousness, to be revisited again and again in moments of quiet contemplation and utter delight. From the impervious arrogance of a recently widowed matron who now sees her manservant in a new light in "William," to a young girl's abrupt loss of innocence in "Under the House," Freed's stories dramatically yet subtly acknowledge the ever-shifting dynamics of our most essential relationships. Wives and lovers, mothers and daughters, Freed's women are complex amalgams of conflicting emotions, yet they all, seemingly, know their true essence and live their lives accordingly: witness Charlotte in "An Error of Desire," or Irma in "The Widow's Daughter." Whether celebrating love or contemplating loss, Freed delights by providing the reader with singular moments of unbridled surprise and poignant affirmation in a stunning and satisfying volume. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1st edition (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156029944
• ISBN-13: 978-0156029940
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,785,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

LYNN FREED was awarded the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of six novels, a short story collection, and a collection of essays.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One sentence propels this from 4 to 5 stars, September 13, 2004

By 

Thomas W Cooney (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Curse of the Appropriate Man (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

At last, a collection of stories from the preeminent female novelist of our day. Freed is an author who goes straight into the world's landscapes, both interior and exterior. You can have your Morrisons and your Smileys and your Gordimers, Lynn Freed is the most fearless contemporary female writer at work today. In any language. And this book serves as proof.

Make no mistake, Freed is a better novelist than short story writer, and there are one or two stories in this collection that don't live up to the rest. However, those stories would be flagships in any one else's collection. So as I prepared to award four stars to this collection, I looked the book over again and came across a line in the story "An Error of Desire" that made it obvious why this is a five-star book: "There is love and there is desire, I thought, and for all the world they look the same until all the desire is spent." Freed is a writer with a rare brilliance that shows itself in her humor, her syntax, and her understanding of the devil and the saint in each of us.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freed at her best, July 8, 2007

By 

J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Curse of the Appropriate Man (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

Dripping with language distilled down to fire water, Lynn Freed delivers here a collection of brilliant short stories, everyone raw and poignant. Whether the tale of the young woman molested by the traveling knife sharpener or the widow's daughter overwhelmed by the power and allure of her sexuality, or the narrator of the title story struggling with her attraction to all the wrong sort of men, each tale proves crafted with the care for which Freed is famous. As with many of her novels and short stories, each of these deals with issues faced by women, mostly sexual or emotional, that can dog the psyche for life.

As with most of her other work, most of these tales take place in Freed's native South Africa, a world in which she is both conflicted and achingly familiar. Yet it is not the milieu from which they derive their power, though her every detail stands as both telling and artfully selected. Instead the great power of Freed's work comes from her characters, each crafted as if by a sculpture, expert in his tools, chipping away every bit of excess to reveal the art within.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't judge the book by its cover or by Freed's novelist career, May 16, 2006

By 

Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Curse of the Appropriate Man (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

Freed, an accomplished novelist, has released a collection of 14 stories which were written over the course of two decades and were previously unpublished. At its core, this collection is about the secret desires (or compulsions, if you prefer that terminology) of women. These desires influence the actions that define the lives of women, from a curious pre-adolescent engaging in sexual relations in the basement of her family home, to paralyzing confusion and homesickness of a high school exchange student, to a complex web of family shadows, and to an abusive relationship between two lesbians.

The novel's beautiful cover and subtle prose are wrapped around a core content which is quite erotic and unconventional, in the manner of alternative lifestyles. It's nothing like the smarmy love stories I expected to read, so from that angle, it was refreshing. While I did enjoy reading these stories, they aren't without their flaws, and this book doesn't make it on to my "must-read" list. If you are intrigued by my description, though, it is most likely perfect for you.