Eternity and Other Stories [Paperback]

Lucius Shepard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2005

Here are seven stories from a master of the art. Viktor Chemayev is the Philip Marlowe of Russian detectives, a sad-eyed, heavy drinking romantic who refuses to stay beat. In the title novella of this extraordinary collection, he goes head-to-head with an Irish assassin in the depths of a Moscow nightclub in an attempt to win back his true love, who has been sold to the Beelzebub-like king of the Moscow underworld... Lucius Shepard is known for his dark, unpredictable vision, and in this assemblage of some of his best writing he takes us from Moscow to Africa; from the mountains of Iraq, where Specialist Charlie N. Wilson encounters a very different sort of enemy, to Central America, where a bloody-handed colonel meets his doom via lizards. In these seven tales Shepard's imagination spans the globe and, like an American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, refuses to be restricted by mere reality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ranging in locale from the ruins at ground zero to war-torn contemporary Iraq and a civil war–ridden corner of a nameless African republic, Shepard's haunting, structurally perfect stories in his latest collection serve as a veritable travel guide to geographic hot spots of tragedy and trauma and the horrors they spawn. In "Only Partly Here," a young man cleaning up the site of the World Trade Center collapse finds direction in his life through a relationship with an enigmatic woman who haunts downtown Manhattan and reveals herself to be a lost soul of a different type. "Eternity and Afterwards" tells of a Russian gangster whose navigation through the occult recesses of a sprawling nightclub captures the Byzantine realities of his country. Shepard (A Handbook of American Prayer) manages a perfect meshing of details that bring the imagined backdrops of these tales to vivid life with the psychological and emotional lives of his characters.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (August 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560256621
• ISBN-13: 978-1560256625
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheesh!, October 14, 2005

By 

Tiajuna Slim (seattle wa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eternity and Other Stories (Paperback)

I don't often respond to reviews, but I do want to respond to a cheap shot taken at me by Tim Symms--certain of his comments about my 9/11 story, Only Parlly Here, cast aspersions on my character, and other of his comments embody an attitude I find somewhat sad.

Mr. Symms seems especially chagrinned--indeed, insulted--that I dare write about 9/11 not having been in NYC at the time, not joining in the relief effort. Well, I almost was. I was scheduled to fly to NYC on Sept. 12 to attend my son's wedding. When I was able to reschedule, I spent several weeks in the city, some of that time with a group of people who were cleaning up the debris. My story involves itself with that time, not the attack. What really burns me about Mr. Simms' comments is his statement, "Lucius wasn't in New York during the attack. He was in our homeland, however. He went to the movies...", thereby implying that I went out for some light entertainment and some tasty popcorn that same day. Part of my income is derived from doing movie reviews. I was doing my job and, further, when I went to the movies several days later, I was mainly fleeing my apartment, escaping the barrage of horrific imagery on my television set. I wanted to be alone in the dark where I could think about my son, about other matters, where I could feel the beating of my heart,and not have its beats programmed by the insipid commentary of Paula Zahn et al. Doubtless, while I was so engaged, Mr. Simms was saving the planet from his command center in Boca Raton, but that's another subject entirely.

This idea that 9/11 is so vast and sacrosanct that it cannot be touched, that we must wait to savor all its aftertastes, that if it is to be approached at all, we must bow out heads and paint them gray...Where did it come from? Vietnam, I think. We'd had it with Vietnam, too much TV, etc, and we didn't want to hear novelists on the subject. Thus a lot of great Vietnam novels (MEDITATIONS IN GREEN, for example) written during or immediately after the war were more-or-less overlooked or just plain ignored. Wherever it came from, this desire not to know, not to hear from our most eloquent voices, until after a mourning period and then a period of acceptance or whatever, it's time we got over it. Since 9/11 there have been disasters that dwarf the fall of the towers -- are we to wait years before we write about them, and if we do, won't other disasters supplant them? Given the frequency of disasters, there's likely going to be a logjam. Speak now is my advice. Speak now and speak often. You may not have ten years. Even if you do, your immediate reactions are as a valuable, perhaps more valuable, than ones processed from memory.

I'm sure there'll be at least one major 9/11 novel. It'll be praised for its "great humanity;" weigh slightly under eight pounds; win the Pullitzer; have legions of readers (Mr Symms among them, no doubt) who'll tote it around like it was the Bible; avoid dealing with politics in any controversial way; contain a predictable assortment of characters (including at least one college professor); have a sub-plot involving yuppie redemption; and, who knows, perhaps it'll even be readable.

I tried to post this without a rating, but they won't let me, so...that being the case, damned if I'm gonna give myself less than five stars.

Lucius Shepard

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Huh?, October 14, 2005

By 

D. Layne "deblayne" (Wilsonville, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eternity and Other Stories (Paperback)

What is Tim Symms on about?

He appears to object to Lucius Shepard's 9/11 story because 1) it was written shortly after 9/11 and estimable figures like Norman Mailer, Ian McEwan, and VS Naipaul have advised that such a vast subject should be processed slowly over the years, or else, in McEwan's case, not addressed at all; 2) because it's the "superficially whimsical tale of a grad student and

a ghost..." 3) because he was not there in NYC. And he does all this in a review entitled IS THIS ALL WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 9/11?

To answer Symm's question, of course it isn't. Shepard's piece is a short story, and no story, no novel, no non-fiction work is likely to tell us all we need to know about it, until--that is--Time or some other corporate entity gives us an event book, ALL YOU EVER NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 9/11.

Shepard's story, far from whimsical and superficial, is a beautifully observed, concise work of fiction that details the numbness we all felt at the time. It does not attempt to gauge the economic aftershocks, the geo-political concerns, etc., that arose from that day--that was not its purpose. Despite the testimony of Mailer, Naipaul, and McEwan, some fiction benefits from immediacy, the way good journalism does.

"Only Partly Here" is not about a ghost and a grad student. It's about a man who has been a student and now works clearing away the debris left from the destruction of the towers. The woman in question may or may not be a ghost; she may be, and this is my reading, a real person whom the man, in his trauma and confusion, relates to as a ghost. Shepard leaves it to the

reader to make this choice. Curiously enough, Symms says Shepard relies on "the art of the fantastical to explain 9/11," and then goes on to cite a Patrick McGrath novella about a ghost and a psychiatrist as being better and more complex. More complex? Dude, it's a novella. By virtue of length alone, it's bound to be more complex than Shepard's piece. Better, I can't

say, not having read it. But McGrath is a fine writer...as is Shepard.

As to Shepard's not being present in NYC at the time of 9/11, does Symms think Hemmingway did everything he wrote about? Novelists and short story writers frequently write about events they did not participate in, but Symms, making an odious comparison between Shepard's absence from Ground Zero and George Bush's, seems to think this is a pre-requisite to writing.

Shepard's female character wants to know what it's like in the pit where the towers were, and his male protagonist is too wasted by the experience to tell her--that strikes me as a wonderful metaphor for the way Americans were feeling on 9/11 and directly afterward. Just because we weren't there

doesn't invalidate what we felt. To dismiss what is patently an excellent collection--and this is a great story collection, folks--on the basis of a misapprehension concerning one story is shameful. Five stars all the way.

Symms suggests that Shepard wrote better in the eighties. Forget about it. ETERNITY AND OTHER STORIES is the real quill.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shepard, as usual, is on his game., March 13, 2006

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eternity and Other Stories (Paperback)

Lucius Shepard, Eternity and Other Stories (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005)

Lucius Shepard is one of America's finest overlooked writers, a man who has labored in relative obscurity (relative, that is, to the popularity he should have obtained twenty years ago) his entire career, turning out finely polished gems of prose in a world that, it would seem, prizes rough cuts. Eternity and Other Stories is Shepard's most recent, as of this writing, collection of short fiction, and like every other book of Shepard's I've read to date, I can unhesitatingly give it the Misanthrope (and Goat) stamp of approval.

While the stories here are very good-- open to a random page and you'll get finer writing than you will in 95% of the books published last year, guaranteed-- the collection is slightly inconsistent. Shepard's penchant for thick, somewhat difficult prose always runs the risk of a story getting bogged down in a lack of pace, and it does happen here on occasion; "Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?" is an especially slow trek, without the kind of million-dollar payoff at the end that makes some difficult books among the best you'll ever read (Grass' Dog Years and Walker's The Secret Service come to mind). But these are balanced out by the stories that, while still thick going, grab you and absolutely refuse to let go until you've turned the final page; these comprise the bulk of the book. "Jailwise" and "Eternity and Afterward," the book's final two pieces, are especially good at this sort of thing, despite being the two longest stories here (I didn't count words, but I'd be willing to bet that "Eternity and Afterward" is almost as long as Shepard's brilliant 2004 novel Viator); they caused me to forgo food and sleep.

There aren't enough different ways for me to say "you can't go wrong with Lucius Shepard;" eventually I may have to stop reviewing his work altogether, simply because the reviews will turn into carbon copies of one another. But really, there's nothing else to be said-- you can't go wrong with Lucius Shepard. *** ½