Foreign Brides [Hardcover]

Elena Lappin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1999

Funny, irreverent, dark, and tender-a startling and sexy debut collection.

Women (and men) cope with foreign marriages in Elena Lappin's shrewd domestic comedies of the absurd, set in London, New York, and a constellation of European and Israeli cities. Transplanted across oceans and ensconced in strange houses where appliances malfunction and husbands are not what they seem, women like Noa, Vera, and Paula settle into lives of persistently unfamiliar routine, stirred up from time to time with a very crooked stick. In "Noa and Noah," Noa, an Israeli, has been married for two years before her English improves and she realizes that her British husband, Noah, is not a glamorous young businessman but a dull junior debt collector. In revenge she begins to frequent a nonkosher butcher-and that's just the beginning. Vera, a Russian, married to an unsuccessful British butler, takes to cab driving and extortion in "Peacock"; Paula, a German, married to her dead best friend's husband, writes stories and snorts cocaine in "Bad Writing." With perfect pitch and a poker face, Lappin writes insidiously funny tales about love and survival in an international no-man's-land of marriage.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There are some short-story writers who seem too knowing, too eager to nudge the reader in the ribs with an authorial elbow. Others seem not knowing enough, as if they'd never quite gotten a purchase on their material. But in her first collection, Foreign Brides, Elena Lappin has already discovered the golden mean. Her tales of emigrant life--and more specifically, intermarriage among the tribes of Israel, Russia, England, and the United States--are unfailingly witty. Yet the author never keeps herself too far above the fictional fray, which ensures that the pain in these stories is no mere postmodernist construct but, well, painful.

In "Noa and Noah," for example, an Israeli bride finds herself hard-pressed to adjust to British life, even if her new husband does sport an Old Testament moniker and a kippa. In fact, Noah's charms have almost entirely evaporated after a year of marriage, and what once appeared to be endearments turn out to be a form of erotic cheerleading:

She had also by now finally deciphered and demystified her husband's sexy mumblings which invariably accompanied their lovemaking: the words Arsenal and Tottenham came up a lot, with very unsexy adjectives describing various players and plaintive remarks about their technique. When she had first grasped this remarkable fact, Noa simply asked Noah why he had to think and talk about football during sex. He had answered, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, that he thought about football all the time, and saying his thoughts out loud during sex helped him slow down.

It would be unfair to disclose Noa's response to her increasing disillusionment. Suffice it to say that it involves a neighborhood butcher and some very nonkosher behavior in the boudoir. Not all of Lappin's characters hit upon such delectable (and surprisingly low-fat!) solutions. In "Peacocks," a similarly distraught émigrée falls back on cab driving and a spot of extortion to maintain her mental health. "Bad Writing" features a German transplant, also a woman, who neutralizes the nastiness of her marriage by turning it into prose. Not every story in Foreign Brides quite clicks. But Lappin is a funny and formidable talent, and her next project--a novel with the intriguing, Gogolian title of The Nose--should be worth sniffing out as soon as it hits the shelves. --Anita Urquhart

From Publishers Weekly

The jerky rhythms and brute candor of the 12 stories in Lappin's first collection arise from the imperfect, second-language English spoken by the author's brazen heroines. Sexually promiscuous and emotionally detached, these "foreign" women naturalize, even as the men they are involved with turn alienAby disappearing or proving themselves unknowable. Noa, of "Noa and Noah" (who is an Israeli, like many of Lappin's characters), thinks "**** that" to keeping kosher for the sake of her British husband, NoahAa supercilious, newly moneyed debt collector who picked her up in a Tel Aviv disco and moved her into his chrome-and-glass London flat. In Noa's halting English we learn that her husband's pillow talk is nothing more than a play-by-play of England soccer matches; frustrated and contemptuous, she begins an affair with Joe McElligot, a butcher whose non-kosher beef she serves to Noah nightly. In "Inhaling New York" the insatiable Sasha seduces Jack, a cold-fish British journalist whose one passion is Manhattan. When they move to London, Jack becomes a "polite, formal shell of a man." In this story, as elsewhere in the collection, flashes of violence engender intimacy: when Jack slaps Sasha (who, in her rebellion, has refused to select a name for their infant son) and she slaps him back, there is suddenly "bliss in the air." Lappin collapses time with a facility that can seem a little smug and too omniscient. This impulse to answer all the questions is most troublesome at these stories' ends. Often the bizarre, compelling and complex characters she creates unaccountably come to accept their lives in too-convenient fashion in the narrative's final paragraphs. The collection, nonetheless, winningly combines a deadpan brassiness with an observant and satirical restraint.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374157588
• ISBN-13: 978-0374157586
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,842,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dull and unappealing stories, September 8, 2004

By 

Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foreign Brides (Hardcover)

The common denominator for all the short stories in the book is that the main character is always a foreign bride.
To me there was something dull and unappealing in the stories. Perhaps because the first story set the tone: the bride is too young to know what she is doing, and marries the groom in a whim and then regrets is dearly. I must admit that the story was well written, because it transmitted the sense of defeat and despair that a young woman in a foreign country and a loveless marriage must feel.
One of the stories, Black Train, has an interesting passage: "All émigrés have the same basic story to tell: there is that small death when they leave their home country, there is that short-lived euphoria when it looks like they've been blessed with a chance to rewrite their scripts in a free society, and then comes the life-long sadness once they realize that they have made an irreversible choice to cut themselves off from their roots. They can appear successful and lead exciting lives - but they will always feel like second-class citizens, wherever they are. And that huge void inside will never, ever be filled."
This got me thinking, because i am an émigré, yet i don't subscribe to those thoughts. Maybe if i had left my country for political reasons, and could never go back, but in this day and age, where you can be on the opposite corner of the world in a matter of hours, where's the trouble? As time goes by, boundaries blur and distances shorten. This reminds me of a long-forgotten song, titled "My Country, my shoes".

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Defintiely not a Must-Buy, December 30, 2001

By 

A reader (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foreign Brides (Hardcover)

Good, but not especially memorable stories of women who made foreign marriages: either Americans who married non-Americans, or non-Americans who married into American families. I read the book several months ago, and none of the stories remains clear in my mind. Worth a trip to the library, but don't bother to buy it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars almost great, short stories too dang short, December 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Foreign Brides: Stories (Paperback)

I have a foreign bride, Jewish Ukrainian and I'm Jewish American, so I was drawn to the title. I found the writing quite good and stories sometimes hilarious. But any of the stories could be more developed into something a bit meatier. The first and last story are connected and cleverly done. I like her general attitude about marriage: it might be a bit haphazard, but it can be an anchor for our lives and fulfilling despite the apparent randomness of mate selection. I liked it.