Hints of His Mortality [Hardcover]

David Borofka (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0877455570 | ISBN-13: 978-0877455578 | Edition: 1

The award-winning stories in David Borofka's Hints of His Mortality focus on the male of the species, on bewildered, guilt-ridden, hypersensitive characters adrift in a sea of changing roles and expectations. Although they yearn for the ideal—whether physical or spiritual—and for that sense of divine connection suggested by Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, they usually end up settling for what seems the next best thing: sex or religion.

The amorous scrimmage between male and female in these taut, intense stories is a contest that leaves no one unmarked. The hapless ministers in Borofka's memorable collection find that their daily grind of professional piety leaves them with more questions than answers. The men and boys in Hints of His Mortality are always aware of their flaws, for Borofka's vital characters have the capacity to register the shadows of their every blemish. Like Ferguson of the title story, haunted for twenty years by his failures of conscience, each protagonist experiences the inexorable fallibility of his own nature, agonizes over his moral weakness, and longs for escape from this life in which “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." Yet each is redeemed by his ongoing struggle for compassion and understanding.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A book that could have been titled "Plan B." This collection of stories by David Borofka illuminate men living lives they hadn't planned upon or even imagined. These men are up-and-comers turned failures entering the second half of their lives not as writers or lawyers or priests or teachers, but as used-car salesmen and insurance brokers, their hearts and egos unhinged by disappointment, alcohol, and infidelity. With dreams shattered and expectations downsized, they still have to negotiate the dangerous DMZ between wives and estranged lovers and their own sense of grace. Borofka imbues his men with a heroic quality that lifts them above their situations, arranging the stories with a narrative drive that makes this collection read like a novel, creating a fully realized and impressive book.

From Publishers Weekly

The 14 stories in this accomplished collection, which won the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award, hurl themselves again and again against the same theme with nobly quixotic persistence. How, asks Borofka, do we console ourselves for our greatest disappointment?the failure of our lives, and ourselves, to rise to the level of our hopes and dreams? Using Wordsworth's famous "Ode, Intimations of Immortality" as epigraph and inspiration, Borofka is astonishingly good at sounding the depths of his characters' despair without ever becoming depressing, proving again that simply testifying to the struggle can be curative. The collection abounds with adulterous husbands, inadequate fathers and pastors with feet of clay all struggling to come to terms with their shortcomings. In "A Blessing," a husband finds his marriage strained when his wife suffers a miscarriage, bringing up unresolved memories from his own childhood. In "Reflected Music," a college student suffers an identity crisis after a breakup with his girlfriend and the advent of a mysterious new housemate. One especially rich character, whom we meet in both "The Blue Cloak" and "Mid-Clair," is Professor Grimshaw, miserable in a severely low-wattage academic career, and his beautiful, passive wife, Clair. Grimshaw "had joined himself to her precisely for her lack of complexity, recognizing that his own ego, shaky enough even when accorded center stage and top billing, would not tolerate the competition of sharing." However, Clair turns out to have unexpected powers of consolation and intuition, providing a much-needed moral compass when Grimshaw fails her. Borofka's writing is sometimes prissy and inert ("the dark hairs protruding from the mole waved in the air like the feelers of some sort of bug"), but the intensity of his stories is almost palpable.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 252 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (November 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877455570
• ISBN-13: 978-0877455578
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,070,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fading into the Light of Common Day, September 7, 2001

By 

Laure-Madeleine - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hints of His Mortality (Hardcover)

For anyone who may wonder what goes on in minds of `men who lead lives of quiet desperation,' author David Borofka offers insights in his award-winning, finely wrought short story collection, `The Hints of His Mortality.' Most of the stories draw the reader in by using a similar narrative device: men speaking of their lives, describing other people as if their identities are defined by their roles in men's lives--`my wife,' `Grimshaw's wife,' `Parker's sister-in-law,' `Cunningham's father,' `Scot's girlfriend,' `his first wife.' Sometimes the protagonist is introduced by his last name only: `The sun was setting when Anderson turned back toward the highway . . . '; `Years later Ferguson would remember. . . .' (James Joyce used this technique in `Eveline' in `Dubliners': `She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.') This style sets the tone for the storytelling; it compels a reader's need to know who is this person.

Thus, who might the `His' be in `Hints of His Mortality'? While all of the stories contain clues, the answer is found, first, in prefatory lines quoted from William Wordsworth's `Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollection of Early Childhood'; second, it's revealed in the eponymous final story of this thematically interrelated collection: `Years later Ferguson would remember-as the disabled 727 in which he was trapped as a passenger sank into the twilight of morning clouds-how his first wife had disappeared or died (he never knew which) in the fog of the Central Valley of California'; third, it's limned in `Epilogue,' which is a final story about two brothers and a fateful encounter. Whose mortality? It's Ferguson's and Anderson's and that of the other men in these stories. As they reflect on their lives, and what they have made of them, the reader becomes a privileged party to what is going on their minds: their anxieties, their regrets, their recriminations, and their rationalizations.

Mr. Borofka is a fine writer. His writing is not always easy to read because it answers the perennial question that has been put to silent men: what are you thinking? `Life is indeed a garden of pain, that men and women are born for trouble and heartache, and that lyricism of experience is nothing but a chimera of our most fraudulent desires?'