Ice Cream [Hardcover]

Helen Dunmore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 10, 2002

Subtle and delicate as the sweet confection of its title" (The Independent), this beautiful collection from one of England's most revered writers explores friendship, regret, mysterious passions, and the intense pleasure of ice cream. As in her acclaimed novels The Siege and A Spell of Winter, world-class storyteller Helen Dunmore shows us with subtlety and humor precisely who her characters are and why we should care for them. In each taut, agile tale, they grow to surprise, concern, and move us as they negotiate situations that are often both mundane and bizarre: a cafeteria cook confronts her Polish pen pal in a meeting that is unexpectedly intense; a divorced mother gains insight from a parking meter; a boastful writer is put in his place in spectacular fashion; and in a chilling future, conception is ruthlessly controlled by the government. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination -- stumbling across a strangely magnetic collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover. In Ice Cream, Dunmore reveals both her poet's ear for the concise and piercing potentialities of language and the novelist's ambition of scope.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Having made her reputation on these shores with literary gothic novels (A Spell of Winter, etc.), British writer Dunmore last year demonstrated her versatility with The Siege, a novel of startling realism and clarity, set in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) during WWII. Her second short story collection (the first to be published here) further testifies to the wide range of her interests, imagination and narrative voice. The 17 stories are all quite short and have in common a remarkable ability to encapsulate character, situation and landscape in prose that shimmers with sensuous detail. The most chilling entry, "The Fag," is a variation on The Handmaid's Tale. In a repressive future society, a couple dares to defy the state's Genetic Code for conceiving children. "Emily's Ring" gathers horror as a young girl is doomed to a lifetime of guilt. Life in a small English village is illuminated in "Coosing," in which an abusive bully warns his wife not to apprise the intended victim of his bigotry. Other stories strike a lighter note. It's fun to watch the protagonist of the title story-a woman who's beautiful, thin and famous-succumb to the lure of comfort food. Other narratives portray food as a balm and benediction, or carry a hopeful message of connection, as in "My Polish Teacher's Tie." There's a touch of the surreal in "Mason's Mini-Break," which revolves around an encounter on the Yorkshire moors, and in a parking meter's message in "Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty." Dunmore's touch is light, but her stories slice through her readers' defenses like laser beams.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Just as her novels transport readers from heat and sensuality (Talking to the Dead), to a sense of impending menace (Your Blue-Eyed Boy), to piercing cold and gnawing starvation in wartime Leningrad (The Siege), so do these stories offer up a panoply of emotion, atmosphere, and character. Food-both the inability to eat (owing to illness, pregnancy, or anorexia) and the appreciation of or longing for it-also figures prominently. In the delicious title story, a famous model celebrating her birthday fantasizes about the heady perfumes, tastes, and textures of ice cream while her personal trainer exhorts her to stick to her brutal diet regime. In two chilling stories, Dunmore shows that she can move easily between time periods. In "Emily's Ring," set during the Victorian age, an elder sister charged with chaperoning her siblings on a swimming expedition for their health is attracted to a fellow bather and loses sight of one of the youngsters. In the futuristic "Leonardo, Michelangelo, Superstork," couples risk prison terms by purchasing genetically engineered embryos. Dunmore uses her formidable imagination and intelligence to create stories that provoke, unsettle, amuse, and glow. Highly recommended for public libraries.
Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, ON
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (December 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117333
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117335
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,614,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's hard not to gobble these stories all at once!, February 10, 2003

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ice Cream (Hardcover)

You know the saying: you can't tell a book by its cover. As a reviewer, I don't take looks too seriously but I have to admit this is one cute package: a slim vanilla volume covered by a shiny dust jacket with candy-colored stripes and a picture of an (empty) ice-cream dish. It is almost edible.

In fact, the title story wasn't by any means my favorite --- it's a sort of glamorous throwaway about the suppression of appetite and its greedy return. But Dunmore, who is also a poet, writes so sensuously and precisely that she can make nearly anything matter. Best known as the author of elegant, pared-down psychological thrillers like TALKING TO THE DEAD and WITH YOUR CROOKED HEART, she has recently ventured beyond that genre with THE SIEGE, a novel set in the USSR during World War II. And now comes this collection of 18 stories --- none of which, as far as I can make out, have been published previously.

Stories aren't usually my thing, except when they're by Alice Munro or Katherine Mansfield. If they move me, I want more; I want to be immersed for days (if possible) in a world of somebody else's making. Still, there is something thrilling about the way a story can begin with a moment and then open up to an entire life --- but subtly and concisely, so you get only the details you need and not the entire family tree. Dunmore seems to know instinctively just how much to tell: not so much that the narrative loses pace and edge, not so little that it becomes annoyingly cryptic. And her talent is such that ICE CREAM, although uneven in quality (short-story collections inevitably are), lives up to its name. I wanted to devour it all at once and had to make myself take it in slowly, bite by voluptuous bite.

Dunmore's sense of language is extraordinary: lush, unhackneyed and rhythmic. She has a way of getting inside a character's head and making herself at home there; the stream of sensation, memory and ephemera is perfectly believable. In "You Stayed Awake With Me," two friends, one of them ill, revisit a childhood summerhouse --- and some past betrayals. "Pain is a climate like winter," the sick woman thinks. "It closes over you and soon you can't imagine not living in it. Some days, when I wake, before I move, I pretend to myself. I think I've got away. I'm stepping off a plane into a different climate where warm, spicy breezes blow your clothes against your thighs. I'm walking so lightly and easily that it feels like flying." "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife," one of the best stories in the book, presents us with a man in mourning whose conversation with himself becomes our lens for a woman's hard, isolated, sturdy life: "Slowly, methodically, he would climb the lighthouse tower, toward the light, thinking of her. A mound of sea thudded against the tower, then fell back and weaseled at the foot of the rock, getting its strength. Nancy said she did not mind thinking of him in the lighthouse, no matter how bad the storms, but what she kept out of her thoughts was the moment when he was brought off the landing-platform, with the sea hungry for him and the lighthouse tender pitching. ... It made her sick to think of it, she said, though he knew she could walk to the edge of the cliff and stand there without a moment's dizziness."

There is no theme as such in ICE CREAM; the eclectic mix suggests a conscious effort to show off Dunmore's range, which is impressive --- from the futuristic bite of "Leonardo, Michelangelo, Superstork" to macabre fables like "Emily's Ring" and "The Clear and Rolling Water" to gentler vignettes that release sweet moments of transcendence ("Swimming Into the Millennium"; "Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty"). But I think her most original stories are darker. They are about the courage, craziness and solitude of the outsider and involve psychological and physical violence as well.

Many of the tales in ICE CREAM come from the "wrong" side of some cultural divide or social convention --- geography, language, class, sexual roles --- and three of them are linked by a common protagonist: Ulli, a Finnish woman whose smart, ironic voice reveals a wintry landscape of the soul. "The Icon Room," a brilliant story, relates her encounter with a stranger, both of them with only a lonely Sunday to look forward to: "Drinking cups of coffee until your heart bangs and you feel dizzy when you stand up. Walking home the quiet way and standing still while a lick of spring sunlight needles your skin. Prickling all afternoon as you wait for the sound of the telephone bell, which doesn't ring and doesn't ring, until at last you give up and put on your dressing gown."

I'd like to hear from Ulli again. I grew fond of her; I want to know more about her. I'd like her to have a companion and a whole book to stretch out in --- because, as good as these are, stories always stop too soon.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

3.0 out of 5 stars Never really pulls you in, August 12, 2004

By 

Belinda "Belinda" (CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ice Cream (Paperback)

These stories are fine but not great. Many of them are cute. I enjoy literary fiction that is less plot-driven than the average best-seller, but very few of these stories had enough plot to satisfy me. I kept feeling disappointed at the end when nothing happened.

This was my first time to read Helen Dunmore. I'd definitely try one of her novels. Her writing is good enough that it intrigued me. I just couldn't get into any of these stories.

4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky collection of character studies, November 20, 2003

By 

Beth Cholette "doctor_beth" (Upstate NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice Cream (Hardcover)

In this collection of short stories, Helen Dunmore focuses on quick, in-depth character sketches. The reader is exposed to a variety of scenarios, from the reality based--in the title story, an actress denies herself her favorite indulgencies in order to maintain her fame--to the unreal--a story of a horrific future where cloning is praised and natural births are punished. Many of the plots involve themes of serious illness and/or death, including "You Stayed Awake With Me" (a woman with terminal illness confronts the past), "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife" (a doting husband reflects on loss), "Emily's Ring" (a young girl is burdened with the care of her many half-siblings), and "Lisette" (a promosing young family is doomed in WWII France). Many of the tales are set in the past; the time isn't always specified, but several stories have a turn of the century feel. One character, Ulli, appears in three different stories; at first, she seems to be a world-weary woman, but in the final story, we learn that she is a 16 year old girl. Of the 18 stories in the book, most are 10-12 pages in length, with the longest being 24 pages and the shortest being only 4 pages. Overall, this book is a short, engaging read that may leave you wondering what happens next.