Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories [Paperback]

Joan Silber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2005

Shortlisted for the National Book Award: "Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence. Her characters bear welcome news of how we will survive."—Andrea Barrett

Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, these stories are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort. Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes a mesmerizing narrative of missionaries in China. In the final story, Giles, born to a priesthood family, leans toward Buddhism after a grievous loss, and in time falls in love with the dancer of the first story. So deft and subtle is Joan Silber with these various perspectives that we come full circle surprised and enchanted by her myriad worlds. National Book Award finalist. Reading group guide included.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Big ideas come in lovely small packages in this collection by Silber (Lucky Us, etc.). Six elegantly connected stories explore, through first-person narratives, the conflicts and commonalities of love, faith and sex. A minor character in the first story becomes the narrator in the second, and so on, with each story building on its predecessor until they come full circle. Alice, a flighty American would-be dancer, struggles with her body and the difficult men in her life in "My Shape"; Duncan, an embittered gay dancer (and one-time teacher of Alice) describes embarrassment, heartbreak and the comforts of renunciation in "The High Road." In "Gaspara Stampa," the titular 16th-century Italian poet narrates her torturous love affairs and the art she makes of them; in "Ashes of Love," an ex-hippie and world traveler, whose capricious wife left him to raise their troubled son, later tries to balance his attentions between the boy and his new, younger lover. In the title story, a missionary's wife in turn-of-the-century China tells of learning to live in a foreign world and faces death during the Boxer Rebellion. Each of Silber's narrators reflects on his or her shifting fortunes with the calm wisdom of hindsight, without diminishing the power of immediate experience. Silber uses the device of interwoven narratives beautifully; these lengthy stories can stand alone, but the subtle connections and emotional resonances help create a satisfying structural unity. Silber's wise, compassionate chronicles of longing, devotion and the search for comfort, both spiritual and physical, will move readers to contemplation and delight.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Silber's new collection is indeed a "ring," as the subtitle suggests, but one so subtle and delicate in its construction that the connections seem to arise more from fortunate happenstance than deliberate design. The link between the end of the book and the beginning almost requires a re-reading of the first story. A poet mentioned in the second story becomes the subject of the third, and so on, with a pale thread of one story becoming bold colors in the next. The author writes successfully in many voices, women and men, gay and straight, present-day and historic. A matter-of-fact detachment toward affairs of the heart is contrasted with moments of uncontrollable passion. Death can come suddenly, violently, but all can be borne by Silber's sturdy characters. "Ideas of Heaven," a story of missionaries in late nineteenth-century China, shows a dedication to accuracy and research. Wonderfully evocative of time and place, this is a collection to be read and savored by all. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039332687X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393326871
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #528,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Silber is the author of six books of fiction, most recently The Size of the World (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction) and Ideas of Heaven (Finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize). Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, two O. Henry Prize collections, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. She's known for stories that leap over long blocks of time, and this led her to write The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her website is joansilber.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Well Done, May 10, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (Hardcover)

Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven is really a terrific collection. Each of these first-person narrative stories is just wonderful, not a weak link in the bunch. Many times, I feel that a short story is a bit of an emotional letdown, but not in the case of these stories; each is emotionally rewarding. Never will you wish that a story was a little longer, or had a bit more for you. The writing here is excellent; the stories, compelling. Silber makes it a little bit more interesting by linking each story to the ones surrounding it as placed in the book. Well done. I highly recommend this collection, even if you generally shy away from short fiction.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A really fun read, February 27, 2005

By 

Michael White (Saint Louis, MO, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (Hardcover)

I picked this book up because of the controversial comments some critics made about the 2004 National Book Award nominees. I was looking for something different from the usual bestsellers that sit out front in Borders or Barnes and Noble, bestsellers that can easily be turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

Silber's book was a refreshing change. You don't read this book for the plot, you read it for the language and the wonderful exploration of the relationship between sexual and spiritual longing. It's not a deep, dense philosophical treatise on the subject though; you see the tension of unfulfilled longing played out in the lives of mostly normal, everyday characters.

I started out thinking about the characters of the first two stories as losers - people who made bad choices in search of fulfillment. But as I kept reading, I came to recognize that many of the weaknesses of the characters were weaknesses I shared - I'm often blind in the same way they were blind about the mistakes they were making. This is what made the book compelling for me.

In the end, this book was just a lot of fun to read. I had a great time sitting on the couch and savoring Silber's beautiful language.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding grace through loss, February 24, 2006

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (Paperback)

I usually read only novels, but this is what the author calls a ring of six first-person stories, linked by the device of having a person or idea mentioned in a minor way in one story becoming the main subject of the next. Far more important than these surface links, however, is the commonality of theme that ties these first-person narratives together, even though their narrators alternate between male and female and their locales range from Renaissance Venice and 19th-century China to more-or-less-contemporary New York and Paris. Few of these life-stories (for each typically spans several decades) deal with great figures, and many are humdrum or downright uneventful. Most of the tales are about love found and lost again, through stupidity, tragedy, or the mere passage of time. Yet each ends in a state of acceptance, compromise perhaps, but increasingly verging on religious grace; the book-jacket comparison with William Trevor is not inapt. And the book's power is cumulative, enfolding the reader in a moral universe that is more consistent and consoling than in many a novel.

In short, excellently conceived and executed; the missing star is simply due to the fact that the book keeps a relatively low profile, without the emotional range of many of the books to which I have awarded five stars.