Customer Reviews

Interesting Women: Stories

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read a wonderful review of this book in the New York Times, bought it and had it on my shelf when a good friend told me I HAD to read it. Once I started, I couldn't put it down! The stories are about everything I find relevant and interesting: relationships between men and women, and between women and women, the dynamics of race, and travel and life in other countries. Isn't this what life is about? Well it is for educated, mixed-race women who enjoy and appreciate travel and living overseas, and who are or were married.
I am looking forward to Andrea Lee's next book with eager anticipation!

I think this book should be retitled "Some Moderately Interesting Women and Some Very Uninteresting Women All of Whom Fit a Personality Template." The author is clearly a worldly, sophisticated, and well-travelled women, but I think she assumes that a worldly person who runs with other worldly people in exotic locales is somehow inherently "interesting." Unfortunately, she mainly presents us with numerous examples of the "expat bore."

I think she has a tin ear for dialogue, yet she does a capable job of evoking a sense of place, and her most believable characters are the ones that I assume are largely autobiographical: the recently divorced and remarried expat American woman in Italy who is dealing with her children, her race, their new stepfather, and the echoes of her previously directionless, dissolute, yet financially comfortable life. The worst story is where the author attempts to render her pre-teen daughter in first person. The story sounds like a mother trying to imagine what her daughter thinks about, yet projects both her voice and her concerns upon the daughter. It's just awful. I was led to this collection of short stories by Lee's story in the New Yorker "The Prior's Room." In this story, Lee actually gives us an interesting woman, and the New Yorker story is far superior to anything in this collection. I recommend the New Yorker story, but not these stories.

This book is great! The writing is suburb--dense but not too "much" for before bed or vacation reading. Her female characters are so well drawn. They are smart, self aware but never self-indulgent and annoying and the tone is great and the themes--about women relating to women, to men, about class distinctions among blacks, etc--are fantastic. it departs from the Bridget Jones genre, taking more risks, is slightly more literary than the multitude of "female perspective" books out there right now, and more complicated. A total pleasure to read, i'm recommending it to everyone i talk to.

The cover of my (European) edition of Lee's short stories is misleading. Between the gritty Vogue-ish photo of an elegantly dressed woman's back, the gold script font of the title, and the dominant blurb by Elle Magazine on the back, you'd think you were in for some classy chick lit. What you get instead are a series of expertly crafted, sophisticated literary gems. With precision, control, and deadpan wit, Lee sketches a series of female characters who find themselves at cultural crossroads: ex-patriots living in a new language, cosmopolitan professionals dating across racial lines, first-world citizens figuring out the terms of their status in the greater world, individuals making sense of their various, conflicting cultural legacies. There's not a single weak story in this collection. I particularly enjoyed "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" and "Anthropology."

the book is great, just a little repetitive is all. Lee is an incredibly gifted, astute, dryly humorous writer who deals with complex topics like race, gender, sex and class with great subtley and style. The only problem is that all of her short stories employ nearly the exact same tone and narrative voice -- the same quietly observant female who makes sly little observations about all of the above-mentioned themes. After a while you start to long for a man's perspective or a variation in tone or style, just to mix things up a little. Nadine Gordimer does this with great skill -- hopefully Andrea Lee will evolve to become as dexterous as Gordimer is at portraying many different points of view. In any case, Lee is off to brilliant start!

I was so excited about this book. I really, really wanted to enjoy it. But the beyond-annoying characters and poor writing just blew it for me.

The women main characters in all of these stories do indeed fit a template, as a reviewer suggested: they are all boring, lonely, and either hyper-aware of it, or hyper-delusional about it. They each either admire gung-ho prostitutes or have wild, more confidant BFFs - the worst kinds of "adventurous woman" cliches - who they know they pale in comparison to, but upon whom their "own survival" depends. Wow, what a great bunch of people to read about! These women do nothing to wake up from their depression, do nothing to even remotely change their lives for the better, and indeed typically look outward to Italian men and late-night soireeing to lend some purpose to their existence. Again - how are these women "interesting"?

Frankly, reading about them was a slog. I suppose though that if you're just like these women, you'll enjoy being in similar company (but I'd suggest seeing a therapist instead).

Andrea Lee's writing mirrors the lack of life of all her main characters. She writes that a character's eyes suddenly sting with tears, but nothing in the content before or after even remotely explains why. A woman has a potentially life-changing vision, then goes to gab boringly on the phone with said wild BFF about cock-teasing. I actually started writing in the book "Why???" next to so many passages that I finally concluded Lee did not know herself why her main characters were acting in certain ways. She just threw in lines here or there, crumbs of bread to make the reader finish the story, to make the reader think Lee actually knew what she was writing about. I expected a whole lot more from a National Book Award nominee.

If you want to read well-written stories about *actually* interesting women, try Isabel Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna. Or Robert Olen Butler's Tabloid Dreams: Stories.

Impossible to undrstand the acclaim she has received. She mistakes self-centeredness for sensitive perception,scattered details for sense of scene, and writing school metaphors for prose style. The plots of all the stories reduce to an alienated woman suggesting the deficiencies of men with whom she is involved while demeaning the context, particularly northern Italy, Not much there,

Ineffable. Brilliant. Rare. This is a singular talent. The work is delicately nuanced and completely vivid, more music than prose at times. It is deserving of universal praise. My one regret is that we do not have more of Ms. Lee's writing to savor. Bravo!

I read Ms. lee's story, Three, in The New Yorker and was blown away. This collection of short stories is 'interesting', but in small doses. By story that is. My suggestion would be to read one and then let the book sit. It conjures up images of worlds I saw in Italy.

I first discovered Lee when I read her brilliantly sly, sexy & astute short story "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" in the anthology of 2001 Best American Short Stories. So when I came across her own collection of short stories, intriguingly called Interesting Women, I immediately bought it.

I was a little disappointed to see that the tone in almost all of her stories was surprisingly repetitive. Almost every single story is told from the nearly identical point of view of an intelligent, observant and slightly judgemental woman. This quote from her story "Full Moon Over Milan" perfectly describes the character of that ever-present female narrator: "With family and lovers Merope learned early to defend her own behavior by adopting the role of ironic spectator, an over-perceptive little girl observing unsurprised the foibles of her elders."

Still, despite the fact that the narrator, the tone, and the themes (of sex, race, nationality and gender) are repeated over and over again, the stories are nevertheless incredibly compelling, thought-provoking and, ultimately, quite satisfying. With time, I hope to see Lee grow to be as skilled a writer as Nadine Gordimer, who explores many of the same themes in a slightly more varied way in her own quite brilliant stories.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend that people read Lee's Interesting Women to discover an equally brilliant writer in the making.