On the verge of giving up—anchored to dreams that never came true and to people who have long since disappeared from their lives—Van Booy's characters walk the streets of these stark and beautiful stories until chance meetings with strangers force them to face responsibility for lives they thought had continued on without them.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Van Booy's sentimental second collection deals heavily in the neuroses and personal traumas of his characters. The longish title story follows Brunno Bonnet, an emotionally debilitated cellist with a fondness for stones who encounters Hannah, a bird-obsessed shop owner with a fondness for acorns. In the beautiful The Missing Statues, Max, a young diplomat is reduced to tears at the edge of St. Peter's Square in Rome as memories of childhood in seedy Las Vegas overwhelm him. In the excellent The Coming and Going of Strangers, a multigenerational story of heroism, tragedy, love and family finds its roots with Walter, a Romany Irish gypsy who falls in love with a Canadian orphan girl. Though Van Booy's tendency to deliver a late-story surprise becomes predictable, each of these stories has moments of sheer loveliness. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In the five impressionistic stories in Van Booy’s latest collection, following The Secret Lives of People in Love (2007), the author continues to develop his highly original style and his overriding theme of isolation versus connection. His characters are often terribly lonely, so much so that when they do find love, it is treated as a miraculous occurrence. Haunted by the memories of dead loved ones and able to readily access the intense emotions of childhood, his characters seem to be not quite of this world. And yet, they are able to express in the most unguarded and heartfelt language their innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, and victories. In “The City of Windy Trees,” George Frack learns, seven years after the fact, that a one-night stand with a Swedish waitress has produced a child. He quits his job and flies to Sweden, eager to meet his child and to turn what might have been a nightmarish situation into the single most important thing that ever happened to him. More about what is felt than what happens, Van Booy’s stories pay beautiful homage to human connection. --Joanne Wilkinson
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More About the Author
Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky for two years, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an M.F.A. and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Award. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. Van Booy now lives in New York City where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Long Island University. He is also involved in the Bard College Access Program for at-risk young adults.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't wait until winter.,
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This review is from: Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)
"Love Begins in Winter" is a memorable book. The stories are sweet and possess underling truth. Several times I became afraid they might drift off to maudlin but they do not. They are purposeful, tie together and succeed beautifully. Simon van Booy has a gift for observation and there are at least 100 sentences in this book that I could read over and over again. He is a romantic, but one who feels and writes as deeply as he does from knowing both personal loss and growing wonder. He is both wise and hopeful. I look forward to his next book.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Daydreams,
This review is from: Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)
In these five stories, author Simon Van Booy speaks
in a clairvoyant voice and a singular style that obscures the line between fiction and poetry. His dexterity with language is so fluid that it summons images of an acrobat flipping nouns and verbs rather than body parts. A series of mellifluous daydreams, the collection traverses time and space exploring the inner lives of individuals who long for lost love. From Bruno Bonnet, a celebrated cellist performing in Quebec, who continues to be enchanted by a childhood sweetheart to George Frack, a down-trodden office worker, who travels to Sweden to meet the daughter he has just discovered, the characters steal your heart and take your breath away.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Love and Ashes,
By
This review is from: Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)
At first, I was simply attracted by the feel in the hand of this beautifully-produced slim paperback. Then, perhaps because I too am a musician, by the situation on the first page: a cellist waits backstage in a Quebec concert hall to perform a recital: "My name is Bruno Bonnet. The curtain I stand behind is the color of a plum. The velvet is heavy. My life is on the other side. Sometimes I wish it would continue on without me." After the concert, Bruno will walk the empty snow-covered city streets for the rest of the night; it is one of many striking conjunctions of people and places that have such powerful effect throughout the five stories in the book. I might also cite the American businessman weeping like a child in St. Peter's Square in Rome, a little boy sitting on a wall in Las Vegas while his stepfather gambles inside, a lovesick Romany on the West coast of Ireland gazing over to an imagined America, or a desolate man wandering through the almost empty zoo in wintry Stockholm. Van Booy writes in the P.S. section how he often gets inspiration simply by traveling somewhere and walking alone. It works.
But then there is his style. You could see it already in the passage I quoted above -- short declarative sentences with little to wash them down. Here is a longer extract: "My hotel room overlooks the St. Lawrence River. Chunks of ice slip by with the current. Quebec women once set out hard rods of corn on planks of wood on the river's bank. I can see their cotton-white breath and their gray teeth as glimmering fish are spread across barrels. Their aprons are wet. Frost has dusted white the rich brown earth. The ground is hard as stone. Cold has cracked their hands. They laugh and wave to children on small boats drifting. Clouds churn in the eyes of the fish." A poetic imagination, certainly, but the language in which it is expressed is dry as ashes. And yet, and yet.... Somehow, out of the ashes, Van Booy can conjure love -- despite the style, perhaps even because of the style. All five stories here involve people finding new life amid desolation. All of them also span more than one generation. The cellist, haunted by the memory of a playmate killed in childhood, meets a woman scarred by the horrible death of her beloved brother. The little boy in Las Vegas, befriended by a casino gondolier, grows up to accept the losses of his youth. The Romany, no longer lovesick, comes to America, although his story takes a quite different turn from what he might have expected. The sad man in Stockholm finds an unexpected joy. The pattern for all the stories is set by the novella that gives its apt title to the book, "Love Begins in Winter." But Van Booy succeeds best in the shorter tales, where the ashes are sparser and love has more hope. The fourth of them especially, "The Coming and Going of Strangers," is a little miracle.
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