Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees [Hardcover]

Patricia Duncker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 1998

From the author of the critically acclaimed Hallucinating Foucault comes this stunning collection of stories united by the themes of pleasure, passion, jealousy, and revenge. Patricia Duncker creates worlds where the apparently innocent are not harmless and people never turn out to be exactly what they seem.

In "The Arrival Matters" -- the extra-ordinary novella that crowns the collection -- the characters play out the sinister and atmospheric end game of a mysterious and supernatural history of love. Elsewhere, a jealous husband pursues his adulterous wife through the streets of Paris, a forbidden book subverts an authoritarian state, a TV crew gets considerably more than it bargained for, and a lesbian community in uproar is described with wry humor.

Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees is a remarkable encore in the career of this daring and provocative writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Cursed with a vivid imagination," the woman in the story "Aria Nova" (who has her "briefest and most extraordinary affair" waltzing in her Doc Martens with a stranger in the Montparnasse metro) mirrors her creator, Duncker (Hallucinating Foucault), a Welsh academic and novelist who lives in France. This collection of 13 tales is honed by precise, hard and luminous wordcraft. In "The Crew of M6," a Parisian film crew, in the south of France to interview a group of articulate lesbians, gets caught in the women's eerie web. The incantatory monologue "A Woman Alone" introduces a femme fatale who makes Billy Joel's "Modern Woman" sound like June Cleaver. Perhaps the most successful of these stories is the novella "The Arrival Matters," which follows a young girl's initiation into a dark world of powerful women and the musician/magician who obeys them. The title story is the anomaly of the collection: a gentle, vivid memory of two beloved lemon trees in a wartime snowstorm. For all her feminist engagement, Duncker's vision is precise and miniature. She sets severe limits on her fiction, most notably excluding strong, admirable men and any love even momentarily separable from power. This closed system accounts for both the vivid life contained between the covers and the sense of release that many readers will feel when they turn the last page.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Duncker's stories may be cryptic, surreal, or even impenetrably enigmatic, but they are always powerfully evocative. It's not clear, for example, how the rebellious wife who shatters the windows in her sunroom manages to leave her husband, who is complacently bathing upstairs, hideously pierced with shards of glass, yet the image is hauntingly disturbing. It's more understandable, but nearly as shocking, when the seemingly submissive wife in another story defies her controlling mate by covering her torso with the tattoo of a huge dagger. Lesbian lovers fare decidedly better than their heterosexual counterparts in these stories, though one of the most accessible and enjoyable describes the wickedly funny revenge of a discarded plaything. Duncker's prose is spare and clean, her intelligence keen, her imagination vivid. Inasmuch as these challenging stories will appeal mainly to readers who are thoroughly comfortable with ambiguity, however, their audience may be limited. Dennis Dodge

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 197 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1ST edition (April 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880016043
• ISBN-13: 978-0880016049
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,386,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another winner from Ms Duncker, April 23, 2000

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NYC "atravelingreader" (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees (Hardcover)

This book of short stories is wonderfully written, most enjoyable and more accessable than the previous Hallucinating Foucault. An extra bonus is that one of the most delightful stories has been expanded into her next novel, The Doctor. A very promising author.