North of Nowhere, South of Loss: Stories [Paperback]

Janette Turner Hospital (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2006

"A new standard for the short story genre that will be hard to surpass." --Library Journal

In these prize-winning, "heartbreakingly nuanced" (Speakeasy) stories, Janette Turner Hospital explores the infinite incarnations of loss; lovers meeting again in midlife re-experience, through the memory of photographs both real and imagined, the passion that both frightened and thrilled them; a young dental hygienist adrift, living in a hostel in northern Australia, receives a heart-wrenching visit from her drug-dependent brother; a mother and adolescent daughter move into a new house, and their sense of safety is shaken when the previous owner reappears, desperate to reclaim what he has lost. Hospital's characters oscillate between estrangement and intense connectedness, between a permanent sense of dislocation and a yearning to belong.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Australian rainforest and the humid American South are the suffocating backdrops for most of these brooding, densely lyrical 14 stories by Hospital (Oyster; Due Preparations for the Plague; etc.). "For Mr. Voss or Occupant" begins with a feeling of foreboding, as Laura White moves herself and her daughter into a house that may be haunted by the very real presence of its former occupant, and ends abruptly with a foreshadowed but still shocking conclusion. A set of four connected stories explores the relationship of Philippa and Brian, friends since childhood in Brisbane. Philippa, an artist, frequently slips into flights of fancy from which Brian, a rational scientist, calls her back. In "Unperformed Experiments," Philippa dreams of Brian and worries that he is in trouble. In "Cape Tribulation," Philippa's nightmares are realized as Brian, worn down by overwork, succumbs to a world of hallucination, populated by ideas and fantasies that could well have been borrowed from Philippa. "And now this comeuppance: he is having her nightmares." Hospital's trademark focus on interior thoughts can be wearing, but welcome relief is provided by dialogue-rich stories such as the lively "Frames and Wonders," which follows a photographer and his lover on a chase through an ancient forest as he tries to capture her in photographic images. These short stories unfold like poems, compact and mysterious, with clues buried within.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The haunting floral scent of frangipani permeates this riveting short-story collection from the Australian author of the novel Due Preparations for the Plague [BKL My 15 03]. Hospital's strength lies in capturing her character's interior lives with a poet's grace and precision. The subjects of each story vary, from a mother and daughter whose new home is threatened by its mysterious previous tenant to lovers who reimagine their affair through a series of photographs, but the most powerful are those featuring childhood friends Brian and Philippa, whose intense bond may still not be enough to save them from their inner demons. The collection is thematically linked: each story explores the geographies and memories that define and bind us even as they change shape over time. How we embroider past events or alter and manipulate memories from actual occurrences are key elements in many of the tales. Like Patrick White's solitary explorer Voss (to whom one story alludes), Hospital's characters are continually in search of a homeland they may never return to and, perhaps, will never find. Misha Stone
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (March 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393327523
• ISBN-13: 978-0393327526
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,530,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These Stories Are East of Wonderful!, November 14, 2004

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: North of Nowhere, South of Loss: Stories (Hardcover)

Janette Turner Hospital has written fourteen short stories here, seven of which have been previously published in another short story collection, all of which appear to have been published in literary magazines or journals. The stories are set all the way from Australia to the Southern United States. The characters are wildly different in their problems and dilemmas; but to a person, they are engaging and alive. It's difficult to select a "best of" as there are no bad stories here. In the first one, "The Ocean of Brisbane", Brian-- who appears in several other stories-- is a successful scientist ashamed of his uneducated mother. His treatment of her will break your heart. One of my favorites is "South of Loss", where two lonely souls connect when a woman whose car breaks down on a back road in South Carolina meets an auto mechanic. They comfort each other from their own sense of loss. Although many of these characters are those whose "worlds of possibilities" are small, they continue to kick against the pricks.

As always, Ms. Hospital is wonderful with language-- from the photographer who is "not guilty as charged" but "framed"--to one Australian character's thoughts on Americans: "They are a curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door. . ." Finally in the story "Litany For The Homeland" Hospital waxes lyrical as she describes her love for Australia: "Homeland is where the senses steer by instinct when the reins are let go. It is always accessible in that small space between sleeping and waking. . . Wherever I am, I live in Queensland. I know to what brown country and to what wet rainforest my homing thoughts will fly in the moment between living and dying. . ." Does writing get better than this? Such poetic passages make Ms. Hospital one of the best writers of English.

These are as good as short stories get.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Everything in its time, October 24, 2004

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: North of Nowhere, South of Loss: Stories (Hardcover)

Hospital has created a book of interconnected short stories, not a happy ending in sight. Rather, she takes incidents from her character's lives, sometimes seemingly minor, other times desperately tragic, and weaves an unusual narrative that reaches past the obvious, into far murkier waters of love, obsession, loss and acceptance.

Beginning in North Australia, the scenes redolent of that particular country and moving finally into the deep south of America, the author's sense of place defines each tale, the relative characters reflecting where each story takes place. Skillfully blending the present and the past, the innocuous becomes ominous, the innocent evil, never predictable, but surely representative of the intricacies of the human psyche.

In a rush of characters across space and time, images flash by unheeded, yet noted. Pushing into the future, emotions accelerate in intensity, yet fall backward into the realm of memory. Throughout the chaos of the years, the complexities of relationships, the what-ifs, there is a great connectedness, an acceptance of what is.

A genius of the impossible, Hospital rushes to the edge of the world and dares to look over. There are no happy endings because, basically, there are no endings, only the push toward freedom of one kind or another. Complex, challenging, North of Nowhere, South of Loss is an extraordinary experience in the realm of possibilities. Luan Gaines/2004.