From Publishers Weekly
Lynds's powerful, beautifully crafted stories speak of the tenuousness of interpersonal relations, and of the courage of ordinary people navigating life's traumas. In the fiercely lyrical "Marriage, Death, Solitude & Confusion," the mundane reality of a down-and-out New York couple is contrasted with the rapturous deathbed visions of a boy hospitalized with leukemia who believes in heaven and reincarnation and is eager to die. "The Lion and the Mountain Man" charts a subservient army wife's metamorphosis into a feminist, divorced entrepreneur whose recurrent erotic dreams of a lion symbolize her repressed emotional needs. Similarly, the heroine of "Sylvestre and Dolores," a poor Guatemalan woman barely able to feed her two children and widowed by a death squad, makes her own escape-to California, with a false passport, only to meet tragedy through her affair with an emigre drug lord. In the title story, a California zoo veterinarian copes with divorce and a dying koala and befriends his neighbor, Mr. Joachim, a German immigrant and Mahler devotee whose family was killed in Nazi death camps. Mr. Joachim hangs in his window huge hand-painted signs bearing cryptic philosophical messages-a gesture of Lynds's characters, struggling to communicate, to be heard, to matter, in a largely indifferent world.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
