Customer Reviews

Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...this is an amazing piece of work. I loved reading Tumble Home. This short-story collection is brief (only 160 pages long) and the stories are deceptively simple. But each story holds profound messages centered on family life and other every day events that may seem insignificant at first glance. My favorite stories are "Sportsman," "The New Lodger," "The Children's Party," and the novella "Tumble Home." Again, the stories are very short, but nevertheless beautiful. Amy Hempel's writing is sparse but possesses such beautiful prose that I just couldn't put this collection down. Hers is a voice that sounds poetic at times. I recommend this book to all short-story lovers.

In a decade of flabby mass-dense but weightless prose, when PCs coax 800 page novels from 3 page brains and there is no fiction that has enough edge to cut soft butter, in a time when short stories are carelessly wrought retreads of rehashed earlier stories, inflicted on readers in the borrowed and depressing syntax of 1950's hackiest fictions, in these bleak days there is one writer, one yet, who still works to make us wince, or laugh out loud, or see the world made new. Look to her tropes, her figurings and how none of her stuff seems mannered, but it's all easy and natural and bright. Buy the book, friend.

Some of the stories in this book are really good, but others just aren't. Having read and been totally blown away by two of Amy Hempel's other short story collections, I found this a little bit disappointing. Stories are interesting enough, and pleasant enough to read but seem more generic than some of her earlier work. I felt like I could have read them and not recognized tht they were the work of this great author. Most disappointing of all was the novella. Long and rambling and if there was a point I didn't get it. For better books by Amy Hempel, I strongly suggest both Reasons To Live and At The Gates Of The Animal Kingdom.

Hempel's slim novella 'Tumble Home,' has a hypnotic prose that leaves the reader concentrating on every word. The short stories are so earthy you feel as if you're among family. Minimalism has never been used so effectively with Hempel's description of everyday americana.

Amy Hempel is a writer you don't want to read lazily. Even in her 70+ page title novella, you don't want to flash over a single syllable, for Hempel is an intensive writer of the unsaid, working with both what is on the page and what isn't to convey the complex emotions of her characters. Also, since many of her narrators or narratives are disjointed in some way (or, like in the title novella, unbalanced), their methods of storytelling are often indirect in form, but direct in emotion.

Hempel's clearest strength has to do with the unmediated emotions she creates in her prose. Rather than thoughtful response, she tends to first engage emotionally, throwing us squarely into a character's head, however uncomfortable that may be. In "Sportsman," for example, Jack has been turned out in an act of what he deems as betrayal, and so drives across the country to find solace. He is mistrusting, alone and heartbroken, and Hempel does not filter out what might be unpleasant about his situation for the sake of sentimentality. Instead, she engages it honestly (and wittily) to make Jack and his friends fleshed out and alive.

Not to say that Hempel works only on an emotional level. Her writing clearly has a lot of intellectual appeal. She exhibits great play with language and a magnificent ear for the quirks of conversation (any party scene in this book will hit you with smart dialogue you'll want to emulate), and her writing is surgically prescise, though maybe too precise at times. Stories like "Sportsman" and "Church Cancels Cow" and the novella _Tumble Home_ run a tight wire of meshing their characters and their metaphors without seam, but other stories, like "The Children's Party," end up with forced metaphor, like pieces whose endings feel a little more contrived than organic, but I will credit Hempel here with her successes in this book rather than disparage her for ithe book's faults. It's a short book, but well worth taking your time with, to wring every idea from.

Amy Hempel reminds me of the time I went to a new doctor...and waited and waited for her surrounded by horribly slick renderings of "great art," sitting on the world's most uncomfortable chairs. Waiting. By the time the doctor showed up I was beside myself with whole menus of outrage. But when she introduced herself to me, I saw that her mascara had run all down her face and she looked a bit of a wreck. I loved her for it instantly.

Amy Hempel is an anorexic writer. She is right down to the bones. It's impossible to find any excessive or fat words in her text. Although easily digested, her words remain so chocked full of minerals, vitamins, and vitality that you simply cannot find another contemporary writer that gives you more of a reading work-out in so little time. The short stories in this compilation live up to this streamlined reputation; however, the novella, Tumble Home, left me tumbling back to Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and Gillman's feminist classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. I was left thinking that I had read it somewhere before, perhaps on a plane, or before a nap. No new territory here, but the prelude to it, the skinny part, makes it worth the voyage.

an incredible author. but don't buy this, there's a copy with all three amy hemple collections. tumble home is just one of three. get them all because it would be a shame to go through this life never having read them.

Hempel is a great writer. The stories aren't for fans of writers like, say, Stephen King (he's my favorite author), but anyone can appreciate Hempel's work.

Amy Hempel is an anorexic writer. She is right down to the bones. It's impossible to find any excessive or fat words in her text. Although easily digested, her words remain so chocked full of minerals, vitamins, and vitality that you simply cannot find another contemporary writer that gives you more of a reading work-out in so little time. The short stories in this compilation live up to this streamlined reputation; however, the novella, Tumble Home, left me tumbling back to Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and Gillman's feminist classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. I was left thinking that I had read it somewhere before, perhaps on a plane, or before a nap. No new territory here, but the prelude to it, the skinny part, makes it worth the voyage.