We So Seldom Look on Love [Paperback]

Barbara Gowdy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

NOW IN PAPERBACK, this masterfully crafted story collection by the author of the internationally best-selling novel Mister Sandman is a haunting book that is certain to both disturb and entertain. With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look On Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain, the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, the erotic delusions of a woman who repeatedly exposes her body to an unknown voyeur, or the bizarre predilections of a female necrophile (a story made into the acclaimed motion picture, "Kissed"), Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor. In reviewing the book in the Boston Globe, the novelist Carol Shields wrote, "Barbara Gowdy invites herself, and us, into taboo territory where love and disgust mingle freely. Nothing seems to hold back the narrative flow, not propriety, not politics, not even that ambiguity we once called good taste . . . Gowdy writes about the macabre, but she writes like an angel."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

From the author of the blockbuster Mister Sandman comes a gathering of unusual characters captured in the outrageous and humorous situations for which Barbara Gowdy has become famous. Teasing the taboos, Gowdy creates a marriage dialogue between a woman and her transsexual fiancé, who she thought was a man, and litigation between Samuel and Simon who share the same two-headed body. She peoples her stories with Siamese twins, a necrophile, and a pathetically lonely exhibitionist. And she brilliantly illustrates how uncomfortably close a connection comedy has to human suffering. The title story has been adapted into a movie called "Kissed.

From Publishers Weekly

These eight short stories employ both satire and morbid humor to explore the lives of emotionally and physically abnormal characters. Among the protagonists: a pathetically goofy hyperactive child in foster care; Siamese twins equipped with two pairs of legs, two sets of female genitalia and one active libido; a little girl who creates chants to shrink the head of her hydrocephalic playmate; a young woman, unable to find satisfaction in her marriage, who poses nude in front of her living room window to excite the voyeur who lives across the way; and the two necrophiliacs of the title story, which takes its name from a Frank O'Hara poem. While their behavior is sometimes macabre, these people show extraordinary gutsiness, refusing to allow their abnormalities to diminish their capacities for life and love in whatever form it takes. Canadian novelist Gowdy ( Falling Angels ) writes with a bite that grants her characters earthy courage without allowing them to lapse into self-pity. Her daring high-wire act may not appeal to everyone, but her stories are not easily forgotten.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Press (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642000
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642006
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #252,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!, March 31, 2000

By 

belladena - See all my reviews

This review is from: We So Seldom Look on Love (Paperback)

I'm not surprised - I knew Gowdy was an artist when I picked up her novel "Falling Angels" by accident. This book of short stories is an incredible and dizzying fall into the world of the bizarre - where everything that is off-the-wall, quirky, and unacceptable, becomes normal, textured, and sprinkled with a bit of reality - though not to the point of being ho-hum. Oh, no! Barbara Gowdy will grab you by the neck and MAKE you admit it's a beautiful world, filled with odd, gorgeous people. I love this author - she is the only writer I've ever known who revels and celebrates the crazy shapes and colours of the human animal.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Weird, Touching, Unclassifiable yet Oddly Beautiful, August 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: We So Seldom Look on Love (Paperback)

What a find! Gowdy is an almost unfairly gifted writer whose modus operandi is to take some off-beat, off-the-wall subject and make it both touching and deeply human.

What kind of subject? Well, there's a girl with an odd kind of siamese twin (two legs who stick out from her chest), who goes to school quite normally, is loved by her family and, of course, runs off to join the circus. She's beautiful, and normal-enough looking (when she dresses to hide those legs) to pass in "normal" society, and she meets and marries a man. It's an old story, yes, but in one line, Gowdy puts a twist on it that is at once liberating and heartbreaking.

There's an old, non entirely sane woman, whose only joy in life is in taking in deformed and abused foster children; a woman who rediscovers her own sexuality when a peeping Tom pays a visit; and a young girl who can only love corpses. Gowdy's self-confidence, in tackling these themes with both grace and ease, is astonishing; the beauty of her prose, in making them poetic, touching and almost unbearably poignant, is equally astonishing.

Gowdy's writing is never abstruse, she never leaves the reader hanging; her stories are told in a straightforward manner, with a classical structure (beginning, middle, crisis plot point, and resolution/end), her characters and dialogue completely believable. The book will probably be most favored by fans of horror or fantasy, only because they have an easier ability to suspend disbelief. Others, however, should be equally moved and impressed.

I am anxious to read any other stories by this brilliant and moving writer.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gowdy's a master at making the unusual, April 23, 2003

By 

"cathst" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: We So Seldom Look on Love (Paperback)

An utterly amazing collection of short stories, many of which are related to one another, so they fit well together as a group. She has a knack for taking the most unusual or unconventional characters and situations and making them seem so realistic and sympathetic. One thing that always strikes me is that she seems to care about her characters so much. Despite their flaws, despite their outright freakishness at times, she, because of her affection for them, is able to convey to the reader their fundamental humanity. As a result, the focus is taken away from whatever makes them different, and we are instead drawn to see the similarities between them and ourselves.

Some images from this book will stay with me forever. Silvie and Sue as well as Simon and Samuel, two sets of siamese twins, each with their own story, for example. Incomparable characterization, simple but profound writing style, this book is absolutely unforgettable.

And, if I can sneak in another recommendation, check out "Mister Sandman" by the same author - as much as I loved this one, that one's even better!