Customer Reviews

We So Seldom Look on Love

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

 

 

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.

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.

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!

If you have ever had romantic yearnings for a corpse, or imagined a prom queen boning ('scuse the pun) some embalmed remains, this books is for you. I have never experienced a mental pathology in a way that made me so wistful and contemplative, so empathetic and receptive and alive. Give it a try! This book will open you petal by petal, to the sun.

I picked this book up on a whim, and discovered a jewel. The stories humanize those made inhuman by society and its constraints, and at the same time show the deeply ingrained pain they endure due to their differences. For those who enjoy Katherine Dunn's darkness (so stunningly seen in Geek Love), this book should be your next read.

I savored these stories--only one a night. They were fantastic. Every one is truly bizarre but truly commonplace at the same time. The characters--freaks and victims of perverse circumstance--are revealed in the end to possess a kind of mundane sensibility. The everydayness of these characters is just captivating.

The author invites the reader into the minds of some curious characters who might be worthy of severe criticism, but the reader is invited to explore them without judgement like an anthropology ethnography. The characters are usually slightly naive, inexperienced, innocent, introspective, and acting in good faith. And they don't know it, but they are awfully quirky. Over the course of the stories they are learning just how quirky they are.

The world these stories takes place in is reminiscent of the playful black-humour novel Geek Love: A Novel by Katherine Dunn (1989). Just slightly magical, which permits the flaws of the characters to be charming, highly visible, ridiculous, and perhaps ultimately allegorical. Also reminiscent of Margaret Atwood (another Canadian), particularly in the intensely self-aware and introspective nature of the characters--they spend a lot of time evaluating themselves and thinking. The last novel I'm reminded of is And the Ass Saw the Angel, Revised Edition by Nick Cave, except AASA is a difficult read and might have been more approachable in short story form.

The short story format is used well. Gowdy has a particular knack for ending short stories at the right time--before all the strings are tied up. A sensitive reader might occasionally find an ending heavy handed as it wraps up with commentary on the theme, but I found those endings an opportunity to spend a little more time with the the story and think about the ethical dilemmas posed.

I have a suggestion--Read this book but skip the first story. I think it is a disaster. Perhaps it was placed first as a warm-up to the world the stories take place in but it lacks the glowing life of the remaining stories. It also suffers from burdensome over-narration of internal thoughts of multiple characters that don't drive the story, has a total failure of imagination in trying to express a characters fascination with the visual world, and occasionally the description of physical events defy common sense and feel clumsy in a way that the editor should have dealt with. And it is entirely too long for the story it contains. The conceit is clever enough, just poorly executed.

First story aside, this is a charming collection of short stories and I'm distressed that there are only 9 reviews. (I was just writing a one-star review of The Girl With the Dragon tattoo which at this time has 2,733 reviews.) I think a sophisticated reader would enjoy this book unless they regularly find deeply introspective characters exhausting, despise magical realism (I liked this despite hating the emotional latino magical realism of Like Water For Chocolate, probably because LWFC wants to be magical while simultaneously utterly depressingly serious), or aren't prepared to approach circus freaks with a sense of humour.

There are fantastic stories in here like the beautiful necrophiliac or the two headed man personifying good and evil, but my favorite story was the one about the foster children. Gowdy told the story in a beautiful and loving way that made it far more arresting then other pieces I've read like it in which the authors try to be shocking.

Though Sandman and White Bone are also very good, We So Seldom Look on Love is still my favorite. Gowdy somehow reminds me of Flannery O'Conner.

Five Stars all the way