Customer Reviews

Year of Two Summers

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

 

 

This engaging collection of 16 stories set in London, Tel Aviv, South Africa, Los Angeles and New York offers the wise compassion of an unflinchingly honest narrative voice. The narrator invites and cajoles us, moving from hip distance into intimacy. Slipping interesting characters into just the sort of situations most likely to challenge us to move past ordinary observations, Levin's language entices us, bits of Hebrew, English slang. The secret he's confiding: not just how to survive, get by, but how to create a comfortable space amid the conflict, death, sheer uncertainty of the contemporary world. This can appear in the dilemmas of an Israeli army recruit awash in waves of desire, longing for his sexy Lebanese tent-mate, or in the industrious efforts of a teen-age drag queen seeking out shoes in his right size. Peppering all of the writer's exquisitely-drawn encounters is brilliant dialogue, supple narrative. We're pulled in, as well, with pleasurable scenes of meals and holidays planned and served up, spontaneous sex tenderly offered or hesitantly avoided. Yet, underneath the superb sensuality of these stories, past the celebration of public and private theater and song, is a breathtaking fierceness and commitment to the exercise of honesty. Here's a voice that at once asks the right questions, and shows where we might look to find, if not the answers, old questions defined in utterly new ways. How is anonymous sex a response to the prospect that familiarity breeds contempt? What to learn from how family, friends and lovers continuously redefine boundaries? Like a long-time friendship tested across the breakup of all else - physical community, families, disease and death - this collection's got legs, staying power. Shaun Levin's secret: devotion to truth and craft in the ability to draw characters whose talk holds our rapt attention from an afternoon tea and into the earliest hours of the next morn.