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Title: Ice Cream by Helen Dunmore ISBN: 0-8021-1733-3 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 10 December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Quirky collection of character studies
Comment: In this collection of short stories, Helen Dunmore focuses on quick, in-depth character sketches. The reader is exposed to a variety of scenarios, from the reality based--in the title story, an actress denies herself her favorite indulgencies in order to maintain her fame--to the unreal--a story of a horrific future where cloning is praised and natural births are punished. Many of the plots involve themes of serious illness and/or death, including "You Stayed Awake With Me" (a woman with terminal illness confronts the past), "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife" (a doting husband reflects on loss), "Emily's Ring" (a young girl is burdened with the care of her many half-siblings), and "Lisette" (a promosing young family is doomed in WWII France). Many of the tales are set in the past; the time isn't always specified, but several stories have a turn of the century feel. One character, Ulli, appears in three different stories; at first, she seems to be a world-weary woman, but in the final story, we learn that she is a 16 year old girl. Of the 18 stories in the book, most are 10-12 pages in length, with the longest being 24 pages and the shortest being only 4 pages. Overall, this book is a short, engaging read that may leave you wondering what happens next.
Rating: 4
Summary: It's hard not to gobble these stories all at once!
Comment: You know the saying: you can't tell a book by its cover. As a reviewer, I don't take looks too seriously but I have to admit this is one cute package: a slim vanilla volume covered by a shiny dust jacket with candy-colored stripes and a picture of an (empty) ice-cream dish. It is almost edible.
In fact, the title story wasn't by any means my favorite --- it's a sort of glamorous throwaway about the suppression of appetite and its greedy return. But Dunmore, who is also a poet, writes so sensuously and precisely that she can make nearly anything matter. Best known as the author of elegant, pared-down psychological thrillers like TALKING TO THE DEAD and WITH YOUR CROOKED HEART, she has recently ventured beyond that genre with THE SIEGE, a novel set in the USSR during World War II. And now comes this collection of 18 stories --- none of which, as far as I can make out, have been published previously.
Stories aren't usually my thing, except when they're by Alice Munro or Katherine Mansfield. If they move me, I want more; I want to be immersed for days (if possible) in a world of somebody else's making. Still, there is something thrilling about the way a story can begin with a moment and then open up to an entire life --- but subtly and concisely, so you get only the details you need and not the entire family tree. Dunmore seems to know instinctively just how much to tell: not so much that the narrative loses pace and edge, not so little that it becomes annoyingly cryptic. And her talent is such that ICE CREAM, although uneven in quality (short-story collections inevitably are), lives up to its name. I wanted to devour it all at once and had to make myself take it in slowly, bite by voluptuous bite.
Dunmore's sense of language is extraordinary: lush, unhackneyed and rhythmic. She has a way of getting inside a character's head and making herself at home there; the stream of sensation, memory and ephemera is perfectly believable. In "You Stayed Awake With Me," two friends, one of them ill, revisit a childhood summerhouse --- and some past betrayals. "Pain is a climate like winter," the sick woman thinks. "It closes over you and soon you can't imagine not living in it. Some days, when I wake, before I move, I pretend to myself. I think I've got away. I'm stepping off a plane into a different climate where warm, spicy breezes blow your clothes against your thighs. I'm walking so lightly and easily that it feels like flying." "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife," one of the best stories in the book, presents us with a man in mourning whose conversation with himself becomes our lens for a woman's hard, isolated, sturdy life: "Slowly, methodically, he would climb the lighthouse tower, toward the light, thinking of her. A mound of sea thudded against the tower, then fell back and weaseled at the foot of the rock, getting its strength. Nancy said she did not mind thinking of him in the lighthouse, no matter how bad the storms, but what she kept out of her thoughts was the moment when he was brought off the landing-platform, with the sea hungry for him and the lighthouse tender pitching. ... It made her sick to think of it, she said, though he knew she could walk to the edge of the cliff and stand there without a moment's dizziness."
There is no theme as such in ICE CREAM; the eclectic mix suggests a conscious effort to show off Dunmore's range, which is impressive --- from the futuristic bite of "Leonardo, Michelangelo, Superstork" to macabre fables like "Emily's Ring" and "The Clear and Rolling Water" to gentler vignettes that release sweet moments of transcendence ("Swimming Into the Millennium"; "Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty"). But I think her most original stories are darker. They are about the courage, craziness and solitude of the outsider and involve psychological and physical violence as well.
Many of the tales in ICE CREAM come from the "wrong" side of some cultural divide or social convention --- geography, language, class, sexual roles --- and three of them are linked by a common protagonist: Ulli, a Finnish woman whose smart, ironic voice reveals a wintry landscape of the soul. "The Icon Room," a brilliant story, relates her encounter with a stranger, both of them with only a lonely Sunday to look forward to: "Drinking cups of coffee until your heart bangs and you feel dizzy when you stand up. Walking home the quiet way and standing still while a lick of spring sunlight needles your skin. Prickling all afternoon as you wait for the sound of the telephone bell, which doesn't ring and doesn't ring, until at last you give up and put on your dressing gown."
I'd like to hear from Ulli again. I grew fond of her; I want to know more about her. I'd like her to have a companion and a whole book to stretch out in --- because, as good as these are, stories always stop too soon.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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Title: With Your Crooked Heart: A Novel by Helen Dunmore ISBN: 0802137709 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 30 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Spell of Winter: A Novel by Helen Dunmore ISBN: 0802138764 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 09 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Referred Pain: And Other Stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz ISBN: 1582433011 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 17 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson ISBN: 0393324796 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: There Are Jews in My House : Stories by LARA VAPNYAR ISBN: 0375422501 Publisher: Pantheon Pub. Date: 02 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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