Stories from Mesa Country - Tapa dura

Stories from Mesa Country (Hardcover)

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CitiRetail
(Stevenage, Reino Unido)

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Descripción Hardcover. Condición: new. Hardcover. An excerpt from Stories from Mesa Country:"They are coming back from the burial ground. I can see them walking, two abreast, along the narrow track by the wash. Tom has his head down, his hands in the pockets of his black suit. Beside him, Reverend Sherman is talking, waving his arms, trying, I'd guess, to comfort. Behind them come Enid and Faith, square shapes in best blue dresses, and then Seth and Arch, leggy as colts, uncomfortable in Sunday suits, in the shadow of tragedy. Now a space, long seconds passing before I see Luisa. She is alone, walking slowly. She is crying. I know that, even from this distance, from my bed beside the window. She wipes her eyes on her apron. Her shoulders heave. She has been crying for three days."I wish I could shout so they could hear me. I wish the Reverend would go to her, assure her of her place in heaven and in our house. I wish one of them, Tom or the children, would take her by the arm, lead her home. Instead they act as if she is not there at all, perhaps thinking that if they ignore her she will vanish and with her this house, these three days, the newly turned earth in the far field."Well, they are wrong. None of it will disappear. We'll live with it, tiptoe around it, make excuses and blame each other. And who is to blame? Tom, for coming here to homestead at the foot of the red rock mountains? For begetting children upon my body? Sons to inherit, daughters to marry? Or I, in my -- not innocence, that's not the word I want -- my cocoon, my shroud of womanhood that brought me here, a continent away from home to wifehood, motherhood, acceptance of death as a part of life? Birth and death are what I see and take for granted. Life comes and goes with the seasons, with the years. There is a violence in this soil, in the people who labor on it. Perhaps it is only the truth of the earth, and one accepts it or goes down in defeat." A first collection of 14 stories that peoples a southwestern landscape with female survivors of one kind of abuse or another. At her best, Coleman can evoke the haunted landscape and the domestic discord of a Frostian dramatic poem or the passionate bitterness of a Lawrentian short story. "Sunflower" concerns a female narrator and her husband Clay, who have found a weary acceptance of each other after her passionate youth and catastrophic tryst with young lover Miguel ("I never felt I could ask him [Clay] where the joy went."). Likewise, in "The Voices of Doves," the narrator, a bereaved mother who lost her infant - one of many children - when her illiterate helper oiled the baby accidentally with carbolic acid, reaches a reconciliation with the girl after a lonely recognition of a kind of fate that is bound up in the land: "There is a violence in this soil, in the people who labor on it." "Mesa Country," on the other hand, is sparse and Lawrentian: "We live in tumult. Everyone." Other stories are more typically feminist and lyrical in their intent and execution: "The Paseo" lovingly evokes in "a silent marketplace" a promenade of women "wrapped around their pearls" and a male narrator who wants to paint one of the young beauties, but whose downfall involves both the local culture and his own unacknowledged desires. In "The Ugliest Woman in the World," the narrator runs off with wild macho man Buck, only to come to her senses, faced with his selfishness, and leave him. A woman in "Acts of Mercy" rides off on a horse to help a neighbor faced with wild clogs - the men here are absent and finally unnecessary. Coleman's stories - some published in such journals as South Dakota Review and Puerto Del Sol - evoke a harsh natural and man-dominated world where women sometimes become strong through their suffering. (Kirkus Reviews) Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Nº de ref. del artículo: 9780804009492

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