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Graven Naar Het Hart Van De Aarde (2009)

by Kevin Wilson(Favorite Author)

4.07 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

De Harmonie

review 1: A solid collection of stories, mostly about lost persons filling their lives with activities that satisfy, but only gloss over their own personal emptinesses. Most of the stories have a happy or hopeful feeling to the endings -- or, at least, a satisfying conclusion. My favorites -- "The Dead Sisters Handbook: a Guide for Sensitive Boys," "The Choir Director's Affair (The Baby's Teeth)" (with its excellent use of the second person, very engaging) and "The Museum of Whatnot" (touches me in my archivist soul). "The Shooting Man" felt kind of Kafka-esque and "Birds in the House" evoked Flannery O'Connor. In the supplemental material, Wilson includes his influences, including O'Connor, George Saunders, John Updike, etc. That's a nice bonus for follow-up rea... moreding.
review 2: Story collections are hard to pull off: such tiny samplers of great writing can either be too scattered or too dense, but Kevin Wilson's stories are neither. They are richly envisioned stories about memorable characters who are both familiar and strange. Every story is centered around some type of forbidden love, some the kind of forbidden love we understand all too well, like a young woman with a much older man, or two teenage boys who are already on the losing end of high school popularity who fall in love with each other. But others are much more surprising: a man who falls in love with a newborn's teeth; a teenage girl who falls in love with a boy four years younger, a boy who cannot get over his illicit attraction to a now deceased sister... The stories are poignant and funny, sometimes truly awe inspiring, other times downright hilarious. Wilson, who was a faculty at Sewanee for a long time before his debut novel hit national acclaim, was always known for his wicked sense of humor, but his stories aren't all funny. Sometimes they're just simply moving. You would be hard pressed to find a single band line or boring character here: everyone and every page has something special to offer. less

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