What is it then between us?: Stories (Collier fiction) - Hardcover

Havazelet, Ehud

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0020517505 ISBN 13: 9780020517504

Publisher: PEARSON PTR @, 1989

Synopsis

Nine stories examine the barriers that shape modern relationships between lovers, parents and children, and friends

About this title

From Library Journal:

$15.95. f The stories in these collections, whose foreign-born authors now reside in the United States, are superficially dissimilar but ultimately alike in the evidence they give of prodigious talent and in theme. Both authors deal with displacement. In Havazelet's stories the displacement is interior. Thus, in "Jillie" we feel a 12-year-old boy's adoration for his cousin, who has come with her mother to live in the boy's house. When Jillie's father appears to reunite his family, the boy helps Jillie hide but betrays her hiding place when she becomes ill. On a visit years later, he finds that Jillie bears no likeness to the young cousin he once adored; even memory is displaced. Havazelet's characters are essentially outsiders, uncomfortable in their lives. In Mukherjee's stories the characters are literally displacedand often twice displaced, Indians who have never lived in India. In "Jasmine" a young woman born of Indian parents buys her way out of Port-of-Spain to Detroit and then takes an even larger leap to Ann Arbor. She becomes a mother's helper and succumbs, happily, to the sexual advances of the father. Mukherjee's characters, poor, illegal immigrants, are seldom granted the luxury of moral choice. Both Havazelet and Mukherjee give us authentic characters snared by calamity, touched by victory; their stories are as funny and as sad as life itself. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author "efficiently evokes a wide range of voices in various settings," observed PW of these nine stories concerning the spaces between people. "Havazelet is adept at capturing the bleakness of missed connections and destructive relationships that are hopelessly out of sync."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: PEARSON PTR @
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0020517505
• ISBN 13: 9780020517504
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177