Four Walls Eight Windows

Southernmost and Other Stories

Four Walls Eight Windows; Michael Brodsky

Synopsis:
Scattered throughout the novella "Southernmost" are allusions to the poets Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. Here, Brodsky explores the tension between two types of artists, equally tormented. Stevens, an insurance salesman with an unhappy marriage, led an ordered existence and was massively repressed; Crane, a bisexual, lived the life of a raucous, uninhibited bohemian. Brodsky engineers a meeting between the two at Key West; the title applies both to Key Westýs physical location and to the fantasy of reaching the limits of being. Also in the collection are "The Son, He Must Not Know," an investigation of a father/son relationship brought to a critical point by a toy the father purchases for his child; "Ferry" and "The Assessed," abstract examinations of storytelling; "Bagatelle," "The $50,000 a Year Man," and "Partridges," which, echoing scenes out of Kafka, together analyze the working lifeý what it is to have to take orders, to be caught in the absurdities of an organization, the necessity to endure what Beckett called "incandescent grey" in order to survive. Brodskyýs work, like that of his literary predecessors--Beckett, Kafka, and Proust--places serious demands on its readers. But just as there is no question Brodsky is not a "light read," there is also no question but that he is developing a body of work that marks him among the most important writers and thinkers of our age. Michael Brodsky was born in 1948 in New York City. The translator of Samuel Beckettýs Eleuthria, he is the author of eight works of fiction and a number of plays and has received the Ernest Hemingway Citation of P.E.N.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1998, Hardcover - 1995