Foreign Brides - Hardcover

Lappin, Elena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330371185 ISBN 13: 9780330371186

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

Funny, irreverent, dark, and tender-a startling and sexy debut collection.

Women (and men) cope with foreign marriages in Elena Lappin's shrewd domestic comedies of the absurd, set in London, New York, and a constellation of European and Israeli cities. Transplanted across oceans and ensconced in strange houses where appliances malfunction and husbands are not what they seem, women like Noa, Vera, and Paula settle into lives of persistently unfamiliar routine, stirred up from time to time with a very crooked stick. In "Noa and Noah," Noa, an Israeli, has been married for two years before her English improves and she realizes that her British husband, Noah, is not a glamorous young businessman but a dull junior debt collector. In revenge she begins to frequent a nonkosher butcher-and that's just the beginning. Vera, a Russian, married to an unsuccessful British butler, takes to cab driving and extortion in "Peacock"; Paula, a German, married to her dead best friend's husband, writes stories and snorts cocaine in "Bad Writing." With perfect pitch and a poker face, Lappin writes insidiously funny tales about love and survival in an international no-man's-land of marriage.

About this title

Review

There are some short-story writers who seem too knowing, too eager to nudge the reader in the ribs with an authorial elbow. Others seem not knowing enough, as if they'd never quite gotten a purchase on their material. But in her first collection, Foreign Brides, Elena Lappin has already discovered the golden mean. Her tales of emigrant life--and more specifically, intermarriage among the tribes of Israel, Russia, England, and the United States--are unfailingly witty. Yet the author never keeps herself too far above the fictional fray, which ensures that the pain in these stories is no mere postmodernist construct but, well, painful.

In "Noa and Noah," for example, an Israeli bride finds herself hard-pressed to adjust to British life, even if her new husband does sport an Old Testament moniker and a kippa. In fact, Noah's charms have almost entirely evaporated after a year of marriage, and what once appeared to be endearments turn out to be a form of erotic cheerleading:

She had also by now finally deciphered and demystified her husband's sexy mumblings which invariably accompanied their lovemaking: the words Arsenal and Tottenham came up a lot, with very unsexy adjectives describing various players and plaintive remarks about their technique. When she had first grasped this remarkable fact, Noa simply asked Noah why he had to think and talk about football during sex. He had answered, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, that he thought about football all the time, and saying his thoughts out loud during sex helped him slow down.

It would be unfair to disclose Noa's response to her increasing disillusionment. Suffice it to say that it involves a neighborhood butcher and some very nonkosher behavior in the boudoir. Not all of Lappin's characters hit upon such delectable (and surprisingly low-fat!) solutions. In "Peacocks," a similarly distraught émigrée falls back on cab driving and a spot of extortion to maintain her mental health. "Bad Writing" features a German transplant, also a woman, who neutralizes the nastiness of her marriage by turning it into prose. Not every story in Foreign Brides quite clicks. But Lappin is a funny and formidable talent, and her next project--a novel with the intriguing, Gogolian title of The Nose--should be worth sniffing out as soon as it hits the shelves. --Anita Urquhart

From the Inside Flap

In Foreign Brides, Elena Lappin's startling and seductive debut collection of short stories, women (and men) cope with marriage across cultures in London, New York, and a constellation of European and Israeli cities. Transplanted from one country to another and ensconced in strange houses where appliances malfunction and husbands are not what they seem, women like Israeli Noa, Russian Vera, and German Paula settle into lives of persistently unfamiliar routine stirred up from time to time with a very crooked stick. In "Noa and Noah," Noa has been married for two years before her English improves and she realizes that her British husband, Noah, is not a glamorous young businessman but a dull junior debt collector. In revenge she begins to frequent a sexy unkosher butcher-and that's just the beginning. Vera, married to an unsuccessful British butler, takes to cab driving and extortion in "Peacocks"; Paula, married to her dead best friend's husband, writes stories and snorts cocaine in "Bad Writing." Displaced though they may be, Noa and her compatriots forge heedlessly ahead-and backwards and sideways-into the unknown or into the mundane.

With perfect pitch and a poker face, Lappin writes insidiously funny tales about love and survival in an international no-man's-land of marriage.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0330371185
• ISBN 13: 9780330371186
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240