Where Love Leaves Us (Iowa Short Fiction Award) - Hardcover

Manfredi, Renee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877454442 ISBN 13: 9780877454441

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1994

Synopsis

Book by Manfredi, Renee

About this title

Reviews

The finest of these observant, lyrical stories by Manfredi, co-winner of the 1993 Iowa Short Fiction Award, center on father/daughter bonds ranging from tender to risky as both parties struggle to deal with the daughter's nascent womanhood. Relationships with mothers, living or dead, are usually peripheral; dates with boys are meaningful chiefly as they plug into the Italian-American family drama. In "The Projectionist," a sagacious and complex tale, 15-year-old Serafina fitfully penetrates the inner life of her father, a sleepwalker and movie-house employee who mourns his Italian first wife. Caitie and her childlike Dad are "Truants" who routinely play hooky from school and work while harried Mom slaves at a law firm until events take an unexpected final twist. "Tall Pittsburgh" shows a doting restaurant owner grooming his ravishing, balky daughter, whose peerless mother died at 27, to be a beauty queen. Love for a dead father haunts "The Mathematics of Pendulums" and the potent title story; in the latter, Lena gives a home perm to her widowed Mom (who wants to charm a new lover) and arrives at a messy epiphany. Five of the nine eloquent tales have appeared in literary journals.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nine intricately configured stories--many about fathers and daughters on the Italian south side of Pittsburgh in the 1960's--by 1993 Iowa Short Fiction Award co-winner Manfredi (see Williford, below). The most powerful relationships here often verge perilously close to incestuous. In ``The Projectionist,'' the narrator's father, a movie projectionist who lost his first wife and daughter in Italy during the war, loses his mind when the narrator starts to date a hippie boy named Carlo. In ``Bocci,'' the antic ten-year-old Ellen is raped by a friend of her father's, also named Carlo, in the men's room of the clubhouse belonging to the Italian Sons and Daughters of America, while her mother and much-beloved father dance upstairs. ``Truants,'' in which a 17-year-old daughter and her father play hookey together for a week, ends with the father begging the pardon of the mother and returning to work while the girl is told she won't graduate from high school. In ``Tall Pittsburgh,'' a girl wins a beauty contest at the behest of her bedazzled widowed father, who's pleased she's finally equalled her dead mother in beauty. Other stories treat love relationships that fail, seemingly because they don't duplicate the passionate involvement of the characters' birth family. Daring and interesting, but also long and overly detailed, without a crowning message. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877454442
• ISBN 13: 9780877454441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158