In the Sparrow Hills - Hardcover

Capouya, Emile

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945575629 ISBN 13: 9780945575627

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1993

Synopsis

Five stories deal with ships, life at sea, big cities, memory, and perception of living

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of five short stories marks an extraordinary debut for Capouya, the publisher of New Amsterdam Books. Distinctive and powerful, the tales display an unusual sense of form combined with superb storytelling and elegant language. Capouya's themes are betrayal, the impulsive violence of men and the moral uncertainties of life, as reflected in a wide range of settings that draw on his experiences as a merchant seaman during WW II and as a GI in Korea, as well as his membership in New York's literary elite. The tales are consciously desultory collations of anecdotes held together by the thread of the unnamed narrator's memories. In the title story, his search for a sketch thought to have been written by Chekhov leads him to recall his near-insubordination on a steamer bound for Antwerp, and then to ruminate on a waitress's cheap perfume. His wife's recovery from major surgery in "Staring at the Sun" triggers thoughts of a dangerous mission near the Leyte Gulf at the end of WW II, and of a later flight over the Pyrenees. Capouya has a strong, quintessentially American voice, redolent with the saltwater tang of sea jargon, that offers the unusual tension of working-class experience recounted in considerably more exalted diction. The result is a cross between Nelson Algren and Henry James, a prose as exhilarating as it is unlikely. Capouya is alert to "the blind purposes of men," profoundly decent in his judgment of his characters and merciless in the narrator's assessment of himself. He is a major new writer whose future books we eagerly await.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Conscience, violence, the nature of memory, good and bad faith--these are some of the themes fluffed and styled by longtime literaryman Capouya (former literary editor of The Nation; now publisher of New Amsterdam Books) in what he terms ``stories,'' although they read more like feckless, somewhat unctuous memoirs. While intellectual and social anecdotes are related (recalling an incident in a Chekhov story that can't be later substantiated--a dream of grace visited Capouya's imagination by Chekhov; the embarassment of facing someone else's embarassment; the survival-of-the-fittest--and less qualified--in the work-world), Capouya returns again and again to his war experiences and the time he served as a merchant seaman: the drama of the sea and of spending weeks among other stressed men cast up lessons like spume. The writing is sculpted, self-conscious, occasionally quite beautiful--but from behind it seems to peek a vanity more intent on dis-expectation and tease than anything else: truths getting doled out in tiny half-spoonfuls. Odd--and also affected. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0945575629
• ISBN 13: 9780945575627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245