Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags - Hardcover

McKay, Shena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559211210 ISBN 13: 9781559211215

Publisher: Moyer Bell and its subsidiaries, 1995

Synopsis

This brilliant collection, written over the last twenty years, demonstrates Shena Mackay's uncanny ability to expose the horrors of everyday life with humor and haunting accuracy. Published to high praise in the UK, Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags introduces American readers to Shena Mackay's short stories. Within they will find tales that range from hilarious to downright chilling.Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags is a rich, satisfying collection that trancends social stratification, ultimately revealing universal truths.

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Reviews

From British writer Mackay (Dunedin, 1993, etc.), an uneven collection of short stories that graphically expose the cruel realities of daily life. Set in the British wasteland of stopped drains, overgrown gardens, and stale fried fish that has become the preferred literary turf of contemporary English writers grappling with a national malaise, the stories range from the macabre to the downright nasty. A single woman's uneasy relationship with an immigrant shopkeeper ends in a bizarre murder (``Bananas''); Claudia, an aging writer living in the country, plans to kill her neighbor's children on Halloween (``The Thirty-First of October''); and a woman visiting her father in a nursing home dies during a struggle over a knife about to be used to cut pizza (``A Curtain with the Knot in It''). Three tales are particularly unpleasant: ``Angelo,'' in which an aging poet and beauty is brutally assaulted on her way home from her first lover's funeral; ``Perpetual Spinach,'' whose protagonists--a pair of kindly senior citizens injured in an accident--are neglected by yuppie neighbors who covet their house; and ``The Most Beautiful Dress in the World,'' a portrait of a distraught woman who murders the gas man in her despair. The best works in this collection are the title story (the only one that has appeared previously in the US), which shows a mystery writer suddenly recalling her own murderous past, and ``Cloud Cuckoo-Land,'' the chronicle of a do-gooder, accused of being out of touch with reality, who fears that he may be just ``an empty tracksuit filled with air.'' Taken as a whole, however, the constant parade of defeats and disasters gets pretty wearing. Much good writing, but not enough to make these tales of the down and out transcend schematic plotting and overworked emotions. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Written over a 20-year period and showing enormous range, these stories feature characters who are either slightly or extravagantly ruined by drink, age, or an inability to see life clearly. Housewives, artists, teachers, mushroom plant workers, and tube station attendants of varying ages, genders, classes, and sexual preferences populate tales with disturbing themes and twisted endings. In "Family Service," as Helen Brigstock impatiently readies herself and her family for church, she nags and berates them while silently admonishing herself for her bad behavior. "All the Pubs in Soho," set in 1956, tells of a sensitive tomboy drawn to a gay couple who have aroused the curiosity and outrage of the local villagers. In the title story, a mystery writer on her way to a speaking engagement removes the wrong bag from the train and unearths memories of a violent past. Funny and strikingly written sentences leap out at the reader throughout this astonishingly accomplished collection. Recommended for most collections.
Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This compendium of 31 brief, tantalizing stories, ranging from the silly to the very bizarre, will keep the reader absorbed right up until the very end. Loaded with Twilight Zone-type spookiness, each story is concerned with seemingly normal existences that are slowly revealed to be anything but normal. While the distinctly British stories are also humorous, the reader will be aware of feeling vaguely uncomfortable as some of the more nightmarish stories unfold. In "Curry at the Laburnum's," morning rush-hour commuters anonymously push a fellow commuter off the platform, then are slowly poisoned by his wife at dinner. In "The Most Beautiful Dress in the World," a frazzled housewife murders a meter reader after a morning of frustrating occurrences. In "The Thirty-First of October," a mild-seeming neighbor plots the demise of two bratty neighborhood children. Mackay's command of language and use of clever plots make these stories captivating, amusing, and shocking. Kathleen Hughes

Edition details

• Publisher: Moyer Bell and its subsidiaries
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559211210
• ISBN 13: 9781559211215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480