Notebook of Lost Things - Hardcover

Staffel, Megan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471606 ISBN 13: 9781569471609

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Helene came to the small town of Paris, New York as a child with her younger brother and her mother, Uta. They were refugees from World War II, survivors of Dresden, who left a DP camp to join a distant relative only to find that he'd vanished. The little family was taken in for the night by William Swick, a bookseller, a shy and lonely man, a dwarf. That one night turns into a lifetime.
Helene now works at the local post office; she is almost too old to have a child, but she tells her lover, Harry, the owner of the village tavern, that she will leave him if he cannot show her that he can rise above the mundane and display the capacity for real love. One night he looks out his window and sees something out of the ordinary, something mysterious, that shakes him out of his self-absorption.
And William Swick loves Uta, loves her still, even after her death.
This is a novel about love and loss, the way that one secret leads to another, the way the surface of ordinary life may, upon closer examination, reveal mystery, and how that mystery affects the lives of five people in a small town and changes them forever.

About this title

About the Author

Megan Staffel teaches writing at Vermont College.

From Kirkus Reviews

A muted and haphazardly constructed story about several lonely souls whose hesitant interrelations barely ruffle the surface of life in the decidedly unglamourous upstate New York town of Paristhe second novel from the author of She Wanted Something Else (1987). I'm interested in possibility, declares Helene Hugel, a 30ish German-American woman who lives on her ``Uncle William Swick's chicken farm, works at the local post office, and more or less passively endures a nonloving sexual relationship with Harry, the middle-aged macho sexist owner of a bar pointedly named Better Days. Most of the characters here have indeed seen such, even if William a dwarf, and therefore the object of ongoing public ridicule and condescensionclings precariously to the possibility that Helenes late mother Uta (whom William had taken in, children in tow, when Uta arrived in America after The War) would have eventually married him. Staffel observes her characters quiet vulnerability with a wry tenderness somewhat reminiscent of John Irving, expanding their orbits to include a piecemeal history of Utas traumatic losses during the firebombing of Dresden (which she painstakingly recorded in the diary Helene now laboriously translates); and, rather more arbitrarily, the story of Stella Doyle, a half-Mexican teenager whose energies and attention waver between her all-American boyfriend on the one hand, and, on the other, the problem posed by her clinically depressed and obese mother. This is a daunting variety of material, all of which often feels like three novellas that havent quite fused successfully into a single story. Readers will understand that these are all lost things seeking some definition, if not fulfillment, of their abbreviated and enigmatic human connections. But Staffels people still dont seem to belong all in the same book, and we dont know what to make of them any more than they themselves do. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1569471606
• ISBN 13: 9781569471609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 231