Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories - Softcover

Sandor, Marjorie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889330825 ISBN 13: 9781889330822

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2003

Synopsis

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."—Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret—her husband’s adultery during World War II—is not revealed until the last story. Sandor’s prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Rachel Gershon's family is full of secrets. In her Grandmother Eva's house, the doors are shut and curtains are drawn at all times. Her mother, Clara, can "seal a piece of time like a letter and send it away," and her father, Abe, saves his confession until he's well beyond the grave. It is Rachel's only consolation that someday she'll have the whole story, that she might, if she listens carefully enough, be able to trace the whispers back past her home on the steep ocean cliffs of California to the Indiana college town in the 1930s where it all began.

In "Elegy for Miss Beagle" a melodramatic young Clara daydreams of death, and romanticizes tragedy, until she is faced with her piano teacher's sudden suicide. In the title story, Clara tries to cure the boredom that "slips over her like a harness" by secretly posing for an artist while she is pregnant. Later, in "God's Spies," Rachel witnesses how good adults can be at keeping secrets when her mother signs up to pose nude again, this time covered from head to toe in gold paint for a local Arts Festival.

The ten linked stories of Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime, display a Chekhovian restraint, an exceptional richness and depth of insight into the strangeness at the heart of every family. Here, the profundity of everyday sadness is laid bare in lucid, quiet terms. Marjorie Sandor tells her stories like secrets, as if "some story under the story was trying to rise up."

About the Author:

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener, essays (The Lyons Press, 1999) and A Night of Music, stories (Ecco Press, 1989). Her short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1985 and 1988), The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon 1999, and has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Awards include a 1998 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Fiction, and the 2000 Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction. She teaches creative writing and literature at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1889330825
• ISBN 13: 9781889330822
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 196