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Five Stories
by Simon Van BooyOn the verge of giving up—anchored to dreams that never came true and to people who have long since disappeared from their lives—Van Booy's characters walk the streets of these stark and beautiful stories until chance meetings with strangers force them to face responsibility for lives they thought had continued on without them.
Excerpt
Love Begins in Winter
I wait in the shadows.
My cello is already on stage. It was carved in 1723 on a Sicilian hillside where the sea is very quiet. The strings vibrate when the bow is near, as though anticipating their lover.
My name is Bruno Bonnet. The curtain I stand behind is the color of a plum. The velvet is heavy. My life is on the other side. Sometimes I wish it would continue on without me.
The stage lights here in Quebec City are too bright. Stars of dust circle the scroll and the pegs as I am introduced in French-Canadian. The cello belonged to my grandfather who was accidentally killed in World War II.
My grandfather's kitchen chair is also on stage. I can only put weight on three legs. The wicker at the center of the seat is ripped. One day it's going to collapse. When the chair arrives at the concert hall a day or so before a performance, a frantic music director will call with bad news: 'my chair has been utterly ruined in transit.'
An eruption of applause and I take ...
Simon Van Booy's characters in
Love Begins in Winter dive
after love without hesitation, act on mysterious coincidence, and bandage their
tragic wounds with new memories. The stories are on the long side (50-70 pages),
offering the reader time to piece together the fragments of characters and
story. Van Booy writes with a combination of chunky, breath-paused sentences and
poetic fluidity. The rhythm reminds me of someone recounting a dream – each
detail built upon the last, gaining momentum until the revelation erupts:
One day, George Frack received
a letter. It was from very far away. The stamp had a bird on it. Its wings were
wide and still. The bird was soaring high above a forest, its body flecked with
red sparks. George wondered if the bird was flying
to a place or away from it…
Then he opened it and found a page of blue handwriting and a photograph of a
girl with brown hair. The girl was wearing a navy polyester dress dotted with
small red hearts. She also had a pink clip in her hair. Her hands were tiny.
The handwriting was full of
loops, as if each letter were a cup held fast upon the page by the heaviness of
each small intention.
When George read the page, his
mouth fell open and a low groaning resounded from his throat.
Van Booy
is generous with philosophical musings and declarations about love, life,
memory, which, paired with coincidence and fateful encounters, give these
stories an ethereal, other-worldly quality – much like the suspended-in-time
feeling of falling in love.
Abbreviated from "Short
Stories for Summer" by Lucia Silva
Binnie Kirshenbaum
The stories of Love Begins in Winter are stylistically brilliant and emotionally beautiful. I found myself gasping, literally gasping, at surprises so perfectly attuned as to be inevitable. Simon Van Booy is an extraordinary writer, and this is a book to be read and reread again and again.
If you liked Love Begins in Winter, try these:
by Junot Diaz
Published 2013
The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts.
by Lily Tuck
Published 2012
Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Tuck's most affecting and riveting book yet.
by Alice Munro
Published 2010
In these ten stories, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
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