North of Nowhere, South of Loss: Stories

Rating:
Summary: Everything in its time
Review: Hospital has created a book of interconnected short stories, not a happy ending in sight. Rather, she takes incidents from her character's lives, sometimes seemingly minor, other times desperately tragic, and weaves an unusual narrative that reaches past the obvious, into far murkier waters of love, obsession, loss and acceptance.

Beginning in North Australia, the scenes redolent of that particular country and moving finally into the deep south of America, the author's sense of place defines each tale, the relative characters reflecting where each story takes place. Skillfully blending the present and the past, the innocuous becomes ominous, the innocent evil, never predictable, but surely representative of the intricacies of the human psyche.

In a rush of characters across space and time, images flash by unheeded, yet noted. Pushing into the future, emotions accelerate in intensity, yet fall backward into the realm of memory. Throughout the chaos of the years, the complexities of relationships, the what-ifs, there is a great connectedness, an acceptance of what is.

A genius of the impossible, Hospital rushes to the edge of the world and dares to look over. There are no happy endings because, basically, there are no endings, only the push toward freedom of one kind or another. Complex, challenging, North of Nowhere, South of Loss is an extraordinary experience in the realm of possibilities. Luan Gaines/2004.

Rating:
Summary: These Stories Are East of Wonderful!
Review: Janette Turner Hospital has written fourteen short stories here, seven of which have been previously published in another short story collection, all of which appear to have been published in literary magazines or journals. The stories are set all the way from Australia to the Southern United States. The characters are wildly different in their problems and dilemmas; but to a person, they are engaging and alive. It's difficult to select a "best of" as there are no bad stories here. In the first one, "The Ocean of Brisbane", Brian-- who appears in several other stories-- is a successful scientist ashamed of his uneducated mother. His treatment of her will break your heart. One of my favorites is "South of Loss", where two lonely souls connect when a woman whose car breaks down on a back road in South Carolina meets an auto mechanic. They comfort each other from their own sense of loss. Although many of these characters are those whose "worlds of possibilities" are small, they continue to kick against the pricks.

As always, Ms. Hospital is wonderful with language-- from the photographer who is "not guilty as charged" but "framed"--to one Australian character's thoughts on Americans: "They are a curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door. . ." Finally in the story "Litany For The Homeland" Hospital waxes lyrical as she describes her love for Australia: "Homeland is where the senses steer by instinct when the reins are let go. It is always accessible in that small space between sleeping and waking. . . Wherever I am, I live in Queensland. I know to what brown country and to what wet rainforest my homing thoughts will fly in the moment between living and dying. . ." Does writing get better than this? Such poetic passages make Ms. Hospital one of the best writers of English.

These are as good as short stories get.