I’m happy that Powell’s Books has decided to pick up my review (originally published in Rain Taxi: Review of Books, Spring 2010) for their “Review-a-Day” feature, especially because Zornoza’s book resonates emotionally and is marked by a unique voice, and thus deserves more attention.
My review of Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay appears in the Spring 2010 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books. Check out the table of contents and buy an issue HERE. Here’s an excerpt:
Zornoza’s stories sprawl across landscapes, sift through details with a syntactical sieve, and revel in minutiae; superfluous exposition is replaced by evocative gestures, bland dialogue surrenders to resonant internal monologue. Consider Where I Stay a road map that carefully marks its scorched landscapes and anonymous small towns while also pointing out the desultory crew of squatters, border guards, prostitutes, drug dealers—transitory figures all—who live hardscrabble lives within them. As such, Zornoza is as much a novelist as he is a cartographer of loneliness, doubt, and fear, one that fearlessly delineates the stark realms of disappointment, unrequited love, and unfulfilled dreams.
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Tagged Andrew Zornoza, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Where I Stay
Michael Kimball’s The Way the Family Got Away is a wonderful book, one I fear has fallen through the cracks. It came out about a decade ago, and I thought it was time to give it some more shine. Here’s an excerpt from my review:
As readers, we often hope that the lover will return, that the reward will come, that the treasure will be found, that there will be respite, that everything will come together in the end. The Way the Family Got Away offers no such easy answers, nor any evidence of the resilience of family to overcome any obstacle, recover from any tragedy. In this short but weighty novel, Kimball offers just what the title says: this is the way the family got away. From town to town, they get farther from where they were but no closer to restoring what they had lost. They are a nameless family, a family in name only, running from their pain only to find it seeping out of them, stinking like so much stagnant water. Though the boy says, “A family needs people in it to keep going or it stops being a family,” what makes a family a family is what these children are forced to figure out for themselves since their mother and father—reduced to husks—shoulder their own guilt, simply slogging ahead to get their children to some kind of safety.
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My review “A Little Bone of Crazy, or This is Your Brain On Snowbroth: Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator” is at Fiction Writers Review. Here’s an excerpt:
Most of these stories are compact studies of paralysis, in the tradition of Beckett and Ionesco. These ciphers don’t so much act or react, but are usually quietly or loudly inert. Insignificance, ennui, insensitivity, and impotence all figure largely here. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in“Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears…
of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand. Significant fears to face, I would say: but these two do a bang-up job of not. Their evasion strategy is deftly honed.
Such characters are unmoored in an unforgiving world, bereft of hope for renewal or redemption.
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 