Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

by Simon Van Booy

Overview

On 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061925863
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/12/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	387 KB

About the Author

Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

Van Booy's sentimental second collection deals heavily in the neuroses and personal traumas of his characters. The longish title story follows Brunno Bonnet, an emotionally debilitated cellist with a fondness for stones who encounters Hannah, a bird-obsessed shop owner with a fondness for acorns. In the beautiful "The Missing Statues," Max, a young diplomat is reduced to tears at the edge of St. Peter's Square in Rome as memories of childhood in seedy Las Vegas overwhelm him. In the excellent "The Coming and Going of Strangers," a multigenerational story of heroism, tragedy, love and family finds its roots with Walter, a Romany Irish gypsy who falls in love with a Canadian orphan girl. Though Van Booy's tendency to deliver a late-story surprise becomes predictable, each of these stories has moments of sheer loveliness. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

Couples find surprising, if not downright strange ways to come together in a second romance-centered collection by Van Booy (The Secret Lives of People in Love, 2007). The author has a pitch-perfect tone for writing about the tender passion. Instead of florid, melodramatic prose, the five tales feature hushed, patient storytelling that's deliberately abstracted; Van Booy's goal is to capture the ineffable nature of falling in love. The title story is a braided narrative involving Bruno, a famous concert cellist prone to musing on the death of his sister years ago, and Hannah, who similarly mourns the untimely loss of her young brother. Restrained without being icy, it recalls a Bergman film as it returns to such curious, ghostly characters as the nun Bruno sees writing on a frosted window, or the homeless man Hannah watches in a Los Angeles park. Van Booy has a taste for merging such gentle imagery with more violent moments, as when Hannah's father chops off his hand after the death of his son. "The Coming and Going of Strangers" opens with a gypsy man risking his life to save a child from drowning. Two decades later, the man's son seems to have inherited his father's nobility, which helps readers understand that he's more than a Peeping Tom as he obsessively spies on the girl he adores. Van Booy's gauzy characterizations can be maddening: Is the narrator of "Tiger, Tiger" unhealthily fixated on a pediatrician who had an affair with her mother-in-law, or is he truly amazingly wise, as she seems to believe? In this particular universe, emotion counts for more than motivation, so the hero of "The City of Windy Trees" doesn't seem especially odd for being so absurdly concerned with Raisinetsand David Bowie songs. His journey from New York to Sweden to meet his daughter comes to such a sweet, sensible resolution that it convincingly shows how love rights the world. Appealing and surprising takes on a subject prone to cliche. Author tour to Nashville, New York City, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle; upon request

Kirkus Reviews