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A review by thaurisil
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro by Jeffrey Eugenides
4.0
"Please keep in mind: my subject here isn't love. My subject is the love story." With this warning, Eugenides presents a collection of short stories that are not about love. No, not about boy meets girl and they fall in love and grow old together, not about fluffy marshmallows and candy floss, not about the type of love you find in rom-coms. Instead, this collection covers all sorts of relationships, not just love, though that is included as well, but the variants of infatuation, love and sex that are commonly mistaken for love.
This is clearly not what anyone expects upon picking up the book, and this will understandably turn many off. But for me, this was a pleasant surprise that widened the scope of the book, prevented it from becoming a monotonous humdrum of "traditional" love, and allowed for the inclusion of many brilliant stories.
Some stories were, to me, terribly boring, like Robert Musil's Tonka, Vladimir Nabokov's Spring in Fialta, and Harold Brodkey's Innocence (most of which was about the mechanics of one sex act, yuck). That these were pretty long only increased my aversion to them.
But most of the stories were very good. My favourite was David Bezmozgis' Natasha, about a boy who gets attracted to his new Russian step-cousin Natasha, but she has too much experience of the world for him with his naivete to really understand her. Another one that I liked very much was William Trevor's Lovers of Their Time, about a married man who has an affair with a young counter-girl, but their affair is financially unviable and he ends up returning to his wife, an unromantic woman who views his affair with disdainful practicality.
Others that I enjoyed included Anton Chekhov's The Lady With the Little Dog (atmospheric), William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily (shocking ending), Milan Kundera's The Hitchhiking Game (nuanced and emotionally realistic), Lorrie Moore's How to Be An Other Woman (effective in the second-person), Mary Robison's Yours (unexpected and sad), George Saunders' Jon (touching), Stuart Dybek's We Didn't (raises what-ifs) and Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain (very, very, very sweet).
I applaud Eugenides' arrangement of the stories. Long stories followed shorter ones, and easy-to-read stories followed more demanding ones. In fact, anyone who can make me like a Miranda July story (I tried reading her collection of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You and gave up after three stories) has done excellent work. And after stories of pre-marital sex and extramarital affairs, Eugenides ends off the collection with Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, a story about the self-sacrificial love of an old man to his wife, to give us the story of true love that we picked up the book to find. His introduction is also beautifully written, and adds a perfect touch to a fabulous anthology.
This is clearly not what anyone expects upon picking up the book, and this will understandably turn many off. But for me, this was a pleasant surprise that widened the scope of the book, prevented it from becoming a monotonous humdrum of "traditional" love, and allowed for the inclusion of many brilliant stories.
Some stories were, to me, terribly boring, like Robert Musil's Tonka, Vladimir Nabokov's Spring in Fialta, and Harold Brodkey's Innocence (most of which was about the mechanics of one sex act, yuck). That these were pretty long only increased my aversion to them.
But most of the stories were very good. My favourite was David Bezmozgis' Natasha, about a boy who gets attracted to his new Russian step-cousin Natasha, but she has too much experience of the world for him with his naivete to really understand her. Another one that I liked very much was William Trevor's Lovers of Their Time, about a married man who has an affair with a young counter-girl, but their affair is financially unviable and he ends up returning to his wife, an unromantic woman who views his affair with disdainful practicality.
Others that I enjoyed included Anton Chekhov's The Lady With the Little Dog (atmospheric), William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily (shocking ending), Milan Kundera's The Hitchhiking Game (nuanced and emotionally realistic), Lorrie Moore's How to Be An Other Woman (effective in the second-person), Mary Robison's Yours (unexpected and sad), George Saunders' Jon (touching), Stuart Dybek's We Didn't (raises what-ifs) and Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain (very, very, very sweet).
I applaud Eugenides' arrangement of the stories. Long stories followed shorter ones, and easy-to-read stories followed more demanding ones. In fact, anyone who can make me like a Miranda July story (I tried reading her collection of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You and gave up after three stories) has done excellent work. And after stories of pre-marital sex and extramarital affairs, Eugenides ends off the collection with Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, a story about the self-sacrificial love of an old man to his wife, to give us the story of true love that we picked up the book to find. His introduction is also beautifully written, and adds a perfect touch to a fabulous anthology.