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There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter. So begins "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn", which gives its title to Harvey Swados's collected stories. In this beautiful and heartbreaking novella, Swados describes a generation "aflame with romance and disillusion," in search of pleasures and answers, and shows how the demands of love and life temper its hopes and fears. It is a perennial story, told by Swados in straightforward and lyrical prose and with tremendous sympathy, and without doubt one of the most enduring achievements of postwar American fiction. Harvey Swados's many splendid stories speak of work, friendship, and family. They are about the common world, as well as the final loneliness from which the common world cannot protect us. And yet Swados, as Richard Gilman has written, was above all concerned with "the breakthrough into true feeling, the attainment of moral dignity, and the linking up with others through compassion."… (más)
Swados is not an untalented writer — his voice flows easily and isn't marred by too many missteps — though he's more than a little mid-century in tone and tenor. His biggest problems come in the stories themselves, which run the gamut of narrative clichés (naive small-town boy moves to the city to pursue his dream, gets taken in by smooth operators, and ends up committing suicide to escape!), chicken soup-esque glurge ("A Handful of Ball-Points, a Heart Full of Love"), and well-meaning but heavy-handed social critiques.
The best story in the volume is certainly the title novella, which raises a question: it's unarguably best to start out a collection of stories with the one with the best opening lines, which unarguably belongs to "Nights...". But, at the same time, where is the proper place to put the best story? Swados' editor chose the start of the volume, which lead to a decline in interest as I continued. Without something as magically alive and real as the opening story, it eventually felt like a chore to push through the clichés and heavy-handedness to reach the end.
I'd gladly own a reprint of just the title story, and perhaps also the last two [My Coney Island Uncle, and Tree of Life], but the entire collection can't begin to live up to its high standards. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
This is the collected stories edition of Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn, first published in 1986, which collects the stories found in the original "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn" as well as those from "A Story for Teddy". Please do not combine it with the earlier publication of the same name.
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Idioma original
DDC/MDS Canónico
LCC canónico
▾Referencias
Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas.
Wikipedia en inglés
Ninguno
▾Descripciones del libro
There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter. So begins "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn", which gives its title to Harvey Swados's collected stories. In this beautiful and heartbreaking novella, Swados describes a generation "aflame with romance and disillusion," in search of pleasures and answers, and shows how the demands of love and life temper its hopes and fears. It is a perennial story, told by Swados in straightforward and lyrical prose and with tremendous sympathy, and without doubt one of the most enduring achievements of postwar American fiction. Harvey Swados's many splendid stories speak of work, friendship, and family. They are about the common world, as well as the final loneliness from which the common world cannot protect us. And yet Swados, as Richard Gilman has written, was above all concerned with "the breakthrough into true feeling, the attainment of moral dignity, and the linking up with others through compassion."
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The best story in the volume is certainly the title novella, which raises a question: it's unarguably best to start out a collection of stories with the one with the best opening lines, which unarguably belongs to "Nights...". But, at the same time, where is the proper place to put the best story? Swados' editor chose the start of the volume, which lead to a decline in interest as I continued. Without something as magically alive and real as the opening story, it eventually felt like a chore to push through the clichés and heavy-handedness to reach the end.
I'd gladly own a reprint of just the title story, and perhaps also the last two [My Coney Island Uncle, and Tree of Life], but the entire collection can't begin to live up to its high standards. (