Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by jennyyates
Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill
3.0
These stories are haunting, strange, fragmented. The title story, “Don’t Cry” is about a recently widowed woman who goes to Ethiopia, accompanying a friend who wants to adopt a child. Gaitskill is very skilled at drawing places, and she likes to weave inner and outer landscapes together.
Often she also strings different time-lines together, and sometimes this can be muddling. Usually, it’s pretty clear, and you flow along with a person’s consciousness as it moves freely from past to present, from one incident to another. In one, “The Arms and Legs of the Lake”, Gaitskill’s scene is a train, and she enters the psyche of each of the passengers, including a young man who is traumatized by his combat experiences in Iraq. Every passenger on the train sees his behavior (and that of every other person there) through the prism of their own beliefs and experiences.
One of the strangest stories is “Mirror Ball”, which describes the movements of the soul as independent from the person who possesses it. Souls can be stolen, can get lost or trapped, and can call out to each other. People believe that they’re acting independently, but often they are responding to the movements of their souls, or to the souls of other people, without realizing it.
Often she also strings different time-lines together, and sometimes this can be muddling. Usually, it’s pretty clear, and you flow along with a person’s consciousness as it moves freely from past to present, from one incident to another. In one, “The Arms and Legs of the Lake”, Gaitskill’s scene is a train, and she enters the psyche of each of the passengers, including a young man who is traumatized by his combat experiences in Iraq. Every passenger on the train sees his behavior (and that of every other person there) through the prism of their own beliefs and experiences.
One of the strangest stories is “Mirror Ball”, which describes the movements of the soul as independent from the person who possesses it. Souls can be stolen, can get lost or trapped, and can call out to each other. People believe that they’re acting independently, but often they are responding to the movements of their souls, or to the souls of other people, without realizing it.