Ellis Island and Other Stories

Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: Few writers can evoke a sense of place and mood like Helprin. The first story, "The Schreuderspitze", is as mystical and moving a story as you'll ever read. "Ellis Island" brings to mind the best of Issac Bashevis Singer. These are brilliant, mature, beautifully crafted tales by a master.

Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: Few writers can evoke a sense of place and mood like Helprin. The first story, "The Schreuderspitze", is as mystical and moving a story as you'll ever read. "Ellis Island" brings to mind the best of Issac Bashevis Singer. These are brilliant, mature, beautifully crafted tales by a master.

Rating:
Summary: A Prelude to Great Works
Review: I am not a regular reader of short stories. In general, I do not like them. Still, as a Mark Helprin fan, this is one of his few works that I had not read. I pressed on ... when I concluded the final story, Ellis Island, I felt completely satisfied with the journey. If you've never read Helprin, I believe "Ellis Island" and "A Vermont Tale" are most representative of his longer works. Each story will tempt you to read his novels, all of which are poetic magic. As I read through these stories, I saw glimpses of each subsequent novel, particularly my favorite, "A Winter's Tale." If you've read Helprin before, you owe yourself the time to read this collection. If you are new to Helprin, this work will encourage you to read more.

Rating:
Summary: A Prelude to Great Works
Review: I am not a regular reader of short stories. In general, I do not like them. Still, as a Mark Helprin fan, this is one of his few works that I had not read. I pressed on ... when I concluded the final story, Ellis Island, I felt completely satisfied with the journey. If you've never read Helprin, I believe "Ellis Island" and "A Vermont Tale" are most representative of his longer works. Each story will tempt you to read his novels, all of which are poetic magic. As I read through these stories, I saw glimpses of each subsequent novel, particularly my favorite, "A Winter's Tale." If you've read Helprin before, you owe yourself the time to read this collection. If you are new to Helprin, this work will encourage you to read more.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Beautiful Stories
Review: I have to preface my comments by stating that though I was dissappointed with this collection, I remain an ardent fan of Mark Helperin. A Soldier of the Great War is one of the most finely-realized novels of the past twenty years. It's in many ways unfare to compare a writer's masterpiece with a collection of short-stories written 25 years earlier. But simply as someone making recommendations to other readers, I would suggest starting with a writer's magnum opus and working one's way back from there. I'd recommend reading The Brother's Karamazov before suggesting Poor Folk, for instance, or Anna Karenina before the Kreutzer Sonata.

What Ellis Island represents is a writer still in the process of finding his footing. We see in many of these stories the genesis of what will become the themes and motifs that will preoccupy the mature artist. The characters are consumed by romanticism and wanderlust, even the Vermont cranes who occupy a central position in the collection. The writing is lyrical and quite often moving. At times, however,it comes across as too consciously poetic, the metaphors forced. While Helperin strives for Joycean epiphanies, his endings too often come off as carelessly constructed fade-outs. This is particularly true of "The Schreuderspitze" and "Martin Bayer." I agree, however, with the reader who singled out "A Vermont Tale" for praise. It stands out in this volume as a forerunner for the type of controlled symbolism Helperin will later perfect. It really is, to use a hackneyed term, a "haunting" tale.

The title-piece of this collection, "Ellis Island," was the source of my biggest let-down. The narrator, who goes by several names (as the mood hits or the situation dictates), is a thoroughly unsympathetic character, in my opinion, and I really don't believe Helperin intended him as such. The setting is turn-of-the century New York and "Moishe" (we'll call him that to avoid confusion here) arrives at Ellis Island along with a boatload of Jewish immigrants. When he is inspected, his odd demeanor causes the agent to lable him as an anarchist and he is shunted off along with other undesireables to be deported. He is saved from his situation by a red-haired Scandinavian beauty who presents herself herself at an opportune moment (for some reason couples are allowed more readily into the New World than singles). When finally ashore in New York, Moishe sets off on a series of improbable adventures (this is where the "magical realism" comes in). He has a brief affair with a "beautiful" artist's model (Helperin's characters never settle for plain-looking women)and finally beds down and settles with a "beautiful" seamstress. Finally he recalls the compact he'd made with the "beautiful", red-haired Dane and returns to Ellis Island (and here I don't want to spoil the ending for readers who haven't read it yet). Suffice it to say, however, that the ending intentionally parallels the ending of "A Vermont Tale," involving the loons. Let's also just leave off by saying that the ending didn't "work" for me and left me feeling that Moishe comes across as less than heroic, which Helperin hasn't led us to expect.

If this series of stories had been written by an author for whom I had lower expectations, I would have awarded it 4 stars. My standards were set so high by "A Soldier," however, that I had to settle on three. Definitely give his novels a try if you haven't already done so.

Rating:
Summary: All Helprin fans should run and buy this collection
Review: I read this beautiful short story collection after just finishing all of Helprin's lengthy novels. I was surprised that a writer who produced such brilliant long works of fiction (A Winter's Tale and Soldier of the Great War) could write just as well in a short story format. These stories are incredible. The one about the loons in Vermont is one of the most devastatingly haunting stories I have ever read. The opening story is one of my favorites as well. After finishing all of Helprin's works, I'm convinced that he's one of those rare writers that inspires you to want to walk around in his mind for a day to see how he pens such memorable works.

Rating:
Summary: Lyricism at its best in the short story
Review: Mark Helprin's writing provides a wonderful experience somewhere between the pruned brilliance of Hemingway,the lyricism of Pasternak, and the surreal vistas of Garcia-Marquez. One of the finest short collections I have encountered.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Beautiful Stories
Review: My first encounter with Mark Helprin was his long novel, Winter's Tale. I thought it was perfect: glorious and mysterious, realistic and magical, funny and fantastic and wondrous and sad. It was almost too much of a good thing; sort of like chocolate decadence topped with mocha ice-cream and drenched in hot fudge sauce.

The stories in Ellis Island and Other Stories offer the same enticing overdose of goodness but in smaller doses. Lest you be thrown off by the cover or the title, these stories are definitely not history or even historical fiction. They are not exclusively about immigrants, Europe or the War, although threads of these subjects do run through them.

The title story, Ellis Island is the longest and the last. It is about the Ellis Island and immigration, of course, but it is also fantastic fantasy complete with a wonderful machine that melts the snow from the streets supported only by its own jets of fire, the Saromsker Rabbi and his glorious sermon on bees, the lovely Hava, and Elise, whose hair is nothing less than a pillar of fire. Of the eleven stories, Ellis Island comes closest to Winter's Tale in its spirit of fantasy, although A Vermont Winter best describes the perfection of a deep Northeastern snow. As in Winter's Tale, in Ellis Island, Helprin is not averse to destroying beautiful things for the sake of a larger good, even if the logic of his narrative does not demand that he do so. But that, you see, is Helprin; for him death is just another part of art.

All of these stories are brilliant and all of them are beautiful. In The Schreuderspitze, a photographer deals with tragedy in the luminous beauty of the Alps; in Letters from the Samantha, questions of humanity and guilt are dealt with on an iron-hulled sailing ship in 1879; in Martin Bayer, we get to know a small boy on the eve of war; in North Light and A Room of Frail Dancers, we glimpse the devastating effects of battle on soldiers. La Volpaia is wonderful, wise and witty and Tamar is nothing if not lovely in the extreme. White Gardens and Palais de Justice defy any sort of description; you simply must read them and then savor them yourself.

Anyone who has read any of Helprin's other works knows he certainly has a way with words. Here are words from the end of Tamar that not only describe the story's beautiful seventeen year old protagonist, but serve to sum up this volume as a whole: Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider; and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

These stories are nothing if they are not art.