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Rating: Summary: The ins and outs of relationships Review: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories by Amy Bloom covers how typical love can be in atypical situations (for some, of course). Ms. Bloom touches on transexualism and a mother's love for her daughter soon-to-be son, death and recovery, breast cancer and the family, death of a newborn -- all situations that do affect people on a daily basis, but aren't the "norm" for the majority.
I think Ms. Bloom is essentially stating that no matter the situation, people are really the same and have the same feelings. If you've ever had any of the above situations touch your life, then I think you can appreciate not only the story that most affects you, but also the other stories to realize that you're not alone -- that other people do love and grieve just as much as you.
I also think it's very timely that love is most realized when someone or something is lost. Makes you think about your life and how you're living it at that exact moment.
I would recommend this book of short stories to anyone-- there's a bit of humor in most stories too, most of it bittersweet, but isn't that how life is?
Rating: Summary: Bloom does it again Review: Bloom's second collection of short stories is another intimate glance into the intricacies of relationships. As in Come to Me, Bloom writes without judgement, simply sharing pain, hope, fear and love felt by ordinary people. Her language is exquisite and her stories memorable. My favorites of the collection include:Stars at Elbow and Feet - After the loss of a child a woman, not feeling worthy of life, finds a new reason to live. Hold Tight - The story of father and daughter reconnecting after cancer takes the family's wife and mother. The Gates are Closing - A man asks his lover, not his wife, to help him end his battle with Parkinson's disease. Despite the grim circumstances these characters are under, Bloom has a way through her luminescent prose of bringing hope and peace to both the characters and the reader. If you pick this up, which I highly recommend, make sure you read Come to Me first. Two of Bloom's most compelling characters in Come to Me, Lionel and Julia, make a repeat performance in this second collection and provide closure to their long-held secret.
Rating: Summary: God is in the details Review: I checked this book out from the library the same time I checked out Bloom's other work, "Love Invents Us," which she appears to have written prior to this work. The title of this work comes from something Huddie says to Elizabeth Ann in "Love Invents Us" which apparently stuck in Bloom's mind as a title for another work. I read the book, but while the stories use beautiful imagery and the characters are well-described I did not find this book beckoning for me to read on. I felt like I was reading something I was forced rather than compelled to read. The title story is good, but nothing else sticks in my mind. "Rowing to Eden" was just flat out weird, in which the breast cancer sufferer's husband ends up with her lesbian best friend. Weird. Period. I loved "Love Invents Us" and found it much more 'alive' and entertaining while Bloom's work took a very different turn with this book. Perhaps I would have liked this collection if I were older, married. But this book was morose and gloomy, with characters I didn't to care to be introduced to, outside of Cole in "A Blind Man Could See How Much I Love You." For a better more interesting short story collection check out "My Date with Satan" by Stacey Richter. Bloom does not connect with her audience and entreat you to read further and want to understand the characters and motivations, which leaves one feeling uninvolved and lacking the intimacy that should be experiencing in reading. I was very disappointed.
Rating: Summary: Great author checking boundaries of love and relations Review: I remain somewhat ambivalent towards this book, an ambivalence that is reflected in the points I gave this collection. Truly this beautiful collection of stories should have received 5 points based on the writer's talent and her writing that is so earthy and real on the one hand and so high level on the other, but if I judge the book according to my personal pleasure then I am not sure...
There is no doubt that this book is very well written, beautiful and candid and touches many modern, relevant subjects leading to the resolution (this is what I felt the writer was telling me) that all can be bore if only you have someone to share it with. Be it a mother, a lesbian girlfriend, a lover helping you suffer your Parkinson. I like this resolution and I think there is something very comforting about it.
My ambivalence stems from the fact that Amy Bloom seems to be constantly checking our boundaries. Many reviewers have already noted that all the characters in this collection suffer from a certain misfortune, be it a sickness of the self or a loved one. I do not think that this exactly is what bothered me but rather with Amy Bloom's going over the edge and maybe crossing a few red lines - such as a sexual encounter between stepmother and son, Julia and Lionel. This one encounter which never repeated itself, has left its marks on both the characters lives and is sufficient to unsettle the reader. Julia, the stepmother was my most beloved character in the book and yet the story is quite disturbing.
I found myself very uncomfortable with the first story bearing the collection name. Not because I am opposed to change of sex but because the story was painful for me to read both from the mother's side of having to see your daughter being so unhappy until the point of maiming herself and both from the physical aspect when I imagined the details of the operation. This story has also led me to ask myself several uneasy questions such as why am I more comfortable reading about cancer pain then about the pain of a sex-change operation? I guess the answer lies in the fact that the deformation of the self was hard for me to take. Amy Bloom has the reader sympathy for all her characters no matter what is their illness or misfortune, but I am not sure that this is a book I would want to read again in the near future. Maybe it is that stories of loss are always hard to take no matter how well they are written.
Rating: Summary: Even A Blind Man Can See Himself In Amy Bloom's Characters Review: In Amy Bloom's second collection of short stories, some of her characters include the mother of a transsexual, a teenaged girl with a dying mother, and a man who is tormented by the night he had sex with his stepmother after his father's funeral. En masse, these characters and their circumstances may seem outrageous, but Bloom's honest portrayal of their inner-lives provides us instead with a window into the universal experience of love and pain. Though the suffering of these characters is palpable, Bloom's writing remains witty, lyrical, and always sharp-never allowing a single moment of these unlikely stories to seem exaggerated or out of place. In "Rowing to Eden," for example, we are presented with a No Exit kind of situation. A woman in her final stage of Chemo Therapy is living in the same house with her lesbian best friend and her doting but dopey husband. As it is with all the other stories in this collection, the defining moments of characterization come with little action. Instead, we understand the story in terms of the delicate relationships and interactions between the three people involved-their slight dialogues, embarrassingly awkward at times, but always poignant and telling. As it is in Sartre's play, Bloom's characters seem trapped, bound together in a sad and fruitless triangle. Bloom boldly takes her readers on a tour of this triangle, allowing us to look in on it through descriptions of dinners and sunsets until suddenly we find ourselves inside the head of the guilt-ridden patient who finds her husband pathetic despite his efforts to help her beat cancer. We also manage to see the situation through the eyes of the husband, a man who just wants his beautiful healthy wife back, and from the perspective of the wife's best friend, a lesbian whose devotion to her friend is steadfast if not obsessive. The beginning of "The Gates Are Closing," examines the experience of a woman helping her lover who has Parkinson's Disease paint the synagogue that his wife presides over. Initially, this may seem absurd, but once Bloom has painted her picture in full, we are forced to notice all the subtle shades of pain and longing that exist behind this scene, as Bloom deftly fills in the spaces between what her characters think and what they do. Ultimately, although Bloom's characters seem capable of anything, including surprising themselves with their own ability to overcome unusual hardships, neatly packaged endings where vexed people find solace and conflicts are smoothed out into oblivion don't show up in this collection-and thankfully so. Instead, as disturbing as the circumstances that dictate each story may be, Bloom makes it all believable-even somewhat hopeful-reminding us that as humans it is the details of our tumultuous relationships that bring our love for one another to life.
Rating: Summary: Using the carnival as a crutch Review: Reading one of Bloom's stories takes a short amount of time, but when I finish one I feel satisfied as if I'd read an entire novel. That's the earmark of an excellent short story writer. Furthermore, although Bloom deals with subjects that are far from mainstream (such as the experience of a trans teenager) she does so to create an interesting and relatable story without being sensational.
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