The World Is the Home of Love and Death - Softcover

Brodkey, Harold

3.71

49 ratings by Goodreads

9780805059991: The World Is the Home of Love and Death

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805059997 ISBN 13: 9780805059991

Publisher: Picador, 1998

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With The World Is the Home of Love and Death, Harold Brodkey completes the extraordinary literary voyage that began with the publication of his first short story in The New Yorker in 1952. During the past four decades, Brodkey established himself as a modern master of short fiction. In The World Is the Home of Love and Death, Brodkey returns to themes he has treated so memorably in the past--the conformity and stupefying monotony of suburbia, the malevolence of cocktail-party conversation--bringing to them a new refinement and compression. In all of these stories, Brodkey proves that there has never been a more acute translator of the language of power, coercion, and, ultimately, love. It is altogether appropriate that Brodkey's final return to fiction should be to the short story, a form that he has influenced so profoundly.

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Review:

The literary world waited a long time for Harold Brodkey's first novel, The Runaway Soul, and perhaps that 25-year wait raised expectations much too high; published in 1991, the 800-page book received mixed reviews. Though The Runaway Soul eventually came to an end, the life of its protagonist, Wiley Silenowicz, goes on in this posthumously published collection of short stories, The World Is the Home of Love and Death.

All of Brodkey's considerable strengths and occasional weaknesses are on display in these stories: brilliant language and an acute understanding of character illuminate tales of orphaned Wiley and his adopted family, the Silenowiczes: his mercurial father, S.L.; seductive mother Ida; and vengeful sister Nonie. But if the writing and characterization are brilliant, Brodkey's penchant for dragging out the tiniest moment through incessant examination can be trying for readers hoping for some forward motion in the narrative. Plot is not one of Brodkey's strong points, but the beauty of his writing renders readers willing to be swept along on the sheer force of his prose.

About the Author:

A staff writer for The New Yorker since the early 1950s, Harold Brodkey died in 1996. He was the author of two novels, including The Runaway Soul (Owl Books, 0-8050-5503-7, $17.00), three short-story collections, and a memoir, This Wild Darkness (Owl Books, 0-8050-5511-8, $12.95), My Venice (Metropolitan, 0-8050-4833-2, $20.00), and The World is the Home of Love and Death.

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