These stories are peopled by revenants, shades of their characters' remembered lives, lovers who died, friends who betrayed them or whom they betrayed, apparitions in dreams, visions and voices that speak unexpectedly out of the past. The mystery of personality keeps them vividly present even when they are long dead. These are absences that contain lives: an artist, Reuben Sachs, who painted an image of a hanged man and a few weeks later shot himself, leaving an irreparable, indelible impression on the mind of a young neighbour. A blind man, in dreams, relives the beauty of the city of Venice, which he visited many years before but could not see. An independent woman, a boldly adventurous young war reporter, is reduced to an ancient, bedridden body who on her hundredth birthday finds a faint voice to ask a young visitor if he has seen her book', indicating the record of her life which lies nearby on a table. A man thinks back to the day he, as small boy, hid on a staircase and looked down at a now long vanished fashionable crowd dancing and drinking at a New Year's celebration in 1950, in an old hotel owned by his parents, in which he will spend his entire childhood and youth. These are varied and intricate tales told by observers and keepers of the past. The mystery they so sharply catch and elucidate is the essential one, each asking, What am I? What were those others who meant so much to me? What is this life that I have lived? Short stories. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents:
1: Young and Old Missing Notes Red Barn Prophecies for April Adam on the Art of Dying Wakefulness 2: Domestic Arrangements The Steps Stitches in Air Housebound An Act of Oblivion 3: Late Hours Where is He Now? Flight
Summary:
Mystery Stories is inhabited by absence: dead friends, past childhoods and ex-lovers. Others, stunned, are left behind to navigate the pitfalls of memory, while trying to make sense of lives built by people who are no longer there. This collection is an intricate addition to Helwig's already large canon of rich, thoughtful stories populated by densely real people.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.