The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories (P.S.)

How's this for an opening? "My wife is deaf. Once she asked me if snow made a sound when it fell and I lied. We have been married twelve years today, and I am leaving her." This is the first paragraph of a wonderful story by Simon Van Booy. Although short, it contains a world of music and loss, history and hope. Before it is over, every thought in that first paragraph will have been transformed into its near-opposite, replacing apparent callousness with enduring love.I first got to know this British-American author from his earlier collection LOVE BEGINS IN WINTER, five stories of almost novella length. He struck me immediately for his extraordinary sense of place and emotional immediacy, but I found his short sentence structure somewhat too dry for stories of that length. This latest collection, however, consists of nineteen pieces ranging from three to twenty pages, and the brief images lie side by side in a glittering lapful of trinkets and souvenirs, a poem in prose. As when a man looks through the closet of his dying wife and comes upon her favorite coat: "His fingers crawled into the pocket and swam around between coins, slips of paper, and mints. The secrets of a hand." Or sudden insights of grace to be found even in dismal surroundings, such as the dilapidated horse-track in a London suburb: "When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched."All these stories are about love, but seldom about first romance; no Moon in June here. So parents and children, brothers and sisters, village neighbors, a lapsed priest and his God, even a lonely man and a shop-window mannequin. But most often husbands and wives after many years of marriage, perhaps after the death of one of the parties. For one of Van Booy's major themes is the power of love to survive loss. He tackles this in so many different ways: through fable (a boy grieving his mother meets a mysterious Indian guru in Central Park), through sensory association (a rejected lover buries his face in a hillside of flowers where they had first met), or through the accumulated details of everyday living (a man coping with his wife's prolonged coma). The settings include Paris, Rome, New York, the Greek islands, and the author's native Wales, none of them obtrusive, but each making a perfect container for the lives it enfolds.There is sadness here, yes, but there are also surprising flashes of joy and and an abiding feeling of connection, like coming to harbor after a long voyage. As another of Van Booy's characters says, "All seas are one sea; every ocean holds hands with another."

This collection of short stories captures vignettes of the characters lives, some sad, some lovely. Van Booy has an amazing way with words. While I didn't particularly enjoy all of the stories, within each story there were phrases and sentences that were amazingly beautiful. I recommend reading this book just for the pleasure of discovering these jewels of language.

Familiar with Van Booy's lyrical prose, I cannot help but experience the same kind of luxurious language while reading this collection. In the story, The Still But Falling World, set in a small village south of Rome, the lives of the inhabitants achieve a balance between the world of lies and a world of acceptance. Nuggets of truth are found too: "My entire family and her husband and children are living the most beautiful lie." The ability to do this, Van Booy writes, stems from love. "In Morano, if you're loved, everything else falls away." There is a wisdom and vulnerability to such writing. I am reminded of Fernando Pessoa's recognition that we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth alone could never accomplish. (Paraphrased from The Book of Disquiet, Penguin Classics.)Reading Van Booy is like loving a melting snowflake in your palm. The transitory nature of life lies beneath the surface of each piece. Its stories are very much like fables you want to carry around with you. In Everything is a Beautiful Trick the story of Magda, an adopted sister from Krakow, whose left arm is missing at her elbow, the reader is taken into the memories of her brother, reminiscing about her death he only imagines. "Memories spill out through a cracked window, melt into the ground between tall grass, and are pushed back up as wildflowers." This idea that we each have our own versions of the truth makes for a very colorful world, as one experience can lead to a myriad of flowers pushing up later. This collection is full of such gems. I feel a quality of Taoist flow and Buddhist acceptance from this voice, but a voice qualified to move beyond mere acquiescence. Simon VanBooy writes like a master, there are not many others creating works like these today whereby reality is redefined to include imagination. It is the eye/ear/heart of a poet at work here.There are 18 stories included in this collection, several of which were previously published by Bookman Press in 2002 in a limited run called Love and the Five Senses.Every piece is distinct from the next, but present is a voice the reader will not forget. There is a thread connecting this author to the above mentioned Passoa, and when I read Some Bloom in Darkness, I return to Colette and am reminded "...we can catch and hold--with words..." as VanBooy does so brilliantly for us. In The World Laughs in Flowers, and The Reappearance of Strawberries, both two very beautiful titles so well selected, the theme of memory underlies. "My memories are arranged like puddles--they are littered throughout the present moment. It seems arbitrary, that which the mind remembers, but I know it is not." This line appears early in the first story, long before the character arrives in Greece to hopefully re-ignite a love before it is too late. In The Reappearance..." a story full of longing and human endurance, we read "without memory...man would be invincible." This polarization of elation and suffering is what makes the stories believable; it is what makes this collection profound. There is nothing formulaic or too full of itself. It is balanced and quiet sometimes, and at others, it can be over the top pure poetry, lyrical and enlightened.

With such a provocative title, you know this book won't disappoint, even though the absolutely accurate name refers to different scenarios than you might imagine. There are so many ways to love and grieve and live completely wrapped in isolation, even in the bustling city. Van Booy thinks of just about all of them and then some in these short stories. He spins sad, hopeful tales in gossamer threads that wind themselves around you until one or two well-placed words in the final sentence bring the whole piece crashing down in brilliant, unexpected ways. These stories mean the most when you feel a bit sad or isolated yourself, perhaps because they shine the light of hope where it needs to go, reminding us that we are all connected by love and our interpretations of living through it. Not to be missed.

This was an OK book. Unfortunately, having read 2 other books from this author I had high expectations that this book did not quite meet. I'm not a big fan of short stories unless the stories are somehow tied together to form a bigger picture. I found many of the stories in this book a bit odd, not quite coming together and the writing a bit choppy and repetitive. The stories did not leave me longing to continue reading other stories and I got bored with the book halfway through and had to push myself to finish. If you love short stories and stories with a bit of an edge with unusual endings, you'll probably like this book. It wasn't my taste.

wow I love these stories.Perfect if you just want to drift off to an amazing world.

Fabulous read