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Editorial Reviews for "Wondermonger" by Michael Rothschild
From Publishers Weekly: Rothschild's
lapidary use of language is itself nearly the central figure
in these 10 stories. It would be a mistake, however, for the
author's dazzling style to blind the reader to the urgency of
the themes here--birth and death are twin motifs of these short
fictions. The most exquisite pieces are also the briefest: "The Toad," in which a pregnant
woman watches a garden snake engulf a toad that she has admired
for "its serene frowning presence, black egg-shaped pupil
in a bronze rim"; and "A Land Without Fossils," in
which a father puts aside his painting of a dead bird to confront
the lushly exotic realm his five-year-old son has imagined as "the
place where he had lived before he was a son." Elsewhere,
men breed animals just as easily as they kill ("Dog in the
Manger"); in the title story, a man who falsely reports
another's death assists in the birth of the latter's child. This
collection is to be savored for its marriage of voluptuous artistry
and unblinking honesty.
From Library Journal: Rothschild's territory is the unstaked North country of Maine,
a land of tree-necked woodsmen; hunters; fecund, witchy women;
and the hidden reaches of the human heart. The title novella
is a rich, mythic tale of love and revenge, of legendary logger
Mordecai Rime, who bites off great chunks of prose and spews
out poetry. By turns enchanting and bawdy, the tale ends in
an excess of horror that matches its mighty players. In other
stories the author explores a historical account of Indian
betrayal, a man's obsession with falconry, hunters and hunted,
and the terrible ironies and retribution wrought by man's taming
the land and its beasts. Several of the stories appeared in
the collection Rhapsody of a Hermit (1973) and in Best American
Short Stories. They resonate with the mythic power of Beowulf,
the moral preoccupations of Hawthorne or Faulkner.
- Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.
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From the cover of "Rhapsody of a Hermit" by Michael Rothschild
The four sections of Michael Rothschild's Rhapsody of a Hermit
are well named "tales", for they carry intimations of terror and
psychic dislocation that would trample roughshod over the limits
of the more demure short-story form. Rothschild's characters are
solitaries whose isolation is a scourge and a quest; they are the
exiles and pariahs of the spirit - falconers, hermits, dog breeders,
false gurus, and self-deluded disciples.
Edgar Mabee, for instance, is writing from High House, a farm
he shares with crickets and porcupines on a ridge above Rust Lake
in central Maine. One quarter mile below High House, live Edgar's
wife, Ellie, and his daughter. And Ellie's lover, Banok, and Banok's
wife. And Lynn. And Robin too. Edgar is busy exploring "one tiny
star in the overlapping interlocking galaxies of marital metaphysics
and the metaphysics of divorce". The title story is the log of
his journey.
The other tales include: "The Austringer", about a man who tries
to initiate a goshawk into the ways of man, while his girlfriend
initiates a curious young neighbor into the ways of woman; "The
Prince of Pine", a historical sketch of the benevolent Indian Wassus
George, how he was betrayed, how he helped found Jeshimon Plantation,
and how he was betrayed again; and "Dog in the Manger", a November
landscape of a marriage in isolation.
Rothschild is a literary master-in-the-making, a thinker and stylist
who writes, as the Elizabethans did, as if he were inventing the
English language by his own powers. |
