My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
Book Review: This Book is a Win-Win Proposition!
Summary: 5 Stars
If you purchase "My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead" you not only obtain a wonderfully entertaining yet complex anthology of "love" stories, you also contribute to a worthy charity that supports budding writers. Win-Win!
I picked up this anthology expecting to just dip in and out of it, but the selections are so engrossing and lively that I was instantly mesmerized.
Another reviewer has wisely pointed out that these aren't all "happily ever after" love stories - far from it. They are BETTER than anything trite and saccharine.
Best yet, these classics can be read over and over. Bravo Jeffrey!
Book Review: Eugenides says "the perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives."
Summary: 5 Stars
Jeffrey Eugenides titled this book from a Latin poet, Catullus (84 BC), who wrote a poem which includes the title line in translation. It's a foreshadowing of the themes of the collected stories within, themes involving the bittersweet, well that's an understatement, aspects of love. Love affairs are often just that -- affairs. Eugenides remarks that Catullus' poems "speak to the stories in this collection that burn, dazzle, delight or sadden, depending."
This anthology of 26 short stories by authors such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Guy de Maupassant, Mary Robison, Eileen Chang, and Alice Munro among others is carefully edited by Eugenides. He has undertaken this project for charitable proceeds; indeed, all proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth-writing programs offered by 826 Chicago, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 - 18 with their creative and expository writing skills and to help teachers inspire their students to write.
A passage in the introduction hints at a possible reason Eugenides felt compelled to put this collection together:
"...I can still hear our Latin teacher, Miss Ferguson, piping out in her most piercing sparrow's voice, "passer pipiabat," getting us to notice how much the plosive rhythm resembled a bird singing. That words were music, that, at the same time they were marks on a page, they also referred to things in the world and, in skilled hands, took on properties of the things they denoted, was for me, at fifteen, an exciting discovery, all the more notable for the fact that this poetic effect had been devised by a young man dead for two thousand years, who'd sent this phrase drifting down the centuries to reach me in my Michigan classroom, filling my American ears with the sound of Roman birdsong..."
The reader is treated to a loose translation of "passer pipiabat" by Eugenides -- "Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all."
I recommend this collection with the notice that one not expect happily-ever-afters. It can be disturbing, thought-provoking, and heartbreaking. For instance, the first two I read, one by Grace Paley and one by Lorrie Moore, were somber and vaguely depressing.
Another plus: all of the contributors have a short bio in the appendix. The cover art is amazing and creative.
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