Lost in Uttar Pradesh: New and Selected Stories

by Evan S. Connell

Overview

Evan S. Connell's restraint, concision, and perfect pitch lend themselves stunningly to the short story form. He intuitively senses when to explain and when to let silence stand in speech's stead. His characters—among them, a wanderer back from Spain, the corpulent Mr. Bemis, Katia and her lion—ring true not because the stories are filled with monumental events, but because they center around seemingly insignificant experiences that remain in the mind, imbued with a meaning ever difficult to define. Often we are left to float in their wake, ending in an ellipsis of sorts. Yet by Connell's mastery, even the voices that speak only once resonate beyond the final page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582434834
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Evan S. Connell was the author of eighteen books, including Francisco Goya, Deus Lo Volt!, Mrs. Bridge, and Son of the Morning Star. He received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

A rich variety of settings, themes and characters distinguishes this collection from Connell (Deus Lo Volt!, 2000, etc.). Several recurring characters function as authorial surrogates and analytical observers. Restless loner William Koerner, for example, appears as a former "john" who solicits conflicting stories about an unstable prostitute he cannot forget ("Hooker"); a dutiful nephew becomes inspired and baffled by his elderly uncle's extravagant tales of foreign travels ("Nan Madol"); and an indignant liberal is appalled by his country's political naivete ("The Cuban Missile Crisis"). A reserved insurance executive known only as Muhlbach (also a prominent figure in Connell's longer fiction) is the dysfunctional paterfamilias of an icy tragicomic family in "Arcturus," which is inspired-as Connell's "Preface" acknowledges-by Thomas Mann's story "Disorder and Early Sorrow." In "St. Augustine's Pigeon," the determined protagonist reinvents himself as a sexual being after his wife's death had rendered him celibate for many years. The complacent suburbanite of Connell's novel Mrs. Bridge is reborn, intriguingly, in the paired figures of a retired stockbroker (in "Proctor Bemis"), who laments his once-great country's descent into mediocrity and dishonesty, and Bemis's still resolutely conservative spouse (in "Mrs. Proctor Bemis"). Among other highlights: a ruthlessly concise allegorical narrative (the Hemingway-like morality tale "Lion"); a chilling image of peril at sea ("Yellow Raft"); and a viciously entertaining depiction of middle-class spiritual crisis ("Noah's Ark"). Connell combines the master fiction writer's skills (brisk characterization, supple stylistic precision) with those ofa compulsive traveler, ruminative antiquarian and borderline-eccentric obsessive.

Kirkus Reviews