"Park’s stories render the shape-shifting weight of love with a subtle but emotionally penetrating accuracy." - Kirkus Reviews
"[Park] offers profound and observational slice-of-life vignettes with a wryness that speaks to the deep psychological issues that men often faceisolation, alienation, regret, sufferingin modern relationships. The 13 stories display a literary complexity that has become a hallmark of Park's writing." - Shelf Awareness & Beatrice.com
"These stories reveal our constant longing amid life’s imperfections . . . Thoughtful scenarios, polished prose; for all story collections." - Library Journal
"An insightful and moving exploration of love and art." - Booklist on THE POETS' WIVES
"Quietly moving . . . Park uncovers an essential sadness in each of these lost soulsa failure of courage or imagination that's all the sadder for being fully recognized and regrettedyet the book is surprisingly funny, too . . . Park's Belfast natives, and many readers, will return from Amsterdam subtly changed." - Boston Globe on THE LIGHT OF AMSTERDAM
"A humane and deeply empathetic writer, Park turns the most ordinary of interactions into a moving story of people's greatest hopes and fears." - Booklist on THE LIGHT OF AMSTERDAM
"Strongly recommended." - Library Journal on THE POETS' WIVES
"This is a novel about people, about feelings, thoughts, and struggles, and Park does an excellent job of developing the characters and making the reader care about them . . . a humane and touching read." - Library Journal on THE LIGHT OF AMSTERDAM
09/01/2016
Notwithstanding its title, this new work from the multi-award-winning Park (e.g., The Poets' Wives was selected as Belfast's One City One Book read) features ordinary people in not exactly extraordinary circumstances, just tilted enough to be revelatory. A private eye who stresses how boring surveillance really is breaks into the home where he once lived with his now estranged wife and child; an educated young man crosses paths with some shady types at a leisure complex, trading his knowledge of the perfect wedding poem for their encouragement in learning to swim; and a 17-year-old dreads his annual Boxing Day visit with his mentally imbalanced mother, on which his cherished father insists. These stories reveal our constant longing amid life's imperfections, but Caravaggio himself says here, "There is no sense of achievement, no lasting satisfaction." VERDICT Thoughtful scenarios, polished prose; for all story collections.
2016-09-20
In 13 stories set mostly in his native Northern Ireland, novelist Park (The Poets Wives, 2014, etc.) explores the emotional lives of men from youth to old age.While Park occasionally flirts with high culturethe opening story, Learning to Swim, features a young Donne scholar from England finding a poem for his new, older, richer, but less educated Belfast acquaintance to recite at his wedding; The Kiss swings between the scoundrel painter Caravaggios betrayal of a friend and present-day adulterythe emphasis here is on the daily grind of love. In the heart-wrenching Boxing Day, a teenager spends a miserable afternoon with his mentally ill mother, impatient to return to the new happy family his father has created yet longing to know [his] mother as she must once have been. Although the island on which the retired teacher in Skype lives may be extreme in its isolation, his yearning to stay connected with his faraway daughter via her preferred technology captures the zeitgeist of contemporary parenthood. In Man Overboard, four childhood friends, now middle-aged, spend an awkward fishing trip not really talking about ourselves in the present until one of them faces a crisis and the others react, revealing the potential tenderness of male friendship. Park shows love gone badthe cop assigned a surveillance beat by day in Keeping Watch spends nights on unofficial surveillance of his ex-wifes house despite a court order, his inability to let go turned into sicknessbut the best stories here approach marital love as a complex organism. Technology is again the metaphor in The Bloggers, about a married couples evolution online and off. The long, seemingly moribund marriage in Gecko endures and reblooms once the husband accepts his own limitations. In Old Fool, the lonely widower who allows a struggling single mother to take advantage of his optimistic naivet is also consciously compensating for his failure to appreciate his wife while she was alive. Parks stories render the shape-shifting weight of love with a subtle but emotionally penetrating accuracy.