March 26, 2021
This latest collection of short stories by Scott (Careers for Women) contains some gems; the best are evocative of another time or place. Scott returns several times to tales about making books and making paper, particularly in different times, long in the past or far into the future. The strongest stories spring from the author's European travel experiences, which sparked her fascination with ancient lives and their relationship to books and reading. In some of the weaker entries, such as "The Knowledge Gallery,"Scott explores a possible future without books; these offerings don't shine like the longer story "Dreaming of Fire," about a scribe in medieval Venice. Other stories focus on the history of unnamed European places and local accounts of villagers' experiences in unnamed 20th-century wars. As can be expected of war stories, some are disturbing, like the first selection, "The Limestone Book." It's not clear whether any of the stories are based on true events. VERDICT Of interest to readers who enjoy short stories, particularly those who are interested in the history of Europe and the history of bookmaking and literacy.--Jan Marry, Heritage P.L., New Kent & Charles City, VA
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 15, 2021
This dreamy, museumlike collection of stories transports readers from a 15th-century Venetian artist's workshop to a disappearing literary archive in the year 2052. Scott, the author of 12 books and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Manikin (1996), approaches these lyrical stories with a gemlike precision and economy of language that imbue them with a shimmering quality. Her detailed approach to worldbuilding suggests that embedded messages and meanings can be found in almost anything--perhaps especially in those things we tend to overlook: a tiny teardrop on the portrait of a lady hanging in the Cloisters or the violet, half-blooming capsules of a larkspur. These details and the mysteries behind them invigorate this collection as much as the eccentric characters embody the narratives. Each of the 15 stories has a distinctly different form, ranging from a graduate student's first-person account of her research on an obscure literary movement to a fast-paced mystery about a child missing on the New York City Subway that unfolds through a series of fragmented accounts. The stories cohere, though, through their overlapping concerns with the function of art in the world and attempts to capture the record of human experience. Like a good museum, the collection also entices the reader to look again, both at the stories themselves and the world beyond these pages. What might we have overlooked? And what if that missing detail is the key to understanding the mysteries that surround us? As one character comments, "We can't begin to know what we've lost. All we can do is keep searching." A beautiful gallery of meditations on language, mortality, and the attempt to leave a lasting mark on the world.
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Starred review from April 1, 2021
Scott, a virtuoso writer of penetrating imagination, not only returns to the short story after several novels, most recently Careers for Women (2017), but also creates a heady inquiry into how we perpetually narrate our lives. Our storytelling habit has inspired us to invent many forms of narration, all vulnerable to distortion and destruction. "The Limestone Book" is a wrenching tale about ancient cave paintings in a time of modern warfare. "Dreaming of Fire" brings readers to a scriptorium in fifteenth-century Venice, where one scribe laboriously copying manuscripts that will be stitched into books goes rogue. Questions of originals, copies, fakes, and censorship multiply as Scott glides into the future, when all texts have been digitized and are therefore prey to interference. A writer in a besieged Mediterranean village fears for his nearly completed, handwritten novel. Stories sprout and grow in the minds of strangers trapped on a stalled subway car. A story about the hunger for fame is narrated by a bear. A lonely man gets carried away on a stream of comforting lies. Suddenly a booklover can no longer read. Venturing into Borgesian territory with each metaphysical bend or surreal twist, Scott, ironic and compassionate, funny and shrewd, considers how the endless torrent of stories we generate fails to fully dispel our inherent inexplicability.
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