Three thoughtful, interesting and challenging stories from an author at the end of a long career in which he managed to combine the best of speculative fiction with a deeply humane interest in life as it really is, on this fragile world of ours.
If you are looking for easily-digested, "beginning-middle-end" type traditional short stories, then you really should move on: these three ... vignettes work with each other, and against each other, and all circle around the questions of happiness, and loneliness, and love. A barrister (cold? Unable to express his feeling?) attempts to win back his estranged wife and daughter with a fantastic tale. A celebrity artist reinvents himself in obscurity. Two former lovers, from opposite sides of a brutal civil war, revisit the sad end of their doomed affair .... All circling around the idea that, as one of the characters says, "sadness is just happiness in reverse."
If you are looking for easily-digested, "beginning-middle-end" type traditional short stories, then you really should move on: these three ... vignettes work with each other, and against each other, and all circle around the questions of happiness, and loneliness, and love. A barrister (cold? Unable to express his feeling?) attempts to win back his estranged wife and daughter with a fantastic tale. A celebrity artist reinvents himself in obscurity. Two former lovers, from opposite sides of a brutal civil war, revisit the sad end of their doomed affair .... All circling around the idea that, as one of the characters says, "sadness is just happiness in reverse."
