Guernica Editions
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Lucia's Eyes and Other Stories
Guernica Editions, Spring 2011
228 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550713343
ISBN10: 1550713345
English
$12.00 Canada, $12.00 US
Read more from the Essential Prose Series
The resistance of the human spirit in face of time, disloyalty, and oblivion is the theme of Marina Sonkina's new collection of short stories. Her seemingly naive and helpless protagonists inhabit disparate social stations, geographical locales and cultures; all are persons displaced in their own lives. But in their struggles for survival, they discover the redeeming and dangerous power of unconditional love - the only weapon available to them. Strange and incomprehensible to everyone, love makes its sudden appearance to an eight-year-old hunchbacked boy in the title story of Lucia's Eyes. As he brings the gifts of his artistic imagination to Lucia, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, the bleak and cruel reality of Stalin's Russia dissolves into magic ... In "Christmas Tango"a jobless drifter in snowy Montreal discovers tango, inadvertently transforming his own life and the lives of those who come in contact with him. In "Tractorina" a hard-working crane-operator, retired in post-Gorbachev Russia, is driven into a rose-tinted abyss by her stepson. Full of unexpected turns and twists, sadness, joy and humour, these stories reflect life, itself always a surprise, and always a miracle.
Marina Sonkina's stories give us unexpected characters in surreal situations presented with unflinching verisimilitude in prose that is at once forceful, lyrical and filled with scepticism. This is not the stuff of European fiction, nor of the multicultural mainstream in North American post-20th century writing. This is more like Mavis Gallant in reverse, a shrewdly observant fictive sensibility self-transplanted to the New World from the old.
George Payerle
These stories display a masterly range of emotional tones, from ice-hard brilliance to mordant wit to sheer lyricism. Marina Sonkina's characters rise from the page to become people we know and understand, although they live at widely distant points of the compass, spiritual and geographical. It's clear that she loves them all, with a passion that forgives their weaknesses. All of these stories reflect Sonkina's erudition, skill and versatility. She is a writer to treasure; she tells memorable tales in succulent, satisfying and elegant prose.
Martha Roth
Books by Marina Sonkina
