A Nurse's Story and Others

ISBN-13: 9781578063185 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 248 str.

Peter Baida

Opis

From Baida's O. Henry Award-winning title story about the final days of a Catholic nurse, to "The Reckoning," in which a corrupt university president's family is torn apart by his downfall, the nine stories collected here give candid accounts of people from various walks of life and the events that unite and divide them. The contrast between deterioration and strength (both physical and spiritual) is a common theme for Baida, who spent 20 years working for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; he himself finally succumbed to hemophilia in 1999. "Family Ties" is told from the perspective of a dying man's daughter as she recalls the drastic step she once took to make him stop abusing her mother; meanwhile, the mother, unaware of what her daughter did, is pressuring her to reconcile with him. Many of the stories display an excellent knack for dialogue: "Points of Light" involves a circle of elderly Jewish friends trying, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of a world beset by crime, illness, conservative pundits and corrupt politicians over pickles and pastrami at their favorite deli. In "No Place to Hide," Richard, a white marketing executive, is confronted in a park by Sweetness, the black, unemployed son of the woman who was once his mother's housekeeper. Now middle-aged, Sweetness cajoles, threatens and bluffs his way into Richard's life. "America, is there something you forgot to tell me?" Richard wonders and it's a question that many of Baida's characters seem to be asking. His stories offer no grand epiphanies, no tidy resolutions but they address complicated issues of loyalty, class, race, ethics and family in a spare, direct style that is insightful and moving.