Book DescriptionJoan Alexander"s stories are intelligent and sure-footed investigations of the darker sides of urban life. They begin with familiar situations -- the failure of a business, the death of a loved one, an affair that never gets physical -- but they chart the rough terrain of emotional trauma with unsettling precision.
Many of the stories in Lines of Truth and Conversation deal in the pangs and pumellings of loss in all its guises, but Alexander has a gift for bittersweet humour, and even her most harrowing stories are lightened by a sense of the comic continuity of life.
Alexander"s writing reaches its gritty peak in the novella `Five Months", in which a woman responds -- sometimes bravely, sometimes obsessively --to the failing health of her father-in-law, who is dying of cancer. Full of feeling but free from sentimentality, this is a tale of family politics, strained relationships, disintegration and love:
`In his coffin, Pa looked cleaned-up and shaven, waxen and smooth, shroud-covered, completely changed in a day, with a little plastic baggie tucked in next to him that Davey saw first. In the baggie was some sand, twist-tied and labelled: Dirt from Israel. Five months from beginning to end. Look how fast a person disappears." Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Lines of Truth and Conversation (Joan Alexander)