Women and Angels: Stories

Women and Angels: Stories

Harold Brodkey

Language: English

Pages: 176

ISBN: B00D00W9FQ

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


From Harold Brodkey come three remarkable stories about the brief lives of two women and the troubling appearance of an angel above Harvard University
Considered by many to be among the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, Harold Brodkey created fiction that startled, provoked, and often confounded. These three novellas, told through the recollections of fictional alter ego, Wiley Silenowicz, serve as sterling examples of Brodkey’s magnificent talent.
 
In “Ceil,” Wiley imagines the mother he never knew, brilliantly reinventing the woman who died when he was a child of two, creating a parent both idealized and painfully real. In “Lila,” Wiley remembers his adoptive mother, an unloving and unlovable, self-involved woman, whose early death from cancer left a permanent void in his family. And in “Angel,”the book’s remarkable closing piece, Wiley recalls a heavenly visitation that came to him and many others while studying at Harvard University, and which heralded a truth most difficult to bear. For lovers of literature who have yet to experience Brodkey’s unique style, soaring language, and conceptual brilliance, Women and Angels is a marvelous introduction to an American master.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

any good to have you there listening! You don’t do anything to help me—what’s wrong with you? You think I’m like an animal? Like a worm? You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t understand anything, you’re no good to me, you were never any good to me. I’d laugh at you, you’re so useless to me, but it hurts me to laugh: What good are you to me? Do something for me! Put yourself in my place! Help me! Why don’t you help me?” Sometimes she would say in a horrible voice, “I’ll tell you what you

tired and cheated—I resented it that she was real and not me or part of me, that her death wasn’t sort of a version of mine. It was going to be too much God-damned work this way. I went off into “thinking,” into an untrained exercise of intellect. I started with xs and ys and Latin phrases. I asked myself what was a person, and, after a while, I came up with: a person is a mind, a body, and an I. The I was not in the brain, at least not in the way the mind was. The I is what in you most hurts

believe me.” I expressed disbelief by the way I stared at her. She said, “Go into my top bureau drawer. Look under the handkerchiefs.” There was a bottle there. I held it up. “What is it?” “My morphine.” “You hide it?” “I know how boys like to try things…” “You hide it from me?” “I don’t want you to be tempted—I know you’re often under a strain.” “Momma, I wouldn’t take your morphine.” “But I don’t use it much any more. Haven’t you noticed I’m clearer lately? I don’t let myself use it,

uncertain way; so that as the war wore on and spread, it seemed to me I would have to die as an American among Americans as well. Those families in which observance is the primary element of their Judaism (or rather, those groups of families, since such Judaism does not permit singularity of devotion or individual piety) do not in numbers or in their sense of sacredness, in my belief, supply a definition for me, an American and a Jew, of what it is to be Jewish. When I consider Jewish history,

This was not given to us in any simple way, Its beauty eased our condition at living now with no Final Meaning of This Manifestation, and in no absolute condition of Testimony that it was almost all, all right, but not really. It didn’t judge, It didn’t raise a sword or other weapon or even Its Hand, It spared us Its speech, and if It spoke to us, did so by inducing thoughts inside us, and yet, if my case is that of others, those thoughts, too, were uncontrolled. Years of shame at my inept

Download sample

Download