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Isobars: Stories
In Isobars , Janette Turner Hospital presents fifteen stories of lives precariously balanced between the past and the present, between the real and the imagined, between the steamy tropical rain forests and beaches of Australia and the urban landscapes of North American cities.
The title story is a kind of cubist meditation on violence against women, refracted through years of fragmented memories into a stunning locus of dread. Indeed, each of the stories is in its own way a fugue on the evanescence of time and distance. In “The Second Coming of Come-by-Chance,” the apocalyptic resurfacing of a submerged city during a drought prompts the reemergence of an old woman’s memory of her rape as a fledgling schoolteacher some forty years earlier.
Throughout these stories the real and imaginary collide again and again under the pressures of passion, loneliness, and grief. In “The Loss of Faith,” a middle-aged professor “sees” his first wife on a New York subway the day she dies in Australia. In “A Little Night Music,” a young woman’s brief sexual encounter with a stranger on an airplane turns out to be a drug-induced fantasy―perhaps.
As the consciousness of her characters clickers between Queensland and Ontario, Sydney and Manhattan, Hospital skillfully blurs the lines between the quotidian and mythic, between the real and surreal. At the haunting conclusion of “Uncle Seaborn,” a man returning to Australia after the death of his parents finds himself drawn by a talisman coin and an almost atavistic longing to a mysterious rendezvous in the sea. And in the chilling piece “Queen on Pentacles, Nine of Swords,” the Tarot is the means by which a fortune-teller’s life becomes entangled with that of a brilliantly doomed Indian woman.
Yet even the most somber stories pulls back at the edge of despair, and there are moments of dazzling illumination, tenderness, and transcendence. In “I Saw Three Ships,” an alcoholic veteran haunted by a friend’s death in World War II seeks redemption through a “visitation” by a young woman he meets on the beach, and comes close to self-forgiveness in a final heart-wrenching tableau of misunderstanding.
Profound, compassionate, powerful, these stories explore the outermost boundaries of emotion. Isobars reaffirms Janette Turner Hospital’s status as one of the preeminent writers of contemporary fiction.
The title story is a kind of cubist meditation on violence against women, refracted through years of fragmented memories into a stunning locus of dread. Indeed, each of the stories is in its own way a fugue on the evanescence of time and distance. In “The Second Coming of Come-by-Chance,” the apocalyptic resurfacing of a submerged city during a drought prompts the reemergence of an old woman’s memory of her rape as a fledgling schoolteacher some forty years earlier.
Throughout these stories the real and imaginary collide again and again under the pressures of passion, loneliness, and grief. In “The Loss of Faith,” a middle-aged professor “sees” his first wife on a New York subway the day she dies in Australia. In “A Little Night Music,” a young woman’s brief sexual encounter with a stranger on an airplane turns out to be a drug-induced fantasy―perhaps.
As the consciousness of her characters clickers between Queensland and Ontario, Sydney and Manhattan, Hospital skillfully blurs the lines between the quotidian and mythic, between the real and surreal. At the haunting conclusion of “Uncle Seaborn,” a man returning to Australia after the death of his parents finds himself drawn by a talisman coin and an almost atavistic longing to a mysterious rendezvous in the sea. And in the chilling piece “Queen on Pentacles, Nine of Swords,” the Tarot is the means by which a fortune-teller’s life becomes entangled with that of a brilliantly doomed Indian woman.
Yet even the most somber stories pulls back at the edge of despair, and there are moments of dazzling illumination, tenderness, and transcendence. In “I Saw Three Ships,” an alcoholic veteran haunted by a friend’s death in World War II seeks redemption through a “visitation” by a young woman he meets on the beach, and comes close to self-forgiveness in a final heart-wrenching tableau of misunderstanding.
Profound, compassionate, powerful, these stories explore the outermost boundaries of emotion. Isobars reaffirms Janette Turner Hospital’s status as one of the preeminent writers of contemporary fiction.
177 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
About the author
Janette Turner Hospital
30 books80 followersBorn in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.
Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an 'Atlantic First' citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 'Ten Best Young Fiction Writers'. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short story collections and her work has been published in multiple foreign language collections. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, 'Unperformed Experiments Have No Results', was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in l995.
The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.
Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for "best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman”, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.
Orpheus Lost, her most recent novel, was one of five finalists for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary prize in 2008.
Orpheus Lost was also on Booklist's Top 30 novels of the year in 2008, along with novels by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Ian MacEwan, Ha Jin, and Michael Chabon.
The novel also made the list of Best 25 Books of the Year of Library Journal, and Hospital was invited to be a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Library Association in Los Angeles in June 2008.
The Italian edition, Orfeo Perduto, has been so well-received in Italy that it will be a featured title at the literary festival on Lake Maggiore in June 2010 where Hospital will be a featured author.
She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.
Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an 'Atlantic First' citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 'Ten Best Young Fiction Writers'. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short story collections and her work has been published in multiple foreign language collections. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, 'Unperformed Experiments Have No Results', was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in l995.
The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.
Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for "best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman”, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.
Orpheus Lost, her most recent novel, was one of five finalists for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary prize in 2008.
Orpheus Lost was also on Booklist's Top 30 novels of the year in 2008, along with novels by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Ian MacEwan, Ha Jin, and Michael Chabon.
The novel also made the list of Best 25 Books of the Year of Library Journal, and Hospital was invited to be a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Library Association in Los Angeles in June 2008.
The Italian edition, Orfeo Perduto, has been so well-received in Italy that it will be a featured title at the literary festival on Lake Maggiore in June 2010 where Hospital will be a featured author.
She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 12, 2020
This is the first time I have read anything by Janette Turner Hospital. Australian by birth, her fiction moves between Australia, Canada and the US, following her moves. The themes are universal ones: loss, memory, the nature of desire. The stories tend to focus on moments of tension and crisis and Hospital seems to be able to focus on the mess of human existence.
Past and present collide: in one story a professor sees his first wife on the New York subway on the day she dies in Australia. In another a town that was flooded following the building of a dam surfaces following a drought: this triggers memories in an older woman who was raped in the town many years before. Many of the stories involve acts of violence against women, but also acts of caring between women, a sense of sisterhood. Many of the men in the stories are older and seemingly well intentioned, looking for something redemptive. Others are younger and more unpredictable. There is often fragmentation and lack of resolution.
Hospital addresses the issues of post-colonial cultures, particularly in Canada and Australia, although there is a story about the Indian diaspora in Canada. Racial tensions are examined in “Bondi” and reveal some of the ugliness that lies beneath the Bondi hedonism following an incident on the beach:
“It’s the wogs. The wogs started it. They were bothering a white girl, they threw sand in a white lady’s face, they kicked a football right into a little kid’s head, a little white kid, he’s got concussion. Theories fly as fast as punches, as thick as blood. Go get ‘em, send the buggers back to where they bloody well came from.”
A refrain I have heard many times, as I am sure many of you have too.
One of the stand out stories is “The Last of the Hapsburgs” about a school teacher (Miss Davenport) teaching far away from home (exiled because of an unnamed scandal) in Northern Queensland; she feels displaced. As a result she identifies with two of her pupils. There is Hazel who is an Indigenous Australian and displaced in her own land and Rebecca, whose parents are survivors of the Holocaust. Two of the three have escaped to Northern Queensland, one is already trapped there. The finale of the story shows they are all trapped there. There is a very good modern ghost story linked to terrorism.
On the whole this is a very sharp and perceptive set of stories with enough to challenge and maintain interest. There are a few language issues but this is an author I will return to at some point as I would like to read some of her longer work.
Past and present collide: in one story a professor sees his first wife on the New York subway on the day she dies in Australia. In another a town that was flooded following the building of a dam surfaces following a drought: this triggers memories in an older woman who was raped in the town many years before. Many of the stories involve acts of violence against women, but also acts of caring between women, a sense of sisterhood. Many of the men in the stories are older and seemingly well intentioned, looking for something redemptive. Others are younger and more unpredictable. There is often fragmentation and lack of resolution.
Hospital addresses the issues of post-colonial cultures, particularly in Canada and Australia, although there is a story about the Indian diaspora in Canada. Racial tensions are examined in “Bondi” and reveal some of the ugliness that lies beneath the Bondi hedonism following an incident on the beach:
“It’s the wogs. The wogs started it. They were bothering a white girl, they threw sand in a white lady’s face, they kicked a football right into a little kid’s head, a little white kid, he’s got concussion. Theories fly as fast as punches, as thick as blood. Go get ‘em, send the buggers back to where they bloody well came from.”
A refrain I have heard many times, as I am sure many of you have too.
One of the stand out stories is “The Last of the Hapsburgs” about a school teacher (Miss Davenport) teaching far away from home (exiled because of an unnamed scandal) in Northern Queensland; she feels displaced. As a result she identifies with two of her pupils. There is Hazel who is an Indigenous Australian and displaced in her own land and Rebecca, whose parents are survivors of the Holocaust. Two of the three have escaped to Northern Queensland, one is already trapped there. The finale of the story shows they are all trapped there. There is a very good modern ghost story linked to terrorism.
On the whole this is a very sharp and perceptive set of stories with enough to challenge and maintain interest. There are a few language issues but this is an author I will return to at some point as I would like to read some of her longer work.
March 10, 2019
My first Janette Turner Hospital and will not be my last.
15 short stories with some very good indeed. As the blurb on the back covers says”….all experience moments of crisis and illumination” with the past and present ever part of each story.
A couple are absolute stand outs for me.
The Last of the Hapsburgs has had me thinking days after initially reading the story. I went back for a 2nd read so impressive was its themes. A school teacher, Miss Devonport, reflects on her life in North Qld and her assistance and compassion to a couple of girls less fortunate. Certainly, crisis and illumination dominated this story that had a sad and bitter ending.
Eggshell Expressway was the story of a drug addict prostitute who actually cares more for her client, a noted judge, than she realises. Crisis and illumination dominated her thoughts as she attempts to save her client from her repulsive pimp.
Recommended to those who like short thematic stories.
15 short stories with some very good indeed. As the blurb on the back covers says”….all experience moments of crisis and illumination” with the past and present ever part of each story.
A couple are absolute stand outs for me.
The Last of the Hapsburgs has had me thinking days after initially reading the story. I went back for a 2nd read so impressive was its themes. A school teacher, Miss Devonport, reflects on her life in North Qld and her assistance and compassion to a couple of girls less fortunate. Certainly, crisis and illumination dominated this story that had a sad and bitter ending.
Eggshell Expressway was the story of a drug addict prostitute who actually cares more for her client, a noted judge, than she realises. Crisis and illumination dominated her thoughts as she attempts to save her client from her repulsive pimp.
Recommended to those who like short thematic stories.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews