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R. C. Binstock

Auteur de Tree of Heaven

7 oeuvres 59 utilisateurs 8 critiques

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Comprend les noms: R.C. Binstock

Œuvres de R. C. Binstock

Tree of Heaven (1995) 42 exemplaires
Swift River (2014) 8 exemplaires
The Soldier (1996) 3 exemplaires
The LIGHT OF HOME (1992) 3 exemplaires
Native Child (2016) 1 exemplaire
The Vanished (2018) 1 exemplaire

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I feel like the china shop in the aftermath of a visit from a reckless bull. RC Binstock’s collection of short stories What You Can’t Give Me contains a series of punches to the gut, delivered to its characters and readers alike. Its current-day setting requires that it at least takes into account the unprecedented, polarizing convulsion of the COVID pandemic, which tends to plow people’s lives under, whether or not they fall ill.

There is a sharp edge in the language in these pieces; they display the author’s enviable handle on 21st Century patter; this skill colors dialogue and exposition alike. Surprising, arresting reactions erupt to the surface in Binstock’s characters here, driving the action in this stunning collection to its memorable, sometimes heart-wrenching conclusion. This collection is a direct broadside hit, among the author’s finest work.

You will find yourself in fascinating settings here, whether it’s a funeral home trying to cope with the deluge of unexpected deaths during the pandemic’s first weeks; a grocery store where tension and aggression show a young employee’s surprising insight into the world around him; or a restaurant whose owner has had to fire almost all his employees after the dropoff of business. But it’s the vivid cast of characters which really carries this collection.

A young worldly-wise waitress feigns amusement at her boss’s lewd innuendo because she feels sure he’d never assault her; the wife whose husband suddenly and cruelly estranges himself from her and the children, but who won’t leave because of the lockdown; the grocery store bagger with Down syndrome, whose thought process shows the author’s bravura skill; and, a personal favorite, the South Asian immigrant pharmacist who administers vaccines at an assisted living home, only to have her life changed when she meets a sympathetic resident in her 90s.

What You Can’t Give Me treats interracial marriage, the #Me Too movement, and the cultural divide in a variety of settings. But in its essence, this collection explores the human need for intimate partnership. In a wide variety of settings, felt by widely divergent characters at various points in their relationships, this very human need is met, thwarted, pursued, or frustrated in the stories, but always, in Binstock’s hands, perceptively, brilliantly.

Intimate and immediate, topical and unpredictable, I can’t recommend What You Can’t Give Me enough.
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Signalé
LukeS | Oct 17, 2022 |
In “The Vanished,” author RC Binstock melds two narratives into one memorable story. In it he recounts the slow, halting recovery of a family still trying to find its footing a year after suffering a horrifying, life-altering tragedy. This matching of two disparate arcs delivers a striking tale of hope and regeneration.

Malcolm and Aaron, brothers in the Bernard family of Boston, each struggle in their own way to cope with the wrenching loss of their sister Barbara and her two small children, who died when their airliner exploded over the North Atlantic. The health of their parents, Dan and Naomi, begins to fail under the strain. And Barbara’s widowed husband James goes to ground in England, frightening two families, and adding to the strain.

In another narrative vein, Binstock aims his considerable talents at the trials of the 19th Century French master, the artist Jean-François Millet. An artist who gained renown in his lifetime for scenes of peasant life, but whose reputation was fodder for critics and political theorists, produced a handful of works mentioned in the novel, and which bear strongly on the author’s design and intent.

Throughout the modern-day events of this novel, the lost loved ones haunt the survivors the way only such victims can. Malcolm, the oldest sibling, faces paralyzing fears about future events outside his control. So much so that he cannot proceed in his work as a sculptor and art professor. The scene where his prodigal black-sheep brother Aaron shows up at his house and the two a night-enshrouded rapprochement is one of the most memorable in the book. It contains a frankness, an energy, and a tenderness in which the brothers display every palette in the spectrum of family relations.

Through Malcolm, the artist and aesthete, we see the works of Millet, stunning and evocative, at this remove in time. Millet has no political agenda, paints no symbols, other than forgettable early-career devotional work, but only wished to portray the world and the people in his native Normandy. Events and themes echo across the decades: Malcolm is enthralled by Millet’s vision of the open horizon of the limitless sea (see The End of the Hamlet of Gruchy by Millet), but in Millet’s own life, a painting of a devout couple taking a prayer break while sowing a field (see The Angelus) takes on the most weight.

The work of this painter, winnowed down by the author to two emblematic works, lend depth, interest, and cogent comment on the latter-day events of loss and redemption. This scheme reveals to us a clever and persuasive storyteller at full power. This is a lovely and redemptive read.

https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-vanished-by-rc-binstock.html
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½
 
Signalé
LukeS | Dec 6, 2018 |
Following the dynamic and memorable Swift River, R.C. Binstock once again demonstrates his gift for capturing little-known and little-explored episodes from America’s past: in Native Child he considers the Orphan Trains, a scheme by reform-minded East Coasters to move purported orphans and street urchins to a “more wholesome” life with families in the Midwest. Along the way he manages an unforgettable and unique family saga, filling it with eloquence, and a deep understanding of human impulse and folly. Native Child is touching, impressive, vivid, and full of soul.

An infant, named Oscar by hospital workers, is found in a grocery in New York, becomes a ward of the state until, aged eight years, he runs away from the latest orphanage and falls in with a street gang. Later that year, 1922, he voluntarily gets on a train with dozens of other children and alights in Nebraska. From there, Mr. Binstock unfolds the multi-generational story, with its loves and pitfalls, its challenges and misunderstandings - those things which make family family.

But there are several unique features to Native Child that separate it from so many other family sagas. Oscar, warily trying to find his life in this alien land, finds speech too challenging and too perilous, and so stops speaking. Oscar's reticence can stand in for the thousands of other silenced children extirpated from their lives, but I prefer to judge it in the personal, singular effects it has on Oscar and his adoptive family. It’s a distillation of the many instances of failed communication between and among members of these linked families, most tragically between Oscar’s guardian Lillian and her sister Frances.

But the soul of Native Child, the compelling reason to take it up and delight in it: it boasts an eloquence not often found in today’s resolutely workmanlike fictions. As timeless truths occur to the life-weary and regretful characters, you get passages like this:

“The meter of life: not time as we guess, as we mostly suppose, yes time passes and it passes, untiringly, profoundly, but only because you are. The difference in you: between inhale and exhale, between heartbeat and beat, between what you drink at eight and what you expel at ten, the same moisture in and out, passing through you, its atoms unchanged but you are changed and that’s how you know time has passed. How you perceive you are alive, must be alive, must accept the rhythm’s rule.”

Those are Oscar’s words from late in his life, and from Lillian, his beloved adoptive guardian:
“… I was startled to recall how we’d all acted as if Oscar’s silence, his refusal to speak, was something provocative, bizarre. We all refuse words, all the time! We do it selectively, is all, under the pretense of being willing when need arises but that’s a lie. We keep to ourselves what we keep to ourselves without review, [and] without approval … Silence is golden or it isn’t, but it’s widespread.”

It’s the silences within families, between foundlings and those who would improve them, between generations, that drive this terrific novel, and also swallow up the love and devotion that people have for one another. Definitely take up Native Child. R.C. Binstock’s already distinguished contributions have grown yet again.
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½
 
Signalé
LukeS | Jun 26, 2016 |
Cette critique a été rédigée pour LibraryThing Member Giveaways.
Water storage is important. During the early part of the 20th century, many lakes and reservoirs were built in this country. These projects submerged towns and farms, forcing people to leave places their families lived in, some for several generations. This book is the story of one girl, whose entire childhood was spent in the shadow of one of these projects. She is 11 when the project is begun and the initial surveying starts. Until she turns 21, she watches the changes the new reservoir makes to her home. Everything changes and everything goes away, but no change can harm you. Things are just different, but they go on. This is a quiet book that I found heavy reading. I got my copy free from LibraryThing.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
susanbeamon | 2 autres critiques | Dec 30, 2014 |

Prix et récompenses

Statistiques

Œuvres
7
Membres
59
Popularité
#280,813
Évaluation
½ 4.5
Critiques
8
ISBN
8

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