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by: Amy Bloom
List Price: $13.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375705571
ISBN: 0375705570
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 164
Publication Date: July 31, 2001
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: July 31, 2001
Sales Rank: 104599
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.
Here are characters confronted with tragedy, perplexed by emotions, and challenged to endure whatever modern life may have in store. A loving mother accompanies her daughter in her journey to become a man, and discovers a new, hopeful love. A stepmother and stepson meet again after fifteen years and a devastating mistake, and rediscover their familial affection for each other. And in 'The Story,' a widow bent on seducing another woman's husband constructs and deconstructs her story until she has 'made the best and happiest ending' possible 'in this world.'
Amazon.com Review:
It was Henry James who first claimed the imagination of disaster, but in Amy Bloom's stunning second collection, she appears to have inherited the mantle. Most of the characters in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You are pursued by at least one of the biological furies: cancer, miscarriage, Parkinson's disease. And even those with their health intact tend to be sick at heart, having run the gantlet of family life and suffered what the military men like to call friendly fire. Yet the effect of these brilliant stories is anything but dreary. Instead they produce an odd sense of elation--Bloom somehow persuades us that her characters will continue under their own steam long after we've closed the book, and she alternates hope and hopelessness in exactly the right, recognizable proportions.
Take the title story, in which a middle-aged mother is determined to see her daughter through the rigors of a sex-change operation. Jane puts up a good front, almost but not quite earning the title of Transsexual Mom of the Year, and supports her 'handsome boy-girl' every step of the way. Yet the strain shows. And when she meets a supernaturally nice man, she can't quite credit her good fortune--even his appearance at her door with an armload of flowers touches off a fresh round of ambivalence: And standing on the little porch of the condo, barely enough room for two medium-size people and forty-eight roses, Jane sees that she has taken her place in the long and honorable line of fools for love: Don Quixote and Hermia and Oscar Wilde and Joe E. Brown, crowing with delight, clutching his straw boater and Jack Lemmon as the speedboat carries them off into a cockeyed and irresistible future. The inclusion of Some Like It Hot's Joe E. Brown, who's gotten both more and less than he bargained for in his cross-dressing sweetheart, is a typically marvelous touch. And lest we think that Bloom has weighted the scales too heavily in favor of disillusion, Jane's new lover gets in the last word, citing the South Carolina state motto: 'Dum spiro, spero.... While I breathe, I hope.' Just keep breathing, the reader wants to say.
'Stars at Elbow and Foot' and 'Rowing to Eden' are no less effective in their mingling of tragedy and sublime trivia. In two other stories, Bloom revives the Sampson clan, which she first introduced in Come to Me, and beautifully extends her mini-epic of mixed-race life without a grain of namby-pamby PC hesitation. And last but not least, there's 'The Story,' a tricky number in which Bloom seems to shoot to hell her own reputation for Chekhovian decency. Here we have a narrator who lies and dissembles, destroys her rival, and lives to tell the (metafictional) tale: 'Even now I regard her destruction as a very good thing, and that undermines the necessary fictive texture of deep ambiguity, the roiling ambivalence that might give tension to the narrator's affection.' In the end, though, Bloom is simply too gifted a writer to banish all seven types of ambiguity from her work. She understands that we are hopelessly divided creatures and cuts us the necessary, unsentimental slack. Or to put it another way, she forgives all--but forgets nothing. --James Marcus
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A blind man can see how much I love you:stories
I found this depressing and seemingly written by an angry & very jaded person who aimed to shock. I never wish to read anything more of Amy Bloom's!
Rating:  - Perfect stories.
This is a beautiful collection of emotionally resonant stories, written with an eye for detail and an ear for dialog. Bloom has such gift for teasing apart the threads of complicated relationships. Most of the stories are concerned with medical events--the fight, the surrender to disease, what it's like to be alive when those around you are succumbing. The story about the Darling Mistress is one of the fiercest in the collection, and my favorite. This book is outstanding.
Rating: - a handful of gems
Being a psychotherapist, Ms. Bloom focuses on stories of people with...certain ailments. But not to worry, these are not 'disease of the week' soap operas--her stories are witty, sometimes outrageously so, often told by characters with their own reasons for bitterness about the world. But the truly inspiring thing about Ms. Bloom is how, one way or another, she allows her characters to struggle on with some hope, some humor, and some love.
The title story is first; it's the longest and ... Read More
Rating: - Great author checking boundaries of love and relations
I remain somewhat ambivalent towards this book, an ambivalence that is reflected in the points I gave this collection. Truly this beautiful collection of stories should have received 5 points based on the writer's talent and her writing that is so earthy and real on the one hand and so high level on the other, but if I judge the book according to my personal pleasure then I am not sure...
There is no doubt that this book is very well written, beautiful and candid and touches many modern, relevant ... Read More
Rating: - The ins and outs of relationships
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories by Amy Bloom covers how typical love can be in atypical situations (for some, of course). Ms. Bloom touches on transexualism and a mother's love for her daughter soon-to-be son, death and recovery, breast cancer and the family, death of a newborn -- all situations that do affect people on a daily basis, but aren't the "norm" for the majority.
I think Ms. Bloom is essentially stating that no matter the situation, people are really the same and ... Read More
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