Cities I've never lived in Stories

Sara Majka

Book - 2016

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Subjects
Genres
Short stories
Published
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
Sara Majka (author)
Item Description
"A public space book."
Physical Description
160 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781555977313
  • Reverón's dolls
  • Miniatures
  • Boy with finch
  • White Heart Bar
  • Saint Andrews Hotel
  • Settlers
  • The museum assistant
  • Maureen
  • Nashua
  • Strangers
  • Cities I've never lived in
  • Four Hills
  • Travelers
  • Boston.
Review by New York Times Review

THE FIRST STORY in Sara Majka's first book begins, "Maybe 10 or 11 years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city." There the narrator visits an art exhibit - the story is called "Reverón's Dolls," after the Venezuelan artist - and stays in an apartment owned by an artist friend, filled with light and canvases. Unjustly, I assumed right away that I knew exactly what kind of book this would be: a book about arty people with complicated personal lives, who use the word "lover" and contemplate wintry landscapes from lonely trains. There are arty people and wintry landscapes in "Cities I've Never Lived In." The narrator above, who is common to many of the 14 stories, does use the word "lover," and reflects on relationships that seem exceedingly complicated. But Majka brings the reader to startling places. The stories feature an array of discomfiting situations and hardscrabble New England lives. All of the stories are sad. A father leaves his daughter with a neighbor and rents an apartment in another town; a mother meets up with the ex-husband who killed their daughter while driving drunk. A little girl is abducted from a church day care and never seen again. Many of them are spooky. A young man leaves a mental hospital and finds that his island home has disappeared from the map. There are doppelgängers throughout the stories - in a bookstore and on the street and in a painting hidden in an attic. Watching an old museum security tape, the narrator catches a glimpse of herself as a child. MAJKA IS DEXTEROUS at bringing a physical clarity to the sites of emotional muddle; the boy in the mental hospital had "cut his wrists with his father's coping saw, and lay on the ground watching the sawdust turn red until someone opened the door." She excels at writing neglected, forlorn people and places. A foyer in a dingy apartment features an end table piled with old mail, mail that is "parchmenty and bowed in the middle." The mother of the dead girl is one of a class of women "who have no femininity in them, but also nothing hard, it was just that life had brought them to having no extra gestures." (Alice Munro is name-checked by the narrator, and her influence is perceptible throughout, although no one can achieve her particular brand of crispness.) In the titular story, Majka's main narrator conceives a plan to travel to soup kitchens around the country, talking to the poor. In one city she sees an exhibit about homeless people; she is moved by their stories but tells her mother on the phone that "it was too compassionate" to be effective. Real artists, she explains, take from people "for their own ends." This is actually a useful annotation to Majka's work. "Cities I've Never Lived In" is not a compassionate book, exactly, despite all the sad things in it. From certain angles, it's a kind of New England gothic, where the lost children and dead women and doppelgängers serve to add atmosphere and meaning to the narrator's past peregrinations, her dalliances and uncertainties. It turns out in the end that this is in fact a book about an arty person with a complicated personal life. But it's a lovely one, written in a moving and uncanny register.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 6, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

I didn't have the things I would say I wanted most. I was quick and sad and you knew looking at me that nothing had gone quite right. I don't know. What do we know of ourselves? So muses the key narrator in Majka's debut collection of stories, which loosely follow the life of a young woman in the aftermath of a divorce. Centered largely around New England from Maine to New York and the small towns in between Majka's narrator provides quiet glimpses into a life that isn't quite what she had in mind, as she tells stories of her own and others' journeys through transitional, shifting times of life. A man leaves a woman; a woman leaves a man; in bars, hostels, and even soup kitchens, people search for connection. Though some threads find resolution and others only hint at it, every story comes back to the themes that occupy the young narrator's mind the most: loneliness and loss, the in-between spaces of life, and the struggle to understand ourselves and the people around us.--Winterroth, Amanda Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The stories in Majka's debut collection are linked in two ways: many feature the same first-person narrator, a youngish woman whose marriage has broken up, but even those that don't have a common mood-a loneliness and yearning for something that will likely not occur. In the title story, the narrator travels from city to city going to soup kitchens-she's not hungry for food, but for a connection, a way to be open to the people she meets there. It's not a plan with a measurable success or failure-when it ends, she's still looking for "an answer to the loneliness." In "Four Hills," she meets an appealing man, and when she sees that he's married, she feels "the calm settling of disappointment as it joined the tide of all the other disappointments." The stories that aren't about this character seem to be told by her. These are set mainly in Maine, sometimes in Portland, and sometimes on islands; they feature people who are figuratively and literally getting cut off. In "Strangers," an island loses its only grocery store; in "Saint Andrews Hotel," a touching foray into a less realistic mode, the islanders lose their ability to reach the mainland. Though the stories seem to blend together, this seems a deliberate choice, and the result is a human and eloquent exploration of isolation. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A clutch of delicate stories, for the most part set in Maine but generally occupied by more cerebral concerns about distance and disconnection. In the title story of Majka's debut collection, the artist narrator decides to bail on a relationship and instead travel the United States to tour soup kitchens. Perhaps needless to say, it's a glum grand tour: from Buffalo to Detroit to Cleveland and then parts further west, she wrestles with the question of "what was effective art about the hungry or homeless," paralleled by her own loneliness. The other 13 stories are defined by similar emotional brittleness among its female protagonists. The narrator of "Nashua" sinks into a relationship with a heavy drinker; in "White Heart Bar," a declining marriage is paired with the narrator's contemplation of a missing girl; a child who went missing from a church's day care weighs heavily on the mind of the narrator of "Travelers." These could be the same fragile women from story to story, the same lost girls, the same despairing bars in Maine, or different ones (the narrators are typically nameless). Regardless, the emotional pitch remains the samebrittle, hurt but plainspoken, unassuming or airy prose. To her credit, Majka has a talent for striking observation. "Four Hills" opens with a brilliant line: "He had the sort of face that made me check for a ring." And "Saint Andrews Hotel" has this somber note: "We fall out of love only to fall in love with a duplicate of what we've left, never understanding that we love what we love and that it doesn't change." Such gemlike sentences come with trade-offs, though. There's little sense of forward movement, and though Majka doesn't rely on tidy endings, avoiding closure for the sake of contemplation makes these stories relatively inert. A stylist to watch but one needing a broader palette of conflicts. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.