Description
Short fiction. The fictional territory of ANOTHER LIFE, this disquieting first collection of stories, is a state of emergency, and for Weihe the emergency is always the same: it is the terrifying possibility that one will be caught, in any instant—as a nocturnal jogger might be caught in the blinding headlights of an oncoming car— without a fully realized life, a life of passion and love, above all.
Edwin Weihe teaches modern literature and directs the Creative Writing Program at Seattle University. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Richard Yates and Kurt Vonnegut, he has been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature and Culture in Aachen, Germany, and Antwerp and Leuven, Belgium, and he has lectured widely in Europe on interdisciplinary topics in literature, philosophy, and art. He teaches a summer abroad course in Paris on the Rise of Modernism, as well as Seattle University’s Writers Workshop in Ireland.
An admiring reader –
Weihe’s stories are a revelation. Edwin Weihe’s Another Life and Other Stories is a remarkable first collection of short fiction. Weihe’s characters find themselves trapped, suffocating in their various situations, yearning, often unconsciously, to chuck it all. Sometimes, they do just that. Despite the desperation they often feel, the characters are always sympathetic, nuanced, sharply drawn. In his title piece, “Another Life,” which is that unusual form, the novella, the narrator is Jack, an American academic attending a Hemingway conference in Paris. Like the famous novelist and the “Lost Generation” crowd of the `20s, the narrator is also an expat, lost from himself. It’s a wonderful work in which the literary history of Paris in the ’20s plays against the narrator’s sense being an exile from his earlier life when a love affair in Paris ended abruptly. The writing is spare, funny, satiric in its treatment of the lit.crit./celeb scene, and finally moving in its understanding of what pushes people to the edge. When a powerhouse feminist critic pronounces the central contention of her scholarship on D.H. Lawrence, namely that Lawrence wasn’t able to bring his wife Frieda to orgasm, you realize Weihe is making a wry comment about the state of literary criticism as well as the essential impotence of male critics in the face of powerful female scholars. The war between the sexes, Weihe’s novella reveals, has its generals and foot soldiers in academia. I highly recommend this fine book for its honesty, understated humor, and for its unwavering gaze at the craziness of our time. When asked by an American newcomer to Paris if he believes in the afterlife, Jack replies, “This is the afterlife.” Yes, it is.