Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation

Auteur(s) : McMillan, Frankie (1950-....)  Voir les notices liées en tant qu'auteur

Titre(s) : My mother and the Hungarians [Texte imprimé] : and other small fictions / Frankie McMillan

Publication : Christchurch (Nouvelle-Zélande) : Canterbury university press, 2016

Description matérielle : 1 vol. (113 p.) ; 21 cm

Comprend : The house on Holloway Street ; You are here ; The piano learns to swim ; The field guide for lost girls ; All it takes is a small mistake ; All it takes is a small mistake, like going too far from the house in winter ; Asking ; The diaspora of boyfriends ; Boarders ; When does a hill become a mountain? ; Falling in love the abseiler repeats the same tricky descent, over and over ; When there is no one there ; The woman who wanted to be a homing pigeon ; Don't move, apartamento ; My sister and Mr Putin ; The things we lose ; "There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences" ; History is an alternating series of frying pans and fires. Do not abandon your clothing in Budapest ; Hand me down ; Everyone has a Stalin story to tell (or not) ; "Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union" ; "The happiest sculptor" ; The marketplace ; The worm as witness ; Small occupations ; Night talk ; First the Russians, then the Jews ; The West opens its arms ; Stopover ; Mostly ; The one who is saved ; It's arm wrestle time again ; On Sundays the Hungarians do not sit in their cars and stare at the sea ; " ... nobody's here, only a blackbird burns its feathers in the distance ..." ; In New Zealand there are many parties to belong to ; The Hungarians roll up their shirt sleeves ; Borders ; No sooner ; Never him ; The happy word ; The Iron Fist, the Iron Curtain, etc. ; " ... and in a flash it seemed all the unliving we had loved were flying overhead ..." ; My mother is becoming a Hungarian ; The world has become bigger than my head can ever hold ; " ... and suddenly across the wall a shadow fell ..." ; Soon the war will be over ; The geography of a name ; After the Hungarians, my mother takes up gardening ; But if in surrender or about to take off ; Notes.

Note(s) : "In this new collection of flash fiction from Frankie MacMillan, family relationships and the experience of refugees in 1950s New Zealand are explored"--Back cover. - Short stories, some previously published. - Includes bibliographical references
A small child permanently loses all sense of direction after she falls out of a tree. Hungarian refugees learn the local idiom: she'll be right; right as rain. The Social Welfare snoops around a boarding house where immigrant men weep for their homelands and a young child misses her father who is only across town. Years later, an adult woman becomes obsessed with Vladimir Putin; another tries over and over to understand the relationship between her mother and the band of refugees who were under her wryly affectionate, and sometimes distracted eye in the 1950s. My mother kept boarders like other people kept chooks or stray dogs. She liked the refugees best with their suitcases, their canvas shoes tied up with string, their boyish faces and willingness to share a bed so that if one woke in the night crying, 'no shoot, no shoot, ' the other could turn and blanket their sorrows with their old European ways. My mother said our house was a little window into the twentieth century and that the cold war would soon be over. In this new collection of flash fiction from Frankie McMillan, family relationships are explored through exaggeration, humour, and surreal eddies of simile and metaphor that broaden the pieces out to look askance at politics, culture and history. Although there are genuinely laugh aloud moments, usually the humour is'clandestine': looking at human vulnerability and oddity, spotlighting miscommunication, yet doing so with fondness and empathy: a delight in all the rough edges between us that proximity can heighten - and yet which intimacy tries to soothe away. Frankie McMillan's small fictions capture disjunctions between child and adult, between cultures, personality types, man and woman. These compressed, often comic capsules of narrative convey a rich sense of family connection and also a child's evolving self-awareness in a fractured, yet still enchanting, world

Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9781927145876. - ISBN 1927145872 (br.)

Identifiant de la notice  : ark:/12148/cb45216509n

Notice n° :  FRBNF45216509 (notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)