A Quiet Night and a Perfect End: Short Stories

By Denise Roig

The days of which Denise Roig writes in A Quiet Night and a Perfect End are filled with Chinese-cooking lessons, wedding preparations, and day trips to the Laurentian mountains. They're peopled by fundamentalist fishermen, mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, the kind of people who seek quiet nights and perfect ends to the turmoil of their long days and shaky beginnings. In short, these are stories about ordinary people's extraordinary ability to cope with the unexpected tragedies, large and small, that befall everyone.

Roig takes her characters, and her readers, on Munro-like passages through miscarriages, infidelities, and disappointments -- through the motions of everyday life. It may be coping with the feeling of academic failure or coming to terms with the loss of a child who has died too young, an unexpected pregnancy or the intrusion of house guests who are no longer friends. What is uplifting, finally, is the achievement of forgiveness, the small, daily victories over despair. These are stories that remind us why our days and nights are so worth living.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0921833407
• ISBN13: 9780921833406
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

precious kind of sense

In story after story, Roig avoids easy drama and through apparently simple narratives, reaches deep into the human psyche, probing with refreshing delicacy the fragile balance of the human condition. ... What is unbearably precious is always on the verge of slipping out of reach or out of control in Roig's stories. Whether it is the couple in "Tiny Dancer," who move to the country with their 4-year-old degenerating with a terminal disease, or the two mothers who comfort each other at the wedding of their children, the balance of love and incipient loss create a tension that can only be described as exquisite. Roig's first book is endorsed on the back cover by no less than Grace Paley and Audrey Thomas, two contemporary masters of the short story. Although Roig's stories cover similar territory, they are at once more sharply focused than Thomas's and belie a kinder vision than Paley's. ... She avoides the bete noire of first books by keeping the coming-of-age angst to a minimum. Instead, most of these stories focus on distinctly adult dilemmas: the constancy of matrimonial love, the subtle power plays between partners, the unbearable pain of losing a child, physically or metaphorically, and the complex joy of intimacy. At this stage of life, there are few quiet nights and no proospect of a perfect end, but somehow, in Roig's vision of things, that doesn't seem so bad. In fact, it makes a precious kind of sense. Merilyn Simonds, author of The Convict Lover, from review in The Montreal Gazette, January 1996.

exceptional collection

This is an exceptional collection of short stories. I felt compelled to re-read each one immediately upon finishing. A little like discovering Alice Munro for the first time. from Carol Mosher, Double Hook Book Shop, Montreal from Canadian Bookseller, April 1996. #### A Quiet Night and a Perfect End is invested with the kind of compassion for its characters and honesty about their actions that is not just rare but unheard of in a first collection. Joel Yanofsky, reviewer for Quill & Quire, February 1996 "The Best Books of 1995."

A quiet toughness

There's a quiet toughness to the stories in Denise Roig's debut collection, stories that resonate for a long time after initial reading. It's no wonder that Canadian Bookseller magazine said it was like discovering Alice Munro for the first time