Luckiest Man in the World

by Randall Silvis

Book Overview

Stories tell of a handyman who overhears a murder plot, a revolutionary who falls asleep on guard duty, a trash man pondering his life, a sidewalk artist, a retired soldier, and a midnight rendezvous. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380699362
• ISBN13: 9780380699360
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Eclectic, somewhat academic, stories

I was led to this by reading Silvis's mystery, "Occasional Hell". The book as a whole was somewhat strained and over the top in places [it featured a hard-boiled ex-PI, now a college professor with a colostomy], but had moments of brilliant prose and observation, as I wrote in my review of that book. I hypothesized that in his short fiction, those moments might dominate. Alas, I was mistaken. The stories that I read had similar oddity of situation, plot or character, and few if any of the lapidary sparkles of prose that made "Occasional Hell" noteworthy. I give the book four stars because the stories are, in their way, engaging, and well done for what they are -- academic, "small magazine" works not intended for a wide audience. I read four of the six stories here. That I read that many, but did not feel like devoting time to fniishing the rest, is indicitive. Pleasant, but like a restaurant dish that serves the purpose of filling up but is not so good as to make one lick the plate, feelings of gluttony and straining belt nothwithstanding. "Trash Man" is about a garbage collector having something like a midlife crisis, for whom "the crisp clarity of the world disappeared." He meditates on the fate of what he hauls, is haunted by his horribly injured assistant Goony, and has a revelation/hallucination/dream in which the universe seems to consist of a giant garbage pit. In "Prayer and Old Jokes" two old friends -- the serious artist Eligio "Ellie" Gutierrez who is reduced to painting velvet Elvises for Tijuana tourists, and gringo liquor store clerk Michael -- go on a trip with Ellie's young brother Carlito, using a racetrack windfall. In Ensenada, they find love .. or at least lust .. nights on the beach, growth and tragedy. The atmosphere is somewhat reminiscent of the film "Amores Perros", a native spin on the debauched tales of American tourists. In a Silvisian twist, the story is tied together by the fantasies of Ellie's senile mother. The viewpoint character of "One Night with a Girl by the Seine" is "Major" Zoya, an aging Russian WWII veteran living in the US with his nearly blind wife Nana, on the bitter edge of poverty. The story is mainly concerned with Zoya's quest for enough funds to buy a cheap pint of vodka, so he can relive in drunken memory his only other experience with a woman, a one night stand with a French girl in liberated Paris who thought he was an American soldier. The surprisingly complex economic calculations of those not concerned with stocks and bonds are well laid out. In "A Walk in the Moonlight" the classic small town loser Eddie Bailey has been arrested for public urination in plain view of the sherrif, and Father MacDonald debates with the amoral but clever town teen sexpot, Eddie's lover Lori, in the confessional.