We So Seldom Look on Love

By Barbara Gowdy

Book Overview

NOW IN PAPERBACK, this masterfully crafted story collection by the author of the internationally best-selling novel "Mister Sandman" is a haunting book that is certain to both disturb and entertain. With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, "We So Seldom Look On Love" explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain, the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, the erotic delusions of a woman who repeatedly exposes her body to an unknown voyeur, or the bizarre predilections of a female necrophile (a story made into the acclaimed motion picture, "Kissed"), Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor. In reviewing the book in the Boston Globe, the novelist Carol Shields wrote, "Barbara Gowdy invites herself, and us, into taboo territory where love and disgust mingle freely. Nothing seems to hold back the narrative flow, not propriety, not politics, not even that ambiguity we once called good taste . . . Gowdy writes about the macabre, but she writes like an angel."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0921051700
• ISBN13: 9780921051701
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Somerville House, USA
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Can necrophilia be heroic? You bet!

If you have ever had romantic yearnings for a corpse, or imagined a prom queen boning ('scuse the pun) some embalmed remains, this books is for you. I have never experienced a mental pathology in a way that made me so wistful and contemplative, so empathetic and receptive and alive. Give it a try! This book will open you petal by petal, to the sun.

Divine

I picked this book up on a whim, and discovered a jewel. The stories humanize those made inhuman by society and its constraints, and at the same time show the deeply ingrained pain they endure due to their differences. For those who enjoy Katherine Dunn's darkness (so stunningly seen in Geek Love), this book should be your next read.

Terrifying and beautiful

Though Sandman and White Bone are also very good, We So Seldom Look on Love is still my favorite. Gowdy somehow reminds me of Flannery O'Conner.

Wow!

I'm not surprised - I knew Gowdy was an artist when I picked up her novel "Falling Angels" by accident. This book of short stories is an incredible and dizzying fall into the world of the bizarre - where everything that is off-the-wall, quirky, and unacceptable, becomes normal, textured, and sprinkled with a bit of reality - though not to the point of being ho-hum. Oh, no! Barbara Gowdy will grab you by the neck and MAKE you admit it's a beautiful world, filled with odd, gorgeous people. I love this author - she is the only writer I've ever known who revels and celebrates the crazy shapes and colours of the human animal.

Five Stars

Five Stars all the way