Mother of Sorrows

by Richard McCann

Book Overview

In these ten interwoven stories, two adolescent brothers face a world in which their father has suddenly died, a world dominated by their beautiful and complicated mother. Thirty years later, one of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400096219
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Elegant, haunting and beautiful

The book is not a cheery one but it is so beautifully written and memorable that it is one that you will want to share with others after you have read it. The author has pieced together short stories from the last fifteen years which provide a cohesive narrative which reads like a novel. The stories are inner reflections from his life, growing up gay and under the spell of his mother and trying to make connections with his brother and father (who dies when the author is eleven). The brother is gay also but their lives are complete opposites - the author, struggling to come to terms with being gay and living in the closet and his brother, openly gay but living an aimless life filled with drugs and misfortunes. The slim volume is a haunting portrait of a fragile family coming to grips with life, love and loss. It is a book that you won't soon forget.

"When the wind blows, I do not know which slip will be revealed"

Author, Richard McCann has written a powerful story of sibling love and motherly adoration. Told in a series of nine snapshots of short stories that briefly peer into the life of one man, Mother of Sorrows effectively blends the past and present, weaving an exotic tapestry of secrets and truths. The narrator, whose father died when he was eleven, looks back with remembrance and longing at his innocent youth and the strange, intense relationship that he had with his venerated mother and wayward brother. His was a family holding onto the post war innocence, but it was world that he tried to flee in an attempt to create a life of his own. From an early age the narrator had a penchant for feminine beauty. For him, beauty was because beauty was defined as "feminine" and therefore it became hopelessly confused with his mother. Together with his best friend, Denny, they would spent hours in the gloom of his living room dreaming of fabulous prizes and inspecting the secrets of his mothers dresser: "her satin nightgowns and padded brassieres, her triangular cloisonné earrings, her brooch of enameled butterfly wings." Fearful of the repercussions from his father and also from Davis, his brother, our narrator abandons the frocks and frills while also eventually abandoning Denny. But he remains besotted with his mother and admits, "the instinct for survival was what my mother and I had in common - no ideals or principles - absolutely nothing." But it is his relationship with his brother that proves to be the most complex. Davis, fraught with insecurities and hopelessness, is picked up in a public park for gross indecency and struggles with dugs for most of his life. Davis represents those parts of our narrator that were "angry, and desirous, rebellious and sexual and scared." Perhaps the most memorable moment in the novel occurs when Davis propositions our narrator in a Dupont Circle gay bar. He's initially appalled, but also secretly titillated. And when he leaves Davis standing on the sidewalk alone, he realizes that he's afraid that he would see himself reflected in him, "to glimpse those parts of himself he most feared and this repudiated as belonging only to him." McCann soars in scenes that are resonant, poetic and exact, and the visions of gay life in the 60s and 70s remain indelibly imprinted in the readers mind. Our embattled protagonist finds himself living a hedonistic existence in France, Spain, and Morocco. It is here that he meets Eduardo, his one true love, whose language has always been touch "with it's own grammar of pleasure and consolation; it's inflections of sorrow." Our narrator admits that he is trying to tell is and to inform us of his maleness, and to reassure us that he has survived, perhaps without noticeable complexes. This is one of McCann's great strengths, as can meld the past with the present, creating for us a world where the harsh realties of AIDS, alcoholism, drug abuse, and a mother's love are depicted with sta

Unforgettable - something rare and wonderful.

Richard McCann's "Mother of Sorrows" is a unique work of autobiographical fiction rich in emotion and illuminated by a painful, polished prose, breathtaking in its clarity. In ten related stories a nameless narrator recounts episodes from his life that expose his often troubled relations with a brother cast in a role of family black sheep, a doomed father unable to recognize or nurture a gay son with a delicate nature, and an adored, self-absorbed mother of a thousand conflicting temperaments - "Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches," "Our Mother of the Mixed Messages," "Our Mother of Apology." What is most impressive about this slim volume is the author's uncanny ability to cut instantly to the heart of the matter, to the emotional core of a given situation or memory without becoming verbose or maudlin. Not since Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" have we seen writing communicate so much, so succinctly.

Family of Sorrows

Richard McCann has written ten fine short stories here, most of which have been published previously. Having read in a gay anthology the last story here, "The Universe, Concealed," is the reason I bought this slim volume of only 191 pages, proving once again that often less is more. While the stories can be read in any order as each of them stands alone, they are all related, a little like one of those David Hockney photographs where the frames are loosely connected to form one picture. There is the narrator, along with his brother Davis, who is 15 months older than he, and their parents. What makes these tender stories so heart-wrenching is that the family dynamics are completely accurate. I saw glimpses of both my parents and my brother in these characters, the competition between children for their parents' love and approval, the difficulties of growing up, the death of a parent or sibling-- and you don't have to be gay to experience that. The narrator is much taken with his mother, dresses in her clothes as a youngster, wants to spend time only with her, and she says things like he is her best friend, probably not the healthiest attitude for a mother to take. He also wants desperately to please his father but not if it means he has to go fishing with him or search for night crawlers. His father is mildly embarrassed with who his son is. "'He makes me nervous,' I heard my father tell my mother one night as I lay in bed. They were speaking about me." Other passages-- or stories-- ring true as well. The narrator, like so many of us in the 1980's and 1990's, has attended far too many "gay" funerals. It's almost as each of them must be the most unusual but oh, so relevant: "I know what ritual we'll get when we die, I thought each time I looked around the room at the bunch of us, [the narrator is attending a Positive Immunity workshop] the worried unwell. . . It won't be Kaddish. It won't be a funeral pyre on the Ganges. It'll be a boombox playing 'Je Ne Regrette Rien' in the rear of some Unitarian church hung with rainbow flags, like a gay Knights of Columbus hall." (Surely the funeral director who coined the word "cremains" for ashes will burn in hell for that little monstrosity.) There are literally dozens of paragraphs like these in these stories that go straight to the heart. The most moving story-- without revealing what happens-- is "My Brother In The Basement." The narrator perceives that his brother Davis is on a collision course but cannot save him. This story, like many of the others, is to be read again and again. I'm reminded of what William Maxwell said about good literature, that we should enjoy it rather than analyze it. Mr. McCann is is a very fine writer.

A Book to Reread

This is in no way simply "a book of stories" or a "memoir." It is stunning. It's in its own class. Quiet, precise, authoritative; this is an entirely dimensioned life. The narrator's need to document and understand, reflected in the meticulous prose, is heart breaking. The brother is heart breaking. The mother is monumental in her self containment -- you can only gawk at her like a piece of sculpture -- you don't judge her, though clearly she wasn't a "good" mother. If tragedy is contributed to by expectation and loss, then she is in her way tragic. But the word tragedy doesn't touch the atmosphere of the life of this narrator. All events are made to feel inevitable.