Seventeen Grams of Soul

by Emilio De Grazia and Emilio Degrazia

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883477077
• ISBN13: 9781883477073
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Lone Oak Press
• Length: 185 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Dignified

Emilio De Grazia writes with poise, panache and elegance on the conflicts between ideal and real, life and death. With great subtlety and wry gallows humor he outlines endings in everyday lives and documents the solitude a principled life necessitates in an age of moral disconnectedness and political apathy. Having had the pleasure of meeting the author in Winona, MN I can attest that the genuine humanity the man exudes in person is present in each of his stories. Have you ever chopped metal with an axe and won? Struck at injustice and lost? De Grazia will take you there.

Reassuring stories about the inevitable.

Like a shawl wrapped snugly to vanquish the chill, a shroud of melancholy can comfort an anguished heart. The author's short stories about death and dying have this analgesic effect. They lift burdens by pointing to inevitability -- the inevitability of people coping with ultimate fates. Surprisingly, they cope well, as probably most of us would. Whether a cancer victim or the survivor who must bear with, few of the characters fall apart. Therefore, we are reassured against our doubts that we, too, can abide the process of dying either as onlooker or star center stage. In the Hemingway short story "My Old Man," sudden death and unpleasant revelation send a son into a despondency and bewildered disbelief readers can feel. A parallel poignancy shades the slower process of Armand's passing in the author's "A Symmetry," The familiar is revealed as a son realizes how much like the father he has become. Many of the other scenes of mortality are treated with a degree of detachment. In fact, another old man found in the author's 12th story declares that dying is "sad" but not a tragedy. While we may not see our own death as a tragedy, the death of anyone close to us surely is. But in making dying seem natural, almost routine, the stories assist in making it more endurable. We are also gladdened by those stories in which strangers or mere acquaintances take an interest in a person dying. For reasons either sympathetic or perverse, that a third party outsider might wonder at the death of another is comforting. Survivors, of course, must carry on; and we are given instruction in that obligation. We watch them struggle for closure or search for new intimacies. Some willingly allow recurring images, even obsessive musings, to intrude upon their thoughts as if they were shields against reality's pain or a balm upon a wound. As you size up these stories you will find that they pull you into that pensive reflection associated with the time between now and an inevit