The Curse of the Appropriate Man

by Lynn Freed

Book Overview

These fourteen short stories, written over the past ten years but never before collected, deal with the struggles between mothers and their wayward daughters, the often preposterous bonds that tie men and women together, and the complex games masters and servants play with one another. In spare, elegant prose, Freed delivers surprise after surprise as she shakes the truth from life. Whether it's her portrayal of a mother mired in senile dementia in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156029944
• ISBN13: 9780156029940
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Freed at her best

Dripping with language distilled down to fire water, Lynn Freed delivers here a collection of brilliant short stories, everyone raw and poignant. Whether the tale of the young woman molested by the traveling knife sharpener or the widow's daughter overwhelmed by the power and allure of her sexuality, or the narrator of the title story struggling with her attraction to all the wrong sort of men, each tale proves crafted with the care for which Freed is famous. As with many of her novels and short stories, each of these deals with issues faced by women, mostly sexual or emotional, that can dog the psyche for life. As with most of her other work, most of these tales take place in Freed's native South Africa, a world in which she is both conflicted and achingly familiar. Yet it is not the milieu from which they derive their power, though her every detail stands as both telling and artfully selected. Instead the great power of Freed's work comes from her characters, each crafted as if by a sculpture, expert in his tools, chipping away every bit of excess to reveal the art within.

secrets and confessions

Lynn Freed's collection of short stories "The Curse of the Appropriate Man" reads as though one is sitting in a room with many women and each one is offering her confession, a deep secret, which is meant only for you, the reader. Only you will understand and not judge. Only you can be trusted. As such, it reads with great honesty and there is nothing I enjoy more in writing than honesty. The most striking of the stories for me is "The Widow's Daughter"--a tale of a beautiful girl whose mother refuses to pay a dowry for her daughter. The awful, lecherous father dead, the two women are left to make their way. It seems the mother always used the daughter to gain favor and continues to do so even after the death of her husband, the mother, thus marginalizing her daughter, seeing her not as a human being but as an object. As such, she starts to look at her daughter through the eyes of a man. In the end the two women are left alone as they were in the beginning. Their future is uncertain, though Irma, believes the writing is on the wall--that she will escape. Freed's stories are masterful in their simplicity. There is nothing superfluous and "The Curse of the Appropriate Man" is a smooth and elegant collection, pulling together many cultures, many times, many places, yet leaving the reader feeling as though she has heard one consistent song--that of a woman looking for her place in the world.

Don't judge the book by its cover or by Freed's novelist career

Freed, an accomplished novelist, has released a collection of 14 stories which were written over the course of two decades and were previously unpublished. At its core, this collection is about the secret desires (or compulsions, if you prefer that terminology) of women. These desires influence the actions that define the lives of women, from a curious pre-adolescent engaging in sexual relations in the basement of her family home, to paralyzing confusion and homesickness of a high school exchange student, to a complex web of family shadows, and to an abusive relationship between two lesbians. The novel's beautiful cover and subtle prose are wrapped around a core content which is quite erotic and unconventional, in the manner of alternative lifestyles. It's nothing like the smarmy love stories I expected to read, so from that angle, it was refreshing. While I did enjoy reading these stories, they aren't without their flaws, and this book doesn't make it on to my "must-read" list. If you are intrigued by my description, though, it is most likely perfect for you.

One sentence propels this from 4 to 5 stars

At last, a collection of stories from the preeminent female novelist of our day. Freed is an author who goes straight into the world's landscapes, both interior and exterior. You can have your Morrisons and your Smileys and your Gordimers, Lynn Freed is the most fearless contemporary female writer at work today. In any language. And this book serves as proof. Make no mistake, Freed is a better novelist than short story writer, and there are one or two stories in this collection that don't live up to the rest. However, those stories would be flagships in any one else's collection. So as I prepared to award four stars to this collection, I looked the book over again and came across a line in the story "An Error of Desire" that made it obvious why this is a five-star book: "There is love and there is desire, I thought, and for all the world they look the same until all the desire is spent." Freed is a writer with a rare brilliance that shows itself in her humor, her syntax, and her understanding of the devil and the saint in each of us.