Elegy on Kinderklavier, a debut collection of stories from Arna Bontemps Hemenway, marks the beginning of a promising career for a gifted young writer whose work has been included in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies.
These remarkable tales circle around absence and loss, often using the Iraq War as a catalyst. In "The Half-Moon Martyrs' Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas," a young woman examines her culpability in a long-since-passed act of cruelty as she remembers the summer her small town turned against the local army recruiter. "The IED," an astounding story in slow motion, examines each nanosecond that follows after a young man steps on a land mine, from his involuntary kinetic and physiological reactions to the flashbacks that reveal the entirety of a life almost lived. In the title story, a father watches his young son lose a battle with brain cancer while his emotional distance from his own wife increases; the story of the couple's relationship pivots around the boy's prize toy, a child-sized keyboard, which never gets played.
Closely observed and elegiac, these stories keep a tight focus on the narrative present, with vivid and sometimes shocking descriptions of the moment their characters' lives are altered. Hemenway pays close attention to physical landscapes--as familiar as Kansas or as exotic as the Middle East--weaving them together so seamlessly that the stories begin to feel otherworldly. This collection is worth reading slowly, paging carefully through each beautiful, lyrical story that captures the disorienting aftermath of loss. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer