Blessings on the Sheep Dog

ISBN: 0870744682

Author: Saunders, Gerda

Condition: New

From the violent world of apartheid South Africa to the supposed immigrant haven of the United States, the people in Saunderss debut story collection brave lifes big questions about connection, displacement, death, love, race, and justice. Grappling with feelings too disturbing to articulate, they turn to anthropology or math, music or cosmology, to make sense of the dissonance around them. More often than not, the only truth they find is that life is a complicated dance, and doing the right thing a moment by moment decision.In "Well Get to Now Later" Stan, a guilt-stricken white South African immigrant confronts his apartheid past when he meets a Zulu dancer traveling with a circus in the United States; in "Pig Day" Jared, an American teenager, accidentally kills his best friend Nick, the son of a Romanian immigrant, and is co-opted by the bereaved father to build a coffin; and in "A Sudden New City" Heila, a mentally frail and physically faltering white South African grandmother, drives a tractor into a black crowd as revenge for her husband Jacobs infidelity across the color line.The voices we hear in Saunderss stories are male, female, young, old, American, South African, Romanian. In richly textured prose, they attest to moments as sublime as the music of the spheres or depict images of earth bound brutality bloody as a goats severed head on a pike. In the tradition of Nadine Goridmer and Norman Rush, but with its own sense of comedy and metaphor, Blessings on the Sheep Dog is a wizardly act of ventriloquism to listen to, relish, remember.