Amy Hempel
Ebook | Pages: 10 pages Rating: 4.3 | 193 Users | 27 Reviews
Details Appertaining To Books In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried
| Title | : | In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried |
| Author | : | Amy Hempel |
| Book Format | : | Ebook |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 10 pages |
| Published | : | 1985 |
| Categories | : | Short Stories. Fiction. Academic. School. Realistic Fiction |
Ilustration During Books In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried
The Language of Grief“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel is a painfully funny/comically sad story about all sorts of emotions that attend to the dying of one’s best friend. Grief, of course. Stages? One is avoidance, akin to denial, which the two friends demonstrate through the near manic level of joking they engage in. And it took her two months for the narrator to visit her friend, as she did not want to see her in this state, of course. And when the doctor tells her to get out of the room in the hospital, she jumps at the chance to go across the road to the beach, to watch young, lean, (healthy) bodies tanning and lusting in the sun. She returns to extend the avoidance through joking around:
"Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons." "Oh, that's good," she said. "A parable." "There's more about the chimp," I said. "But it will break your heart." "No, thanks," she says, and scratches at her mask.
She and her friend tell each other “useless” stuff, focusing on the trivial, such as the fact that it was Bob Dylan’s mother that invented Wite Out, so they can avoid really talking about her dying. And then (devastatingly), though her dying friend arranges to have a bed for her in the room, she tells her she can’t stay, she can’t handle it. This searing honesty is on one level shocking—it’s her best friend, she should not die alone!—and then again, almost freeing; it’s what we want to do, too, in our worst moments, she is us, alas. Who wants to face the death of someone we love? She gets in her car and drives, the wind in her hair; she has escaped!
At the end, after her friend is buried—in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried, and who would care about that trivial detail but someone who (like us!) would prefer to talk about stuff like that rather than the fact that her best friend is dead—she returns to the story of the chimp “that will break your heart,” and then she does; she breaks ours.
Here’s Laura Hurwitz, reading the story on her podcast, The Easy Chair (though she says it took four times for her to get through the ending of the story without breaking down). And yet she also says, it is not a maudlin story, it is honest and human and funny and sad all at once.
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR...
A pdf of the story:
http://fictionaut.com/stories/amy-hem...
I first read Amy Hempel’s much-anthologized story in the eighties, when I took my MFA. We read as examples of The Short Story Now Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel, Laurie Moore and others exhibiting a deeper humanity with concision and humor and grace. All of those writers are known principally for their facility with the short story, but two of those authors named above we associate in part, for good and ill, with their minimalist teacher, Gordon Lish. Imagine the thrill for any young(ish) MFA student in reading a story that was the very first written by a young author in a similar MFA program, a story that catapulted her—yes, with this one story—to international (okay, okay, short story level) fame. Imagine young writers everywhere astonished by the fulfillment of a dream; could it happen to me?
Mention Books As In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Appertaining To Books In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried
Ratings: 4.3 From 193 Users | 27 ReviewsAssess Appertaining To Books In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried
Still hadn't really found her form, but there are intimationsA very moving story, I have read it several times and it brings tears to my eyes each time.
Amy Hempel's In The cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried is a moving story of a woman living through the death of her best friend from a terminal illness. The prose is beautifully written and very moving, and very skillfully shows the emotions she is going through without sappy sentimentality. It is amazing to see how this author packs 400 pages worth of emotion into one short story that takes a half hour to read. Hats off to this author, and I would love to read more of her work.
Amy Hempel is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Brooklyn College. Hempel was a former student of Gordon Lish, who eventually helped her publish her first collection of short stories. Hempel has been published in Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Bomb. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Ambassador Book Award in 2007, the Rea Award for
This is, quite simply, perfect short fiction.
My heart aches.
Amy Hempel is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Brooklyn College. Hempel was a former student of Gordon Lish, who eventually helped her publish her first collection of short stories. Hempel has been published in Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Bomb. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Ambassador Book Award in 2007, the Rea Award for
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