Part the Hawser Limn the Sea edition by Dan Lopez Literature Fiction eBooks
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Five fascinating tales linked by the sea. An aging architect must decide to give up his grief, even if it means losing the vestiges of a lover’s memory. An object of erotic fixation galvanizes men against the isolation of exile on a cruise liner. As he watches the disintegration of his picket-fence fantasy, an ex-soldier looks to the sea for absolution. By turns urban and remote, the emotional landscapes navigated in this stunning debut collection offer a bold new meditation on love, loss, and isolation in our precarious present, and make visceral for us the duality of risk and salvation that attend our most passionate attachments.
Part the Hawser Limn the Sea edition by Dan Lopez Literature Fiction eBooks
Dan Lopez's debut collection of short stories, Part the Hawser, Limn the Sea (2014) contains only five brief tales, but they contain poetic dynamite. Each story is but a snapshot, a sliver of the characters' lives often leaving the reader yearning for more because what they have been exposed to is so real and very often very moving. The stories have a few obvious threads which connect the five stories making them appropriate for the same collection. Each story deals with the sea or water. Lopez uses water as an archetype--water being able to cleanse and purify or lead to transfiguration. The tales are about finding one's way through loss, grief, pain, sorrow, and trying to achieve a new balance, a way of coping, if not a better life altogether--assuming the individual even has the will to want that. Another clear line of thought that runs through Lopez's stories is that no one can cope or survive let alone recover from the tragedies of life and move forward without someone else accompanying them on their journey. Ironically, since the water motif is present in every story, John Donne's line, "No man is an island entire of itself," is likely to occur to the reader.In the opening story, "Part the Hawser/Limn the Sea," two very different men (one gay, one straight) who have suffered similar losses meet at a "grief center... sandwiched between the boiler and the garbage chute" in a church basement. The men bond as they grieve and begin to meet apart from the group. A curious poem which no one knows the meaning of painted long ago on a ship's engine room wall and maintained by the seamen as a sort of "mascot" allows the two to share and release their grief as never before. For them, it is a purging and an unexpected moment of intimacy with a fellow traveler, a needed liberation, before they both can move ahead in life. In "Andrew Barbee" a fishing trip brings three men face-to-face. For one it means spending time on the sea with both his current and past lover. For all three the outcome of the trip will determine whether or not their potential future happiness and break with the past can be realized. Set outside of Chicago on one of the Great Lakes, "Coast of Indiana" deals with a man's decision--a decision that will alter his life considerably--if he is willing and able to force himself into a different way of thinking about life, adjusting his need to always be in control, and relating to another. "The Cruise" is Lopez's most erotically charged story and also the most ironic. A young man who helps bring joy and liberation to others cannot do the same for himself. Lopez appears to give the story's ending a bit of ambiguity to allow the reader a sense of hope, but the story remains immersed in tragic overtones. The final story, "Volumes Set against a Twilight Sky" is perhaps the saddest of all of Lopez's stories as a man who has deeply loved, sacrificed, and been a caretaker for a dying partner learns a heart-breaking, painful reality after his partner's death. Only with the help of a friend and, again, a cruise on the ocean, along with some deep rationalization which may or may not be a reflection of the truth does the story's protagonist have a chance to recover from his loss (both the loss of his partner and the relationship he believed they had) and move on.
Lopez's stories are beautifully written, but deceptive. There aren't a lot of dramatic events in the tales (with a couple of notable exceptions) and, true to life, quiet can be the most prevalent atmosphere in which people both surrender themselves to when feeling sorrow as well as that which helps lead to significant revelations. The stories are so brief and the language Lopez utilizes is so concise it often isn't until the reader has finished the story that the full impact of what one has read sinks in and one has the chance to take in all that the story entails and the unique, very human dilemmas contained in each one of them. Part the Hawser, Limn the Sea reveals an already skilled young writer with a vast potential ahead of him.
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Part the Hawser Limn the Sea edition by Dan Lopez Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
This brief collection of stories stayed with me, surfacing at odd moments, when you think you're okay and then you realize that you're totally emotionally wrecked from something you read the night before. That lost feeling, that feeling where you don't know where to place your desire, or how to make any sense of it -- those are the feelings that I like best, and those are the feelings that this book is filled with
The characters are interesting, even complex, yet I couldn't connect with any of them. They were as cold as the waters they ventured.
I enjoyed the book and its characters. In the first story, which gives the book its title, two men attending a grief recovery group, one straight and one gay, establishes a friendship that leads to physical intimacy. I liked how, even though the story is told from the point of view of the straight man, I could relate and understand the reactions of the gay man.
In “Andrew Barbee”, a man goes fishing with his former, older partner and his new, younger one, only to discover, to his dismay, that what (and who) he likes is what everybody else (including his new boy-lover and another boy-seaman) in the fishing boat does. I, again, liked the underlying, untold story, which we can glimpse through the characters’ reactions
The other story that caught my attention was “The Cruise”, where a group of friends discovers there is only one way to leave the cruise, and their lifestyle. It has mystical overtones and a Melvillesque, being-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, feeling. Overall, a very good reading
This slim collection of very loosely connected stories -- the boat motif is all that binds them -- was a bit wooden for my taste. The stories seemed constructed and had little strong voice in them, and yet at the same time we're not plot-driven either, and thus seemed to dither around. Now, at a three-week remove from having read it, only a single character stands out -- the bitchy architect/journal writer whose fear of being abandoned caused him to write pages and pages and pages of journals castigating his long-time boyfriend -- and I didn't like him!
Dan Lopez's debut collection of short stories, Part the Hawser, Limn the Sea (2014) contains only five brief tales, but they contain poetic dynamite. Each story is but a snapshot, a sliver of the characters' lives often leaving the reader yearning for more because what they have been exposed to is so real and very often very moving. The stories have a few obvious threads which connect the five stories making them appropriate for the same collection. Each story deals with the sea or water. Lopez uses water as an archetype--water being able to cleanse and purify or lead to transfiguration. The tales are about finding one's way through loss, grief, pain, sorrow, and trying to achieve a new balance, a way of coping, if not a better life altogether--assuming the individual even has the will to want that. Another clear line of thought that runs through Lopez's stories is that no one can cope or survive let alone recover from the tragedies of life and move forward without someone else accompanying them on their journey. Ironically, since the water motif is present in every story, John Donne's line, "No man is an island entire of itself," is likely to occur to the reader.
In the opening story, "Part the Hawser/Limn the Sea," two very different men (one gay, one straight) who have suffered similar losses meet at a "grief center... sandwiched between the boiler and the garbage chute" in a church basement. The men bond as they grieve and begin to meet apart from the group. A curious poem which no one knows the meaning of painted long ago on a ship's engine room wall and maintained by the seamen as a sort of "mascot" allows the two to share and release their grief as never before. For them, it is a purging and an unexpected moment of intimacy with a fellow traveler, a needed liberation, before they both can move ahead in life. In "Andrew Barbee" a fishing trip brings three men face-to-face. For one it means spending time on the sea with both his current and past lover. For all three the outcome of the trip will determine whether or not their potential future happiness and break with the past can be realized. Set outside of Chicago on one of the Great Lakes, "Coast of Indiana" deals with a man's decision--a decision that will alter his life considerably--if he is willing and able to force himself into a different way of thinking about life, adjusting his need to always be in control, and relating to another. "The Cruise" is Lopez's most erotically charged story and also the most ironic. A young man who helps bring joy and liberation to others cannot do the same for himself. Lopez appears to give the story's ending a bit of ambiguity to allow the reader a sense of hope, but the story remains immersed in tragic overtones. The final story, "Volumes Set against a Twilight Sky" is perhaps the saddest of all of Lopez's stories as a man who has deeply loved, sacrificed, and been a caretaker for a dying partner learns a heart-breaking, painful reality after his partner's death. Only with the help of a friend and, again, a cruise on the ocean, along with some deep rationalization which may or may not be a reflection of the truth does the story's protagonist have a chance to recover from his loss (both the loss of his partner and the relationship he believed they had) and move on.
Lopez's stories are beautifully written, but deceptive. There aren't a lot of dramatic events in the tales (with a couple of notable exceptions) and, true to life, quiet can be the most prevalent atmosphere in which people both surrender themselves to when feeling sorrow as well as that which helps lead to significant revelations. The stories are so brief and the language Lopez utilizes is so concise it often isn't until the reader has finished the story that the full impact of what one has read sinks in and one has the chance to take in all that the story entails and the unique, very human dilemmas contained in each one of them. Part the Hawser, Limn the Sea reveals an already skilled young writer with a vast potential ahead of him.
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