This gives his posthumously published stories an added poignancy, an otherworldly echo oddly in tune with his literary ambitions. Harold Brodkey, who died last year, was obsessed with his own orphaned state and with the haunting, multiple voices of the past. There is also something magical, for here is the voice of the author, still speaking after death, reminding us, through its odd persistence, of the mysterious nature of writing. Here is the first paragraph of Jonathan Rosen’s 1997 review:Īll books, once published, live beyond the protective reach of their creators, but there is something particularly lonely about a posthumous book, arriving in the world a true orphan. ♦♦♦ I think it’s telling how Jeffrey Eugenides, in editing his anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, decided to include two of Brodkey’s stories-“ First Love and Other Sorrows,” and “Innocence.” The former was my first Brodkey, and I remember thinking how it was such an oversight that it took me that long to find out about him. Some observations on Harold Brodkey and his last-posthumous, in fact-collection of short stories, The World is the Home of Love and Death. I can see why people prefer characters to have the abstract bodies of conventional references, to be bronze in that sense, and not to be merely real and, forgive me, at sea on a lawn in the moonlight. To propose a reality as story rather than a story as reality might at least remind you what a prior thing experience is.
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