Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart (2)

I finished reading Alice Walker’s short story collection waiting in Pearson Airport for our plane to Mexico. I have to say, each story I read in the second half of the book involved one or both of the main characters having an affair. Walker admits that parts of these stories are true. They pertain to the life she had with ‘the husband of her youth.’ Apparently, there was quite a bit of extramarital sex while she was with her husband, on both their parts.

Having just been married myself, I’m not sure how I feel about these stories. They were well written. They were easy to read. Besides the story I mentioned in a previous post, Olive Oil, I don’t know if I really enjoyed any of these stories. I was constantly thinking, how could s/he do that? The repeated affairs just seemed crazy. It was, perhaps, a symptom of a failing marriage. Yet they stayed together for a long time.

It was a good collection. If you like Alice Walker, definitely read it. Just don’t expect the stories to end with the heroine and her hero walking off into the sunset.

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