| Title | : | Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1400033829 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781400033829 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1994 |
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger—until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help—and then everything changes.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Reviews
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Every once in a while you read a news story about a recluse who's devoted his life to some miniature: the New York skyline on a grain of rice, Angkor Wat in porcelain. This is how this novel feels to me. (I should note I have no reason to believe that Lorrie Moore is a bearded recluse.) Frog Hospital -- which I love, love, love -- isn't a novel of great inventiveness, or scope, or wisdom. It is a book of breathtaking craft. Moore takes her stock-standard, ever-powerful themes -- innocence and its loss is the biggie -- and renders them in prose so perfect, so buffed and polished, that I want to pick up the sentences, quote them, put them under glass.
Nobody who I've recommended this to has liked it anywhere as much as I do. So, based on historical data, let me offer you a qualified recommendation: read this. You'll enjoy it (it's short, funny, and uncomplicated: hard to hate), but you probably won't think it's all that great. And you'll be wrong. -
Childhood and adolescent friendships are perhaps the most poignant of all. They can leave us with feelings of regret for the persons we used to be, the dreams we once had. Remember how fervent were those desires and hopes for the future? I do. Sharing those yearnings with that one special friend often leads to a deep nostalgia later in life. Those dreams aren’t often realized, particularly to the grand scale we once imagined. I think perhaps this is especially true when one has the desire to escape from a small town in order to get out into the “real” world. This is a wonderfully written story about two such friends, Berie and Sils, as narrated by Berie looking back in time. Those were years of secrets and the sorts of adventures that teen girls found themselves getting into while the parents were often oblivious to the shenanigans… cigarettes, booze and boys. Middle-aged Berie, on a trip to Paris with her husband, revisits those years as she tries to piece together the fragments of her marriage.
“… I’ve felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn’t sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy’s desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog…”
The prose soars in this little book, and the characters are so vivid. You know who these people are through and through. I can’t say whether or not I really liked Berie, either the younger or the older version of her, but I could quite easily envision her and Sils running around town, her disdain for her parents, and her wish to get away from the claustrophobic small town as quickly as was humanly possible for an adolescent girl. With a friendship like this, there is usually one adoring half and the other the more dazzling, popular of the two. Such is the case with these two. Sils was the shiny star and Berie the one with the delayed development, less attractive to boys. What happens when one friend surpasses the other in experiences? It does change the dynamic of a friendship. And when one moves away and the other stays, what does it all mean? Is one better off than the other? A lot of this novel expresses the turmoil of coming to terms with such things.
“What did it mean that she had stayed here, in Horsehearts, in one place, like a tree? Though I knew one’s roots grew deep and steady that way, still, one’s lower limbs could fuse, or die, killed off by one’s own stalwart shade.”
The one complaint I have, and the reason I’m not able to give this a full five stars, is that I didn’t care for being jolted back into the present time with the older Berie. It felt disjointed, and I resented not being left in the past with her and Sils. Lorrie Moore is known for her skill with short stories, and I can see that here. She’s very good at composing sentences and passages, but the flow of a novel, the coherence of such a story, was a little bit lacking for me personally. Her short stories are a must-read for me now. Nevertheless, I loved being immersed in a friendship like this with all its ups and downs, the warmth, the confusion, the angst, and most of all the way in which it brought back fond memories of my own special, youthful friendships. Above all, it made me miss my childhood best friend.
“It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.” -
"Mi infancia no tuvo narrativa; todo era apenas una combinación de aire y falta de aire: esperar que la vida empezara, que el cuerpo creciera, que la mente se volviera temeraria. No había historias ni ideas, no todavía, no realmente".
Ya lo dije en mis comentarios a su libro de cuentos “Pájaros de América”, Moore gusta de exhibir su inteligencia, que es mucha, sus personajes son ingeniosos y profundos, sus diálogos ocurrentes y lúcidos, sus comentarios agudos, y su humor, como igualmente dije allí, claro está, inteligente.“Lo que me gusta es la filosofía –me dijo una vez–. La filosofía es genial. Aunque no me gusta todo el rollo de la Existencia. ¿Existimos? Eso me cabrea. Pero me gusta lo del Bien y el Mal. Me gusta Qué es el Arte. Pero solo un poco de Qué es el Arte. Si te pasas acaba yendo a parar al ¿Existimos?, lo cual me cabrea.”
Pero lo que no dije es que también sabe cómo hacer que sus lectores se sientan inteligentes zambulléndose en esa colorida madeja que tan sabiamente entreteje la autora con hilos de humor y dolor, de ironía y tristeza. Si a todo esto le sumamos un tema tan propio de esta edad en la que me encuentro, ese contraste entre una vida por vivir repleta de posibilidades y una “llena de momentos que tendrían que haber transcurrido de otro modo pero no lo hicieron”, su sutiliza, su melancolía, no puedo más que celebrar muy mucho su lectura.“Mi crueldad hacia ella estaba ya clavada en mi interior como una astilla, donde residiría durante años en mi impotente memoria mientras la piel crecía a su alrededor; ¿qué otra cosa puede hacer la memoria? No puede hacer nada: finge que come la metralla de tus actos, mas no sabe tragar ni masticar.”
Berie Carr y su marido intentan salvar su matrimonio con un viaje a París. Berie tiene que soportar su frustrada vocación de madre, la personalidad infiel de su marido, su maltrato, el aburrimiento, la decadencia… el contexto ideal para echar la vista atrás hacia aquel momento en el que posiblemente fue feliz, aquel momento en el que...“Tenía toda la vida por delante. Tenía paciencia, fe y la cabeza llena de canciones… Una canción era la verdad eterna oculta bajo la superficie de las cosas.”
En la adolescencia se cree en las letras de las canciones, sobre todo si se cantan junto a una amiga como Sils. Berie haría cualquier cosa por su amiga, aunque Sils sea La Cenicienta en un parque de atracciones temático en el que ella misma es simplemente la cajera, aunque Sils tenga ya cuerpo de mujer que oscurece aún más el suyo todavía por desarrollar, aunque Sils permita que los chicos, que solo tenían ojos para ella, irrumpan en sus vidas y disparen contra las ranas a las que ellas intentarán después curar no siempre con éxito (buena metáfora de lo que eran las relaciones hombre-mujer de la época y que todavía no hemos superado totalmente).
En la adolescencia se corren peligros de los que uno no se asusta hasta muchos años después, se odia a los padres que tan mal nos entienden y a veces se odia con razón, se pasa mucho de los hermanos, se fuma a escondidas, se bebe a escondidas, se hacen muchas cosas a escondidas, se experimenta, se busca algo, no se sabe qué, cualquier cosa, pero sobre todo se malgasta una sensación que tanto se echará en falta años más tarde.“Yo anhelaba tener otra vez un sentimiento, uno particular: el de estar acercándome a una habitación pero no haber entrado en ella todavía.”
Maravillosa autora y maravillosa novela. -
"Once I saw a girl who'd been fired the year before driving around town still wearing that pinafore and dress. She was crazy, people said. But they didn't have to say."
There's no better writer of sentences, no funnier cultural being, than Lorrie Moore. The humor here comes, as always, fast and unexpectedly, the left cross of a joke landing while we're focused on the looping right of a plot arc. The main thrust of this novel is fantastic and poignant, as the lead remembers an adolescent year with her best friend (a depiction of female friendship that is fascinating to read after this year's Ferrante fervor). Though short, the book is populated with strong supporting characters who make us fall in love all the more with Berie, as good a teenage protagonist that you can find. The frame narrative, set in Paris, is also excellently written and smart, the story of a 40 year old woman who is estranged from all sorts of things.
My only hesitation is that there is a small mishmash between the two sections, almost like one of those John Lennon Beatles songs where they stick 20 seconds of Paul McCartney noodling at the end. Those noodles are great - it's Paul McCartney! - but they always seem to me to be a bit of extra stuffing that I want to be fleshed out. This is an all time great novella and two-thirds of a really good short-story, stitched together. -
Traté de leer este libro lentamente, para que no se me terminara tan pronto, pero no pude evitar devorarlo. Es una maravilla Lorre Moore, a quien nunca había leído, y sin duda también amé esta traducción, hecha por la maravillosa Inés Garland, quien siento que es como una hermana cósmica de Moore a la hora de traducirla. Algo que me parece hermoso de este libro, es su forma de contar la memoria. No está contando un hecho dramático, o no se mete en el drama de pleno. Está una pareja en crisis, pero esa es solo la entrada y la salida de esta historia, lo demás es la memoria, la amistad, los lazos familiares, el pasado. Sus imágenes son preciosas, su humor es irresistible, sin duda este libro va directo a mis favoritos de este año y de la vida. Léanlo, es una delicia de principio a fin.
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First off, let me say that I adore Moore's short stories. *Adore.* And find her work as a novelist as lacking in real bite or interest as, say, the novels of Ethan Canin, which are some kind of horrible. I read part of this once before and gave up and only picked it up again because someone I esteem loves it.
Hard pressed to explain why this novel so irritated me. It is written beautifully, of course; and the core story--about a seventies girlhood in a small town with the usual coming-of-age hoohah--is well rendered in its specifics. We recognize ourselves in the characters.
But the smallness of the novel, and the disproportionate amount of attention focused on events that remain dully small by the end of the story, feels to me like a literary hangover from the eighties: There was a genre of "literary novels" that shied away from plot or daring contrivances, choosing instead something more realistic. But overdeliberate writing about minutiae is just as contrived, only in a different way.
Bah. At any rate, a lovely and annoying novel. It does have the merit of being awfully short. I can say that much. -
Lorrie Moore's prose is, at just the right moments, lofty and lyrical without ever being pretentious. Yes, it's a coming of age story about the awkwardness of transition, a storyline that's been done over and over and over again, yet never quite like this. Moore makes it seem effortless. She introduces us to Berie and Sils and their small bubble of a universe and 148 pages later we're nostalgic and reminiscent and more than a wee bit sad. I get that this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. I mean hey, not everyone likes or listens to Joni Mitchell, but that doesn't make her any less fantastic to those of us who do.
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2 ½ stars
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is the first book I have read by Lorrie Moore. Apparently it has been eight years since she last published a novel. My sense here is that she simply tried too hard, or perhaps she was shooting for something that she couldn’t quite pull off, because the story – two stories, really – didn’t connect in the way I suspected she wanted them to. Interactions between characters felt disjointed, and the writing often came across as contrived: Earl was Earl Gray, a matrimonial lawyer whom everyone in town called Mr. Tea. Intended to be funny, no doubt. Another example: central character Berie goes with her friend Sils to a new local restaurant for a drink. There was a long salad bar and a big open grill. One was supposed to cook one’s own steak. “Cook your own mistake,” she called it.
I picked the book up because I liked the title, and the blurb inside the cover raves about Lorrie Moore’s previous work. About Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, we read, “Lisa Moore’s special amalgam of comedy and poignancy is at its most brilliant as she explores the subtle bonds that tie friends together…. This is Lorrie Moore’s most moving work to date.” The friendship between the two girls didn’t ring true to me: I never felt “moved”; and any bonding seemed pretty-much unidirectional, for Berie.
In the main storyline, Berie and Sils are fifteen and working at Storyland, an amusement park in upstate New York for the summer in 1972. If anything, the present storyline, with Berie and husband Daniel visiting Paris, unhappy in marriage, was more realistic. Here again, though, in her belittling of his character, are we to feel sympathy that she is with such an oafish and irritating man? He tells some other patrons at a restaurant that they have no children, but that they do have a large gato at home, mixing the Spanish word for “cat” with the French gateau for “cake”. He calls his fallen arches his fallen archness. And so it goes. Moore’s intention is likely to show the contrast between this relationship decades after her more cherished relationship with Sils, which she keeps returning to, shutting out her husband and Paris: Sils was beautiful – her eyes a deep, black-flecked aquamarine, her skin smooth as soap, her hair long and silt-colored but with an oriole yellow streak here and there catching the sun the way a river does. Berie is merely an entrance cashier at the park, whereas Sils plays the role of Cinderella. Berie looks more like twelve, whereas Sils looks old enough to get into bars. Berie is not developed; Sils is. Berie sacrifices her own values to come to Sils’ aid when Sils needs it, but in doing so, she ultimately alienates Sils rather than create a stronger bond.
I did like the part about frogs, though. When they were younger, and the local boys shot frogs in the swamp with their BB guns, allowing them to die slowly, Berie and Sils would use tweezers to try to pull the BB’s out, then they would bandage the half-dead frogs with gauze in an attempt to save them, but it seldom worked. That summer, Sils made a picture of the frogs with her and Berie in the background in the midst of a swamp. In the foreground, next to rocks and lily pads, sat two wounded frogs, one in a splint, one with a bandage tied around its eye: they looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs. The title page shows this picture.
The scene reminded me of my own childhood, when I was about twelve, but in a gravel pit, not a swamp, and it didn’t involve guns. The gravel pit, below our house, was adjacent to the hill I climbed to get home from school. One day I saw a couple of boys killing frogs: they used a big, heavy stick like a baseball bat to whack the poor creatures out into the pit. I yelled at them, but they ignored me. I was a girl, and they were older than me. Some time later, I saw the same scene, with one difference: there was only one boy doing the killing. Somehow that was even worse. I threatened to beat him up if he didn’t quit. He laughed and batted another frog. When I picked up a rock, he took off, still laughing. I yelled, “I’ll get you next time!” but I never saw him again.
Further on in the book, Berie reads about frogs disappearing from the earth; that scientists were saying it’s a warning. I enjoyed how Moore had her protagonist use this: A plague of no frogs. And I thought of those walks up the beach road I’d made any number of times in the sexual evening hum of summer, how called and lovely and desired you felt, how possible, even when you weren’t at all. It was the frogs doing that. Later it seemed true, that I rarely heard frogs anymore.
There was some excellent writing in Frog Hospital, and I do respect the opinion of Goodreads friends about Moore and some of her other works. She is not an author I will dismiss just because of this book. I plan to read some of her short stories.
Birds of America, perhaps? -
Lo leí gracias a mi clase de literatura inglesa, y la verdad es que le encontré el gusto luego de varios días de haberlo leído. Empecé a conectar algunos puntos, a pensarlo con nostalgia, con la magia de la adolescencia, la picardía, los deslices juveniles, cosas que me impresionaron bastante, como descripciones estéticamente bellas y a veces sombrías. Un libro precioso que recomendaría ampliamente.
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Summer of 1972. Small town in upstate New York. Two fifteen-year-old girls who are best friends. They engage in a lot of risky behaviors with shady people. Their lives begin to diverge as one of them gets involved with an older boy and the other gets into brazen thievery.
Having once been a fifteen-year-old girl myself, I really connected with this story. When we're in high school, we feel like the whole wide world is out there waiting for us. Everything is a lark. Anything is possible in our future, and nothing we choose in the moment will have any lasting consequences. We have no doubt that our closest friendships will always remain intact. But adulthood settles heavy on our shoulders and our hearts, and we look back with wonder and puzzlement at who we used to be. -
Somos, en gran parte, lo que elegimos dejar atrás.
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The weather systems in girls' lives and friendships are worthy of serious study. That is the thesis of this perfect book.
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Un matrimonio vencido por la rutina es el punto de inicio del libro de Lorrie Morre, desde París miran con nostalgia las cenizas de lo que fue y nunca volverá. Ella, la esposa, regresa al pasado a evocar los momentos en los que el fuego ardió con mayor pasión, rememora los eventos que la hicieron sentir viva, intentando absorber un poco de esa tibieza.
No son los instantes con su esposo o con otros hombres los que evoca, se sumerge en los recuerdo con Sills, su mejor amiga. Narra Episodios de travesuras, descubrimiento, deseo, desaciertos y estupideces. Retrata la adolescencia y su intensidad negándose a pasar desapercibida.
Es un texto bonito y sutil, todo lo produce con levedad y delicadeza: risas, nostalgia y reflexiones. Dejo por aquí una probadita:
“Hay una mujer de mediana edad que se encuentra con una rana en el bosque.
!Bésame! ¡Besamé! -dice la rana-, y me convertiré en un bello príncipe. La mujer la mira fijo, fascinada, pero no se mueve. ¿Qué pasa? -pregunta la rana, impacientándose-. ¿No quieres un bello príncipe?. Lo siento -dice la mujer-, pero a esta altura de mi vida me interesa más una rana que habla”. -
No voy a parar de hablar de este libro nunca.
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4.5 stars
In Paris we eat brains every night.
So begins Lorrie Moore's sumptuous novel(la) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, a work that's two-thirds girls-coming-of-age-in-the-Nixon-years and one-third a tale of middle-age regret and lost opportunities. That it's compressed into 150 pages (which, when reading, feels much longer, in a good way) imbued throughout with a "you-are-there" feeling, chock-full of memorable lines, is remarkable.
It starts with Benoîte-Marie (Berie) in Paris, traveling with her husband who's there for a lecture series on Tay-Sachs disease. Berie, filled with ennui and second thoughts about her marriage and her life thus far, turns to musing about her childhood in Horsehearts, NY, a tourist town near the Quebec border. Much of the novel centers on Berie's teenage friendship with Silsby Chaussée, their lives spent working at Storyland (a cheesy amusement park) and, armed with fake IDs, hitting up the taverns on the outskirts of town.
It's in these formative years (which kinda have the feel of an SE Hinton novel, but slathered with snarky humor) that we see the groundwork laid for Berie's adulthood.
I suspect many Baby Boomers will eat up the all the 60s-70s references, but this a book with universal accessiblity. With all the layers of sgnificance and beautiful poetic passages, I can easily see this book assigned for a college American Lit (or Women's Studies) curriculum; i can just as easily imagine reading this pool-side on a hot summer day. Really, the only reason I couldn't bring myself to give this five stars was it just didn't quite feel complete. The 60s-70s Berie didn't quite mesh with the "present-day" maritally-dissatisfied Berie. (Perhaps this might be Ms. Moore's intention; or perhaps it's indicative her strength as a short-story writer, where few plotlines are "resolved" with a tidy bow). Regardless, this is a wonderful read, and leaves me excited to read her more recent works. -
Berie Carr is a middle-aged American woman, vacationing in Paris with her husband, their marriage forever on the brink of collapse. She looks back wistfully to her adolescence in upstate New York, particularly the summer of 1972. Then she was 15, working as a ticket collector in an amusement park called Storyland. Her best friend was Sils, a beautiful girl who was popular with all the boys. Together they got up all manner of high-jinks, sneaking cigarettes behind the rides and staying out all night at bars using faking IDs. Things got complicated when Sils became pregnant, and Berie went above and beyond to help her troubled pal. It all led to events that tested their special bond to its limits.
It's quite a melancholic story, this one. Berie is obviously unhappy with her life at present, but even her memories of that eventful summer are tinged with regret. Her friendship with Sils eventually drifted apart and you get that feeling that it still hurts all these years later. There was a loss of innocence as the two of them were forced to grow up fast, and I wonder if Berie would do things differently, were she to relive that era again. It's my first time reading Lorrie Moore after hearing much praise thrown her way. I was a little underwhelmed I must say. I found the themes of the story interesting enough, but I thought her writing was overcomplicated at times, tripping over itself with extravagant wordplay. I wouldn't rule out reading more of her work though, especially if her characters are always this memorable and reflective. -
I could not figure out where in Upstate New York this book was supposed to take place. The name of the town sounded like somewhere out near Elmira, details of the town at times sounded like Saratoga, but other details made the town sounds smaller, and more like a place sort of near Lake George. But then the distances mentioned at the end of the book made none of the earlier distances sounds correct. I'll ignore certain details and place the book as being in Saratoga, and the theme park as being out near where my parents live, and then I will believe that Lorrie Moore only writes books that take place within close proximity to places I have lived. Or not, and instead just face the idea that the book doesn't really take place in any real place and it's an amalgamation of places in upstate New York.
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Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? makes me want to sing in a choir and skip service at the same time.
a novel written from the perspective of a 40-something woman recounting her last summer as the best friend of an underage demigoddess, Lorrie Moore weaves bittersweet nostalgia with the present. (there is no there there.) berrie carr eats parisian brains in an attempt to taste something familiar, she catches up with her rich french-american friend living off french welfare who reminds her of sils, she loves her husband who pushed her down a flight of stairs and who asks her which "aggrandizement" they are in paris.
berrie and sils are like the yin and yang, an amusement park cashier wearing a pinafore to match cinderella's cigarette stained polyester gown. berries lives with her family of strangers, one desolate foster sister, and sils lives with her mom who works at a motel and her brothers who make music in the basement.
they eat salads for breakfast and drink beers at night. they meet at a five-year-old's headstone to smoke cigarettes and wait for sils to say something more. they run away from a man who waves a gun over their naked bodies led in the middle of a dark field.
men ask sils to dance, and berrie stares and thinks they wonder where sils came from. men ask berrie to dance, and sils tilts her head back as her boyfriend nuzzles his mouth into her neck. berrie steals money from the register, sils gets pregnant, and they drive to Vermont with a dwarf cabbie.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? begins with a drawing of a picture of two little girls, and ends with lorrie moore's verbal transference of the transcendence of a Girls Choir "the careful harmonies set loose from our voices so pure and exact and light we wondered later, packing up to leave, how high and fast and far they had gone." (148)
some dog-eared QUOTES:
It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe. (8)
We looked to secret things. We looked to stories and misadventures and mined them for their narcotic ore. We loved to laugh violently, convulsively, no sound actually coming out until suddenly we'd have to gasp in a braying way for breath. (15)
And in this lie I feel close to him, so grateful to him, so full of pity. (48)
... and we burst out laughing, in a stoned, mean way, but he laughed with us, and we all just sat there in the night traffic laughing in the uncontrolled, hysterical way of people who rarely got what they wanted in life though they also didn't try very hard. (59)
"You know those cream puffs called Divorce?" (79) -
En general, I love me some Lorrie Moore. I thought Gate at the Stairs was funny and brilliant. The last story in Birds of America made me cry (Or at least it made me want to cry. I think I was in a good mood when I read it). But this book felt it was written while Moore was watching TV, or else that she dashed off a quick draft and sent it to her editor and it somehow got published, even though it was just a first draft.
It reminded me of when you go to an art gallery, and they have some special show of Picasso pencil drawings that he did as a Youth. And you know you are supposed to be impressed by the artististitude of young Picasso, but really, you're standing there thinking: "Dude. This is a pencil drawing of a box. Even I could do this, and I can't even usually draw a circle that doesn't look like an oval." This book is like Picasso pencil art: lacking in color, details, and, really a point. If you squint, you can see some strains of genius, but really, if you're being honest with yourself, a pencil drawing art exhibition is not worth your time.
But don't worry, Lorrie. I'm not breaking up with you. You didn't commit a Jonathan Safran Foer-like crime of trying to tell me not to eat meat. But in your next book, I hope I don't have to squint quite so hard. -
Otra amiga estupenda
Estoy rodeado de fanáticos de Lorrie Moore, gente que cree que es la última diosa de la literatura universal, y está muy bien que lo piensen. A mí también me gusta pero me cuesta subirme al tren del fanatismo por ella. Tengo otros cielos, otros olimpos.
Esta tribu lorriana me llevó a leer esta novela, la primera de ella para mí. Está muy bien, tiene algunas observaciones que me recordaron al estilo de Seinfeld. Es un libro de hace 30 años y, como habla del aborto y por elevación de la construcción del feminismo en los años 70, es una novela de rabiosa actualidad. Mientras la leía pensaba que cuando la terminara se la iba a pasar a mi sobrina de 18 años. Pero estos no son los únicos temas: la vida de pueblo, el desarrollo personal, la erosión de un largo matrimonio, todo salpimentado con muy buenas escenas y frases y diálogos muy divertidos (como el chiste de la rana que habla que abre un capítulo)
En fin, me gustaron muchas cosas, otras me parecieron un poco too much (las galletitas o masitas "divorce"). Denle tiempo, tarda un poco en arrancar pero cuando levanta vuelo ya no baja. Van cuatro estrellitas porque además de todo es una novela casi universalmente recomendable y si leyeran esta reseña mis amigos me matarían si le pongo menos. -
Me pasó lo mismo la última vez que la leí. Cuesta entrar pero una vez adentro es todo muy confortable.
La protagonista recuerda un momento de su vida y en especial a una persona que fue muy importante. Una amiga que ya no es parte de sus amistades actuales. Ese trabajo sobre el recuerdo es muy lindo. Se siente real la nostalgia y el cariño añejado con el que repasa su memoria.
Me cae bien Lorrie. Su escritura es muy inteligente pero no te deja afuera. Te hace parte del chiste. Comparte sus reflexiones de tal manera que incluye al lector. Sus diálogos son ingeniosos, sus personajes profundos y cercanos.
Dan ganas de tomarse un café con ella para hablar de la vida. -
Ugh, this novel. It somehow does the impossible and portrays both the seeming simplicity of adolescence and the complexity and feeling of loss (whether actual or symbolic) that comes with retrospection. Stories of teenage friendships and youth and coming of age have been told a million times, but I promise Frog Hospital is different.
Somewhere, Moore stated that in discussed relationships of marital intensity, often only traditional marriage is touched upon. However, Frog Hospital reminds the reader that as humans, we are espoused many times throughout a life, and perhaps our true spousal relationship is in fact the least fervid of them all. Here, Berie has three unions: her brother, Claude; her childhood best friend, Sils; and finally, her husband. While Claude and the husband are left on the fringes, Moore writes with incredible accuracy the feverish and overwhelming intensity of a young friendship. We witness this all-consuming bond where Berie’s actions that perhaps border on sacrificial. Contrasted with Berie’s actual marriage, we are left to wonder if Berie at present chose to insulate herself from intimacy; if she learned that no person is faultless; or if she simply acknowledges that her actual marriage is not deserving of the devotion that she selflessly bestowed to Sils.
My only two gripes are this:
1. With choosing first-person narration but also providing two versions of Berie, internal inconsistency is nearly impossible to avoid. At times, I forgot these Beries shared one body. Not that Moore’s use of reflection from Berie doesn’t work, but that at some point off the page and away from the reader, Berie gained interests and semantics that weren’t present in her earlier self, leading to a d
isjointing between Berie (present) and Berie (past).
2. The ending. Frog Hospital is a short book. I don’t think the brevity or the rapid ending weaken Frog Hospital. Simply, I just wanted more.
You might say this novel goes nowhere, or conversely that it goes everywhere. And in both cases, you would be right. Because that’s what life is like, isn’t it -
For some reason I was not aware of Lorrie Moore until I heard about her most recent book “A Gate at the Stairs“. I’m thrilled to have discovered her and I’m looking forward to reading as much as I can from her. “Frog Hospital” is a wander down memory lane. Moore and I are contemporaries so me (and a few billion other boomers) will easily recognize her sense of time. The place was a bit more foreign to me; it almost felt like Canadian though since Minnesota is so close to Canada that’s not too surprising. She writes about two 15 year old girls, best friends, and best friends to the point of there being conscious only of one another. Best friends with an intensity only teenagers can conjure up, to the point that it feels like first love with all it’s sensuality and body awareness, with lots of touching, not in a sexual way however. They chase boys or 20 something men in hopes of that but even when they’re with men they’re really just with one another, complete with a lover and a beloved. Silsby is Cinderalla, literally wearing that costume at the local amusement park, but also for awkward, late to develop Berie. Berie idolizes Silsby from close by. They’ve been friends since childhood so they know one another’s layers; they have a short hand that locks everyone else out. Silsby finds herself in trouble and, as always, naturally accepts Berie’s help. Silsby is used to tributes. This one costs Berie too much. The consequences is they taken apart, left to fend for themselves, without their other half. Humpty dumpty falls (and even puts in an appearance). Years later when they meet again they can’t put him back together again though they try. They’re grown women who’ve grown apart, there’s still love but no commonality except their shared past. I love Moore's tragic sense of humor.
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Exquisito.
Una belleza por cómo escribe y lo que escribe.
Los adultos que escriben como niños que siempre piensan en grande, descubren buena parte de lo que vale la pena contar y leer. El adulto que todavía siente una antigua naturaleza salvaje, no del todo sexual, que tiene más que ver con la aventura y la huida, es el que mejor nos transmite todo.
Lorrie Moore nos cuenta su salir de la preadolescencia/adolescencia/infancia visto desde la época de un matrimonio asentado (no muy bien asentado), "a salvo", y cómo dejamos de ser personas agradables y de rodearnos de personas agradables. Cuenta eso pero nos transmite mucho más que lo que escribe.
¿Qué hacemos con ese pasado, viste desde este presente? ¿Lo llevamos a cuestas o lo amputamos? No se puede hacer ninguna de las dos cosas: vivimos en el medio. -
Impresionante su modo de mirar el pasado.
El humor, la vitalidad y la carga emocional de sus personajes son de verdad inolvidables. Hay párrafos preciosos totales. Primero vez que leo a Lorrie Moore y quiero más. -
"Once I saw a girl who'd been fired the year before driving around town still wearing that pinafore and dress. She was crazy, people said. But they didn't have to say."
There's no better writer of sentences, no funnier cultural being, than Lorrie Moore. The humor here comes, as always, fast and unexpectedly, the left cross of a joke landing while we're focused on the looping right of a plot arc. The main thrust of this novel is fantastic and poignant, as the lead remembers an adolescent year with her best friend (a depiction of female friendship that is fascinating to read after this year's Ferrante fervor). Though short, the book is populated with strong supporting characters who make us fall in love all the more with Berie, as good a teenage protagonist that you can find. The frame narrative, set in Paris, is also excellently written and smart, the story of a 40 year old woman who is estranged from all sorts of things.
My only hesitation is that there is a small mishmash between the two sections, almost like one of those John Lennon Beatles songs where they stick 20 seconds of Paul McCartney noodling at the end. Those noodles are great - it's Paul McCartney! - but they always seem to me to be a bit of extra stuffing that I want to be fleshed out. This is an all time great novella and two-thirds of a really good short-story, stitched together. It left me wanting more. -
Lorrie Moore is quickly becoming one of my favorite literary fiction writers. She has a perfect blend of insight and humor mixed into her writing, a combination that leaves you smiling even as something painful or awkward is happening in the story. While this didn't grab me as much as
A Gate at the Stairs or
Like Life, it was still a pleasure to read. If literary fiction is your thing, definitely check out Moore's books. -
Aunque lo leí en español, me gustó mucho lo inteligente de la narración. Es cortito, rápido de leer y la historia de la adolescencia de la protagonista está muy bien narrada, con harto humor, sarcasmo, y muchas verdades. Es una buena traducción y me dan ganas de conocer más a Lorrie Moore.
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Más allá de la genialidad incuestionable de Lorrie Moore, toda persona que haya tenido un/una Silsby Chaussée en su vida va a atesorar con mucha nostalgia esta historia.
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Bellísimo. Llegué a la última página y tuve que releerla para evitar que se termine.
