Shakespeare's Kitchen: Stories Book

I'm having a little trouble lately reading books to completion. I think this is related to my sudden acquisition of a lot of new books (holiday gifts and the like). It's making me feel tugged in too many directions and hopeless about finishing anything. Yet again, obligation has rushed in to save me from myself. This slim volume was our book club's pick for our upcoming January meeting, so I had to dig in and read it. I am not familiar with Lore Segal, but after reading this, I do feel that I might read some of her earlier work.

Shakespeare's Kitchen is a hybrid between a short story collection and a novel. The cast of characters and common settings recur throughout each story, and many of the stories focus on a love triangle among the three main characters: Ilka and Eliza and Leslie Shakespeare. A loose narrative thread binds the stories together.

Segal's third person narration has a gentle touch and seems to really love the characters even when they are engaged in unlovable acts. Despite the tone of the narration, there were times where I just could not like certain characters. Eliza, for example, kept coming across as an unpleasant bitch, and I could not think of her as anything but, even though the gentle narrator assured me that Ilka loved Eliza.

Several of the stories have an element of the bizarre, but it is so cleverly written that it doesn't seem bizarre at all until you give it some thought. I'm specifically thinking of the "reverse bug" with the screaming and the crime wave.

As I was reading, what struck me the most is that this is very much a book about adults. So much of what is popular literary fiction (or so much of what I read) is focused on children or young adults or youth or precocity or coming of age. Segal's characters are firmly ensconced in middle age, and though some of the characters do have children, their parenthood is never their main attribute. I, for one, enjoyed the change of pace, and it wasn't until I read this book that I recognized that I needed it.