SOURCE: A review of In the Fertile Land, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 255–56.

In the following review, Malin explores the existential themes of reality and the past as portrayed in In the Fertile Land.

This collection of stories [In the Fertile Land]—including a novella entitled Distances—is required reading. It informs us in a brilliant, sad manner that we can never describe—or, better yet, capture—the events which happen to us. We can never get the “truth”; we can only interpret incompletely. We are always plagued by distances.

The first story begins strangely: “Yesterday I talked to my father. He stood in my room with his back to the window, facing the bed, his legs slightly apart, his hands behind his back, in the familiar posture. He has been dead for ten years.” We are plunged into a world in which dead...