A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You : Stories (origineel 2000; editie 2001)

I liked these - they were tough and strange and beautiful. ( )

Smart, but not enjoyable. I read the first two and the last and had enough.
And I'm still trying to remember what Bloom I loved enough to grab everything else I could find by her....

I don't even know what I can say about this book to do it justice. Each story was so moving, some left me breathless, others like sharp talons were tearing at my heart. ( )

A blind man can see how much I love you is a set of careful observations of the emotional lives of ordinary people pushed beyond their comfort zone. Among others, there’s a parent coming to terms with her daughter’s sex change; a woman unexpectedly dishing out petty class-based revenge; a lesbian cancer patient finding herself attracted to a male friend, and a woman working through a miscarriage.

These characters are carefully drawn with words and sentences that are precisely sparse enough. Bloom’s language is a tightly focused one, favouring minimalism over quantity as she throws her characters off the deep end. In A blind man… Bloom has penned a series of resolutely crafted stories that successfully pack a film’s worth of emotional developments into a few pages. ( )

In this early collection of short stories, Amy Bloom demonstrates once again her psychological perceptiveness, her humanity, and her ability to say a lot with just a few words but, with a few exceptions, the stories are not as rich and the characters not as fully developed as in her most recent collection,Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Among the best are the title story and the two Lionel and Julia stories, which were also included in the current collection as part of a group of four interconnected stories. Amy Bloom is a psychotherapist who became a writer, and in this book we occasionally see too much of the psychotherapist and not enough of the writer; in her later work, this is not a problem.