Reviews

Chameleon-like, Shacochis assimilates diverse geographic locales and voices in these surprising stories. In ``I Ate Her Heart,'' a wild tall tale set in Texas, a harmonica-playing good-old-boy finds that violence and love may intersect. ``Where Pelham Fell'' is about a diehard Virginia aristocrat who obsessively collects bones from a Civil War battlefield. Contrived diction mars ``The Trapdoor,'' set in an Elizabethan London playhouse. The opener, ``Les Femmes Creoles,'' hilariously yet touchingly limns two old crones who weave romantic rescue fantasies around male intruders on their derelict plantation. Three of the eight tales return to the Caribbean locale that Shacochis musically evoked in his first collection, Easy in the Islands , which won a 1985 American Book Award. The most complex piece here, ``Celebrations of the New World,'' is a zinger. The respective families of a newly married coupletheir roots generically Midwestern and Lebanese-Irish-Mexicanconfront each other in a July Fourth bash; we see America as a seething caldron rather than a melting-pot. These memorable stories capture a sense of the enormous compromises that life forces on us as we lurch toward a clouded future. (Feb.)

Winner of the 1985 American Book Award, Shacochis here presents a Southboth American South and Caribbeanthat is less a geographical place than a metaphor or mystery seen through gauze. Thus, in ``Les Femmes Creoles'' we meet two very old sisters living on an abandoned estate in the Caribbean. Whether their hallucinatory state is due to hunger or madness, whether they actually exist or are spirits, is unclear. Yet Shacochis has entered their souls so deeply that they never fail to hold one's attention. Operating on several symbolic levels, the stories all demand a considerable patience but reward the reader with strange insights and a close glimpse of strange worlds.Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.