Elegy on Kinderklavier

Death is an imminent, lurking presence in this debut collection of seven stories, which explore the confluence of fate and circumstance that places men in situations of anguish and despair. The tales unfold in slow motion with moments of acute sensitivity. “The IED” is a 22-page depiction of the “paroxysms of memory” that a soldier undergoes as he steps on an explosive device. A homeless veteran suffering from PTSD continuously relives his combat experiences in “The Fugue.” Hemenway’s prose is dense and often quite beautiful at the sentence level, but the pacing slows momentum. “In the Mosque of Imam Alwami,” the war in Iraq and the subsequent violent tide of fundamentalism affects the lives of three Kurdish friends in devastating ways. In the heartbreaking title story, Hemenway spares no grim details in depicting the anguish of a father watching his eight-year-old son dying of a glioma on his brain stem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vividly portrayed through the story of the death of a two-year-old burned to death by zealots in “The Territory of Grief,” which takes place in a futuristic town called New Jerusalem, located in the disputed territories and populated only by mourners. In “The Half Moon Martyrs’ Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas” an Army recruiter is blamed for the mortality rate of his town’s soldiers in Iraq. Hemenway’s earnest desire to reflect historical forces that tragically impact individual lives is admirable, but the collection is best read in small doses, and the cumulative effect can be overwhelming. (July)