cover image The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales

The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales

Marilyn Sides. Harmony, $23 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-517-70395-3

Desires of the flesh are symbolized by a variety of objects in the five exquisitely written stories that make up this first collection. The swirling, erotic title tale, a 1990 O. Henry Prize Story, follows C.M. Descotes, a ""rather young woman"" who deals in antique maps, as she travels from Boston to Amsterdam, seeking to acquire two particularly fine illuminated maps. A man catches her attention while she dines alone in a pub, but, with quiet pride, she remains concentrated on business. When he turns out to be the map dealer in whose possession lies the most desirable map she's ever seen, however, business and sexual passion become carnally intertwined. In sophisticated and graceful prose lush with sensual detail, the remaining four stories also describe obsessive romantic attachments. In ""Temporary Tattoos,"" the elaborate marks left on the body wear away far more quickly than the simpler ones left on the heart. ""The Bead Trade"" is a wrenching narrative in which a 46-year-old man, whose whole life has narrowed down to his fascination with beads, falls for a woman whose ""neat and round"" head begs his caresses the way only his beloved beads previously did. The last story, ""The Master of the Pink Glyphs""--at more than 100 pages really a novella--features more gorgeous writing, even if the plot, about a woman searching for emotional restoration while on an archeological dig in Guatemala, gets lost in the jungle. Understated yet fervent, their diverse settings evoked with keenly observed details, the stories in this collection establish Sides as a writer of remarkably beautiful prose. (June)