This new collection, on the other hand, is a continuation of his life’s work, his obsessive, herculean attempt to capture the complex thought processes of minds both in moments of action and in reflections on those moments decades later. It is natural to hope for a summing up or coda in an author’s swan song, but if it is to be found anywhere in Brodkey’s oeuvre, it is in his memoir. Now, posthumously, comes “The World Is the Home of Love and Death,” Brodkey’s final volume of stories. Thirty years elapsed between the publication of Brodkey’s first collection of stories, “First Love and Other Sorrows,” in 1958 and his hefty second tome, “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode” in 1988. If I had to give up what I’ve written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn’t do it.”
I like what I’ve written, the stories and two novels. Shortly before his death from AIDS in January 1996, Harold Brodkey wrote in his memoir, “This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death,” that “I don’t expect to be understood.
