Books
Harmony of the World
Stories (1984)
In one of the ten unblinkingly truthful stories that make up Harmony of the the World, an elderly Polish piano teacher scolds a morose pupil, "Pain always seems new when you have it." It is Harmony of the World's ambition to make its characters' everyday sufferings—and occasional fragile joysseem utterly unprecedented, even as Baxter reminds us, gently and with a sly comic twist, that everything they feel is only the collateral damage of being human.
Whether describing the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a women visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need and pity in a friendship that had gone on a few decades too long, Harmony of the World enchants the reader with elegant balance and unexpected insights.
Read an excerpt, here on this site
