Short Stories - June
In which we find out that a thing that started out as a spur-of-the-moment decision has bloomed into a project that has changed me many times over in the past few months. It was really annoying to see my anti-library and to-read list getting longer and longer and then one day I finally had to put my foot down, make a spreadsheet, pin it to the drive, download the first twenty titles that looked promising and say "no more excuses. read the damn thing!"
Not that I am complaining. It's been a consistently wonderful endeavor despite being a bit overwhelming at times. In the sweet month of June, I had the pleasure of reading 11 brilliant stories with one that was slightly longer at 200+ pages. Let's have a look:
The Substance of Martyrs - William Sambrot
⭐⭐⭐
William Sambrot's story takes place in a small German hamlet where the main church has been heavily damaged by allied bombing in WW2. The statue of Christ, however, has miraculously survived. The locals believe that there is something extremely holy about the church and the figure of Christ therein. People from far-off places visit the church hoping for their prayers to be answered. The focal point of the story is the mystique around the statue of Christ and figuring out if it's made of some otherworldly material and possesses unfathomable power.
I'll admit the plot was a bit formulaic but I liked the prose a lot. Sambrot's descriptive style is delightful and it was a light and easy read (yes, sometimes that's all you need!!)
One line summary: A nod to the power of faith featuring a figure of Christ made of something unique.
Year Published: 1963
Recommend? Yes
The Continuity of Parks - Julio Cortázar
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This was a great, concise read. It was so short, in fact, that the entire story was written as one long paragraph yet the prose is so gripping that you hardly notice the wall-of-text style choice. Props to the writer as the title does NOT gives anything away about how the story unfolds.
One line summary: It's like if the python-eating-itself was a story.
Year Published: 1964
Recommend? Yes
The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid - Hamid Tayeb Saleh
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This was my first read from an African author in the short story challenge (I know, I know, there are more to come, I promise!). The prose is beautiful page after page after page. It narrates the story of a small community of otherwise good people suffering from stasis; too removed from the modern world, too attached to their norms and too reluctant to change. I liked that the author is neither too critical of anyone involved nor too adamant about one solution as the cure-all for the dilemmas faced by the village folk. I had a lot to think about after reading this.
One line summary: Can the old exist with the new and if so, how should it be done in the most elegant way so that minimum harm is caused to all the parties involved?
Year Published: 1960
Recommend? Yes
The Foreigner, Sister of The Foreign Woman - Assia Djebar
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We meet Sirin, a woman who was sent along with her sister by Cyrus as gifts to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in Medina. Despite living a good life with kids and a master (the protagonist is a concubine), Sirin misses her home town Alexandria terribly and reminisces about it by singing to the kids in her native language.
This is one of those stories like the James Thurber one I read back in Jan or Clarice Lispector one from May where there is no grand message or a thorny question to mull over. Just snippets of a person's life who lived in a certain time period and you get to immerse yourself in their world. To that end, even as a translated work from French-to-English, the story has retained much of its poeticism.
A reason why I enjoyed reading this so much was because a big part of my early childhood was spent devouring stories from children's magazines and stories of the prophets so this was like revisiting my life as a bookworm between ages of 6-9.
One line summary: You are a concubine settled in a foreign land with your sister but you miss your motherland and reminisce about it in creative ways.
Year Published: 1992
Recommend? Yes
The Lady With The Dog - Anton Chekov
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I mean it's Chekov so you know the storytelling is gonna be straight fire. Gurov is in his mid-30s when he meets Anna, a young woman in her mid-20s, who is visiting a resort town on vacation. Gurov has had multiple flings with other women and thinks Anna would be just another name on the list of his brief-but-passionate romances but soon he realizes that his feelings for Anna run deeper. Since they're both from different cities they soon have to part ways but Gurov can't stop thinking about Anna and decides to pay her a visit.
Now I do realize, while explaining the plot, that it sounds like a run-of-the-mill YA-romance novel but it's not because (1) it was written 125 yrs ago and (2) it does a great job explaining longing, and how feelings can creep up on you and how things are not always so black-and-white.
One line summary: Two people who have feelings for each other despite being in relationships with other people.
Year Published: 1899
Recommend? YES
Men In The Sun - Ghassan Kanafani
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This was a poignant read. It touches on the topic of migrants displaced by apartheid and the harrowing situations they face as they hire people smugglers to transport them to wealthy countries for a better future. There's four characters in the story, three Palestinian migrants and one smuggler who meet in Iraq by chance. The smuggler offers to get them to Kuwait by smuggling them in a water tank but here's the catch: the heat inside the empty tank is devastating as it drives through the desert during daytime (with temps close to 45-50°C) and the journey is longgg.
It's not a light read and it is a polarizing topic but it is also relevant to the plight of thousands in the Middle East, Europe and South America and for that reason alone is worth reading. Like The Things They Carried story from last month, it's not about the politics of war but more about the struggles, hopes and anxieties of ordinary people embarking on an impossible journey.
One line summary: You want what everyone else wants: a shot at a better life but your options are limited and you gotta work with the cards you're dealt with.
Year Published: 1962
Recommend? Yes
Big Mama's Funeral - Gabriel García Marquez
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Marquez's story recounts the last days of a powerful matriarch in the fictional Macondo. He uses lots of exaggerated descriptions to portray the influence and reach of the protagonist and all the baggage that comes with excess wealth: bastard grandchildren, relatives and acquaintances who only care about what they can get out of you, among others. There's also some commentary on how the poor view the wealthy as larger than life, god-like figures and how the rich spend much of their lives maintaining that image. It's like watching an old age Latin-American version of lifestyle inflation minus the self awareness.
One line summary: The power of the traditional affluent class in the old world, the hold it exerts on the underclass and the latter's passive acceptance of it.
Year Published: 1962
Recommend? No
The Cold Equations - Tom Godwin
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The Cold Equations lays down a conflicting premise: what if you're a young, 18 year old girl in some distant future who sneaks on a spaceship to visit her brother on a different planet but the commander of the ship catches you? What if the ship doesn't have enough fuel and they have to jettison you as soon as they find out? This is what the story is about and without inserting any more spoilers, know that it is a 10/10 read and VERY well-written.
One line summary: The commander of a spaceship has to make some tough decisions when he finds a young trespasser aboard the ship whose presence jeopardizes the mission and the lives of the crew.
Year Published: 1954
Recommend? YES
The Moon Moth - Jack Vance
I tried reading 3-4 pages but couldn't really get into it and had to give up.
One line summary: Oh brother, who knows?
Year Published: 1961
Recommend? Did. Not. Finish (DNF)
The Babysitter - Robert Coover
⭐⭐
So, so sick of unwittingly reading alternate realities that give you a headache. The protagonist is a young babysitter who is in the middle of a chaotic evening looking after three young kids. Within the story we meet her boyfriend who drops by with another friend and the creepy houseowner who has these fantasies about raping the babysitter when he catches her alone. It would've been a bit easier-to-follow read had there been some links between the different parts of the story but there aren't and halfway through you're not even sure what is real and what is imaginary.
Yeah, I'm gonna be a hater with this one.
One line summary: It's just fragmented alternate realities jumbled up to tell a story.
Year Published: 2014
Recommend? No
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
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I read like first 20 pages of it years ago and knew it was a Good one so whatever mysterious circumstances brought this 200-page-long "short story" to the to-read list, I just decided to read it now rather than later. It's probably one of the most moving stories I've read this month and for multiple reasons:
(1) it's reminiscent of Greg Egan's excellent short story I read a couple of months ago (2) it's kinda tangential to the research thesis I worked on (3) I gotta be a capital-H Hater to people who bully others for intellectual or physical disabilities so I was on the protagonist's team from the start (4) I could literally predict a few paragraphs before what test batteries they were planning to run on the protagonist and it's exciting when you can predict where the author is going with the plot (5) I cried at three different parts in the last 30 pages.
Tl; Dr: a 32 yr old guy with an IQ of <80 who works at a bakery is offered to go through surgery to increase his intelligence and he very eagerly takes it. Most of the story goes through his experiences before/after the operation as he tries to adjust to a new brain that can now piece together things rapidly but many of the memories are not pleasant at all AND the long-term outcome of the surgery is uncertain.
One line summary: You got some experimental brain surgery done and now life is not the same anymore.
Year Published: 1966
Recommend? With all my heart
A penny for your thoughts?
Reading a lot of heavy stuff about death, disease, poverty, and nihilism does take a toll on you. I ascribe to the taking-things-lightly school of philosophy so sitting down with some of these ideas for a while can sometimes be taxing. Several times after finishing something, I'd have to take myself out on a walk, listen to music or watch something funny before I could come back to my usual self.
It's not always taxing though. For example, one cool thing that has emerged out of all this is the dissipation of the deferential factor: no matter if the writer is Borges or Tagore or Marquez, he's just some guy and it's just some story you're reading at the end of the day.
I tried making a grid style image of all the writers whose works I have loved reading so far and got this as a result:
As for the stats, I've read 80 stories out of the original reading goal (n=200) which translates to 40% of the reading goal. Not shabby considering that you can't just skip sections in fiction unlike some of the non-fic stuff. I'm ok with that and I would hate to do this reading thing like it's a sprint. Let's see how far we get until late December. I'd be giddy with the final tally no matter what number it is.
See you around with more reviews and mildly interesting takes.
Take care!