New Century Reading

Dear Life

Somehow I don't think I'm quite smart enough to really comment on this book. I'm a big fan of Alice Munro, although I sometimes think that I'm not "getting" everything she's conveying. I don't consider that her fault. She's not as difficult on the surface as, say, Virginia Woolf, but the simplicity of her text might be deceptive.

Anyway. I loved this collection. A few years back, Munro made noises about retiring, but apparently she rethought that. As long as she's producing work this good, I'm all for her continued employment.

The title sounds like something saccharine or cloying, like how precious life is, but the title story uses that phrase in a different way, as a young mother senses a threat to her child and snatches her out of harm's way, holding on "for dear life". That's a worthy interpretation of most of these stories, filled with people in decades-ago Canada, trying to find and hold on to what's important, or to cope with the loss of that thing so worth hanging on for dear life.

There are stories that have endings that are ambiguous, some that you see coming but wish you didn't, and yet they're the right endings, even if they're painful. The final four, including the title story, have a preface that notes they are all parts of one larger piece that is "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact."

Munro's style is something I have always admired. She can say so much in so few words, and sometimes with a dry humor:

"When I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter."

Wow. I feel like I've learned so much about this mother-daughter scenario, and it's just one short paragraph.

Munro does sad amazingly well too, without sentimentality or pathos. There are characters in this book who broke my heart. (Don't worry, no spoilers.)

I have to admit I think this is kind of an odd selection for the Tournament of Books. Sadly, I don't think it will progress very far, although it's a wonderful book, but it's not as shiny or likely to be as argued-over (I could be wrong, though) as some of the other finalists. But it also makes me wonder if Munro is ever discussed as a potential Nobel winner. She certainly has brought to life a very specific time and place.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Whoa, Nelly. This is really not a book for people not willing to be challenged to think. Not that the book is an indecipherable read, like, say, Ulysses. No, the short stories in this collection are mostly accessible (there's one written in a more experimental form that was a bit hard to follow), plainly told stories, but the conflicts and issues of ethics they raise will make you ponder.

I haven't read Englander before, so I'm not sure how this compares to his other books. This is very much a collection of pieces about various aspects of Judaism. It can be a microcosm, such as in the title story where two married couples, one much more devout and observant than the other, compare and contrast their lives with intense results. Or it might be a story that's more like a fable, with two women on a lonely mountainside overlooking Palestine, and how over the decades the women and their community evolves and changes and copes with the war that irrevocably shaped their world. It could be a macabre tale, the kind where you start out laughing uneasily and then wonder if laughing was appropriate, that takes place at Camp Sundown, a summer camp for elderly Jews. It's even the surprisingly gentle story of Author, a formerly revered novelist who has poured 12 years into his latest book, only to find the world of literature has passed him by and forgotten him.

It's a slim volume, not a story out of place. Highly recommended. But be prepared to be uncomfortable.

Diving Belles

Diving Belles by Lucy Wood is being compared to Angela Carter, and I'm not getting the connection. This is a collection of stories with magical elements--two kids explore the graveyard where bones of giants make a macabre playground; an elderly woman is given the chance to dive down under the sea to see if she can find her long-missing husband, lured away by merpeople; mysterous hounds roam the moors.

But Carter's stories, at least the ones I've read, have a much darker edge to them, almost hallucinatory at times, and much more gripping. Wood is a talented writer, and she's dead-on in approaching her magical stories by grounding them in as much realistic detail as possible, and beautiful detail at that. But too many of the stories seem to be vignettes rather than fully fleshed out tales. I found myself wanting more actual plot, rather than just evocative descriptions of setting. Occasionally I was frustrated by a story that seemed about to take off, only to end where I thought it was finally beginning.

Not all the stories are like that. The best one in the book is Notes from the House Spirits, told in the plural first person by long-time tenant spirits of a house who collectively remember the house's history and inhabitants. Wood skillfully shows the reader who the human inhabitants are and what their lives are like, even though the narrators themselves don't understand the human condition. The story doesn't necessarily have a lot of plot, but it does have movement, and it's also touching.

This is Wood's first published book, and while I felt it was hit-and-miss, the quality of the writing is such that I'd keep an eye out for her next book. In the meantime, the reminder about Angela Carter inspired me to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: order her collected stories. Halloween is coming soon, after all.

The Bloody Chamber

This was my first foray into the strange, strange world of Angela Carter. I thought it'd make a particularly good Halloween-weekend read, and I was right. 

But let me add: this is a superbly creepy book, the kind of book that, if you're lolling about on a gloomy Sunday afternoon, and you perhaps take a little snooze in between stories, you're likely to have dreams of the most peculiar nature.

Most of these little tales are retellings of fairy tales, including Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood. But as if the original versions of those tales weren't spooky enough, Carter's take on them is hallucinogenic, erotic, full of suspense--sure, you thought you knew how Little Red Riding Hood ended, but with Carter, you might be wrong. Or right--but not in the way you thought you'd be.

For such a short book (126 pages), it's a slow read, in part because I needed to take a break after each story and collect my thoughts (or dream weird dreams) and in part because Carter's writing is so lush and detailed. Sure, I could have skimmed, but to get the full effect, it's necessary to read each word, take your time. And like a good writer, each word contributes to the story, either forwarding the plot or character or setting the scene:

"A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy scent of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications."

Or even something as short as:

"Midwinter--invincible, immaculate."

Not all stories are grim (pun intended); but even the ones with humor, like the retelling of Puss-in-Boots, have a sense of menace throughout, so any laughs are uneasy. Adding to the hallucinatory quality is the occasional crossover of one fairy tale to another, such as when, in the tale about vampires, comes the old Jack and the Beanstalk line, given a new sense of the macabre: "Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman."

Carter even goes so far as to imply what kind of reader would not be touched by these tales:

"And though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror; so he is like the boy in the fairy tale, who does not know how to shudder, and so he is like the boy in the fairy tale, who does not know how to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the Devil himself and all his retinue could do the trick.

"This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero."

What a great line! So perfect for the story, yet with subcontexts outside of the story.

Fortunately, I must have imagination, because stories did make me shudder, and kept me reading. A perfect Halloween accompaniment.

Note: it sounds like Carter herself was an interesting person who died at only 51--way too young. Here's a written eulogy by Salman Rushdie.

 

The Empty Family

I love Colm Toibin. Happily for me, that love wasn't lessened at all by reading his latest collection of stories, The Empty Family. You know how it is; there's an author whose work you fervently admire, book after book, but then, bam, they're suddenly not so good anymore. You're crestfallen. And then you worry about the other authors you fervently admire. When are they going to decline?

I'm not sure Toibin will ever decline, but he certainly hasn't as of yet. This is a wide-ranging collection touching on various aspects of family, including a story about Lady Gregory reflecting back on her life and poetic affairs, and her desire to share the details of her life with Henry James at dinner; an elderly but eminent film set designer returns to the land of her birth (Ireland) for a film and finds her resolve tested by unwelcome memories; two stories set in post-dictator Spain, one about a young gay man finding his way in a brave new world, and the other about a young woman returning to Spain after taking exile in Britain, and the changes time has wrought on both her and her family; and, in what's possibly my favorite story of the collection (The Colour of Shadows), a young gay man returns to his small Irish home town to see after the aunt who raised him, who is sliding away into age and dementia, and who inadvertently says things that could destroy a relationship--but don't, with heartbreaking results.

Toibin is such a clear and distinct writer, elegant, but not self-consciously artsy. His characters all have a certain amount of self-awareness, some of it gained over time. Some of them do hurtful things, for hurtful reasons, while others mean no harm but still inflict it. Home, birthplaces, birthrights, and family are all woven into the subtext of these stories.

Toibin is also an amazing male writer of women. I'm often skeptical about a man writing from a woman's point of view, but he does it several times in this collection, and always believably. There's a fair amount of sadness, but there's also happiness, sometimes hard won, and flat-out relief.

My thanks to Scribner for sending me a review copy of this lovely book.

Boys and Girls Like You and Me

I loved Aryn Kyle's novel The God of Animals, so I was excited to check out her short story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me. I have mixed feelings about this book. Some of the stories are sharp and heartbreaking, like the perfectly paired Femme and Allegiance, about the cruelty girls (and women) can inflict on one another. (The latter story was included in the 2007 Best American Short Stories series.) A story called Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore was incredibly funny, in a very dark way.

But some of the stories felt a bit overcrafted. It didn't surprise me to read that Kyle has an MFA; sometimes you read stories from MFA grads who have workshopped the life out of their very well-written stories. And the overwhelming theme of this book is women who are losers, women who start as cruel high school students or picked-on grade schoolers, who flail uselessly around in college, and later in life have dead-end affairs and no decent personal or professional lives. Not that that's unrealistic, but it is a bit wearying after a while.

So--maybe in smaller doses, read over a longer period of time, I'd've had a better opinion of this book. Kyle writes beautifully, often with a very wry sense of humor that appeals to me. Still, I'll read whatever she publishes next.

Legend of a Suicide

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann is a challenging book to read. It's a collection of five short stories and a novella, all centered around Jim Fenn and his son Roy. Jim is apparently based on Vann's own father, Jim Vann, who killed himself when he was 40. These stories appear to be a way of examining that act--how it came to happen, the impact it had on others, and what might have transpired if things had gone differently, but not any more happily.

The stories are stand-alone and complete within themselves, sometimes telling contradictory versions of the same story. While all are well-written, I found some of them to be almost too well-written--kind of the overdone, MFA-student-crafting-gone-overboard that sometimes causes a story to lose momentum because it's just so carefully and meticulously put together, if that makes sense. The final story, The Higher Blue, feels a bit strained to be arty in a way that distracts from the story overall.

But the novella, Sukkwan Island, is a harrowing, frightening, breathtaking piece of work. I won't give spoilers, but the premise is that Jim, knowing he's a colossal screw-up and reeling from his most recent relationship failure, decides to be a better father by taking 13-year-old Roy to stay on an uninhabited Alaskan island for a year, live off the land by foraging and hunting and fishing. You know from the get-go that this is going to be a disaster, but just how the disaster unfolds, and how the characters end up, is shocking and riveting.

Vann is an intensely atmospheric writer, and setting plays a big role in his storytelling, such as Roy's reaction to being on the Alaskan island with his father:

"Roy stopped in front of their cabin and looked out at the water in a pale U before him that seemed connected to the sky. There was no line at all between them, no horizon. It was impossible to tell where exactly the rain and mist touched down except very close in, at the water's edge. The trees on either side seemed hung in shreds. He walked down to the water, stepping carefully on the wet rounded stones, and heard the rain everywhere, an even sheet of sound erasing all others. It was the only smell, too. Even when it smelled of land or sea, even when Roy caught the scents of what he imagined were ferns and nettles and rotten wood, they seemed only a part of the way the rain smelled. And he was realizing that this was what it would be like, mostly. The clear days they'd had were the oddity. This dense rain, and the world enclosed by it, was what they would know. This would be their home."

Yes, it's a depressing book, and yet still worth reading, especially the novella.

The 15/15/15 Project--day 12

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

I'd read the title story before, but even on a re-read, it's a frightening tale, a first-person account of a woman's downward spiral into insanity. It's also a sharp piece of social commentary for its time, with its pointed commentary about women's "nerves" best being cured by isolation and bedrest, rather than engagement with the world around her and activity, which the narrator repeatedly begs for.

I knew Gilman was a prolific short story writer, but hadn't read any of her other work. This slim volume had an additional six stories. I read them all, and if they're representative of her body of work, I think I know why Yellow Wallpaper stands alone in terms of being remembered decades later. The remaining six stories are preachy, with laboriously structured plots designed to hang Gilman's ideology on.

Not that I disagree with her agenda--women should be independent, educated, equal, support each other, etc.--but even though I frequently reminded myself that these stories must have been shocking in their day, they're awfully dated now and sometimes result in some eye-rolling and frustrated sighs from this gentle reader. None of them are anywhere near as compelling or involving as Wallpaper.

The 15/15/15 Project--day 5

After a few pretty serious days, I decided to lighten up.

Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes. 

Author and illustrator Mark Crick takes 14 recipes and recasts them as stories by famous authors. Jane Austen's heroine Mrs. B--- agonizes over the social etiquette involved in serving Tarragon Eggs; Marcel Proust's narrator is taken down a road of longing and memory when drinking a cappuccino that reminds him of Tiramisu; Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a story of crime and redemption, told via Coq Au Vin; and the Marquis de Sade--well, let's just say it involves Boned Stuffed Poussins.

This isn't a bad little read. Sometime Crick hits his mark, as with his Austen and Marquez imitiations, while other times he misses entirely, as in the cringe-worthy piece which has Virginia Woolf's heroine making Clafoutis Grandmere for a poverty-stricken acquaintance.

Did I expect it to be fantastic? No. I expected a light diversion, with food, and it certainly provided that. The illustrations are an especially nice touch--oddly, though the Woolf text was my least favorite, the Woolf illustration was the best.

Back to serious reading.

The Thing Around Your Neck

It seems lately that I've been talking about books that I'm scared to read, because I so loved the author's previous book that I'm afraid of being disappointed. I was relieved and delighted by Kate Walbert's latest book, A Short History of Women, which overcame the concerns I had after loving Our Kind. But I still approached this book with the same level of trepidation.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of the National Book Critics Circle finalist Half of a Yellow Sun, which ranks way up there on my list of personal favorites. So naturally I was worried when The Thing Around Your Neck appeared. Would I like it as well? And was it even fair to compare them, since the former is a novel, and the new book is a collection of short stories?

Here's the thing. Adichie is a tremendously gifted writer. These short stories are things of beauty. They're stories of Nigerians in America, and in Nigeria, and the cultural clashes that occur on both sides. A group of African writers congregate for a writer's conference where race and gender matter in devastating ways; a young nanny finds herself drawn to the child's mother; a Nigerian emigrant living as an up-and-coming American finds her husband has a mistress back in the home country; and a young woman begins her life as the bride of an arranged marriage.

These are imaginative, deeply textured ideas, but as a whole, they're not as strong as her previous novel. The father in "On Monday of Last Week" teeters dangerously on the edge of stereotype. The second person narration in the title story feels strained. But perhaps the worst thing I can say--and this is something that could also easily be seen as a compliment--is that many of the stories felt compressed, as if they had enough potential to become a novel, but were restrained into the shorter form. The short story is a difficult form to write, and those who do it well (William Trevor, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro) make the story complete, make the length exactly right for what they're doing. In fact, Jhumpa Lahiri's recent collection Unaccustomed Earth accomplished what I think Adichie was trying to do with her book: look at life in America when you're not from America, and life going back and forth between various countries and cultures. But Lahiri's stories were complete in and of themselves, whereas Adichie's feel as if too much has been left out. In particular, the story "The Headstrong Historian" left me frustrated and longing for a full book-length version.

Which is to say, Adichie is a very gifted writer--I may just prefer novels by her to stories.