"Before the Stars Could Foretell" by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay

"Before the Stars Could Foretell" by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay-শরদিন্দু বন্দোপাধ্যায়-(1998, 6 pages, translated from Bengali by Indrani Chakrabatory)

A War Between Cousins in 1500BC 

A Story Inspired by the Mahabharata Epic

Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (1899-1970, Jaunpurin, Uttar Pradesh, India) is best known for his creation of what some would call the Sherlock Holmes or Father Brown of India, Byomkesh Bakshi.   After graduating from college, he obtained a 
law degree.   He began to publish literary works while in law school.   In 1938 he moved to Calcutta to be a screen writer for the film industry.   By 1958 his works were such best sellers that he became a full time writer.    He is famous for his historical tales set in the Bronze and Iron Age in Northern India.   He drew
on the great epics of Indian literature and gave them a human face.

"Before the Stars Could Foretell" is set in Northern India, around 1500 BC at the time of the Kurukshetra War.    The precise details of this war
are lost to us but Bandyopadhyay does a good job of making it come back to life for us.    As the story opens we meet two very good friends who led an army against their neighbors and defeated them.    They are such good friends that each one wants the other to have the honor of being king of the area the conquered.   They came up with a very interesting way to divide up the ruling of the kingdom.   One friend would start out as king and pass the title to his friend on the next lunar eclipse.  The friend who is not king will act as head of the army.   All goes well in the kingdom for a while until there is a revolt in the southern territories.  The general takes the army to fight  the rebels.  


One of the friends returns with a captured princess.    This infuriates the rebels and they renew their fight.   The general leaves the princess in the care of the king and asks him to instruct her in their language (as of now they cannot speak to each other) as he intends to marry her.   The princess is very intelligent and quickly learns the language.   She argues that it is against their mutual traditions and law to abduct women.   She is told, in a remark that is a commentary on some the still prevailing customs of the area, that there is nothing wrong with abducting a woman if you intend to marry her!


There is an interesting and fun twist at the end I will not spoil  it for potential readers.


This is a well told story.    It is hard to do a short story as historical fiction as you do not have a lot of space and time to set the background but Bandyopathyay does a good job of making the past come to life for us.   


You can read the story HERE

I enjoyed this story and endorse it as an interesting read.  

Mel u

"A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell

"A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell"  (1917, 6 pages)

An Early Classic Feminist Short Story

"A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell (1876 to 1948-Davenport, Iowa, USA) is a classic early 20th century feminist short story.   Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for best dramatic work in 1930.   She was very active in the theater, wrote nine novels (one of which was brought back into print in 1999 by Persephone Press,  Fidelity-The Literary Stew has an excellent post on this novel), and numerous short stories.    (You can read more about her active and interesting life HERE.)   It appears "A Jury of Her Peers" is by far her most still read work.    

"A Jury of Her Peers"  starts of at the home of a married couple, living out in the country.     The sheriff and some of his men (as well as his wife) are at the house as the husband has been founded dead.   It kind of looks like suicide by hanging but the sheriff does not feel right about this so he wants to look around and ask some questions.    The wife of the families nearest neighbor is there.   The sheriff's wife also seems to have know about the woman a bit.   The sheriff is telling the county attorney what he found during his investigation.   He had gone to the house of the murdered man without knowing what happened.   He was just there to suggest to the isolated couple that they get a phone.   He finds the woman to be very distraught and her husband either hung himself somehow or was strangled.    The sheriff  is suspicious of the wife as no one else was around (and of course the spouse is always the first suspect) but he can  find no motive for the killing.   The county attorney says he cannot bring the wife to trial without at least a motive to tell a jury about.     As the wife talks a picture of the husband develops.   He was a harshly dominating man who kept his wife a near captive in her house.   

Here is where the very real fun of this story develops.   I will not spoil what happens next for you.   I really liked the ending a lot.

There are several very good blog posts on this story.

Lakeside Musings has a very interesting and insightful post on what this story has to say about the relationships between men and women in America in the early part of the 19th century.

Free Listens talks about the condescending way in which even well meaning men sometimes treat their wives.   

You can read "A Jury of Her Peers" HERE

I really enjoyed this story.   It is simply and very well written and easy to follow.   It would probably make a good class room story for those 12 and above.   I am glad  I read it and I think most others will be also.

As always I am grateful for any suggestions of short stories I might enjoy.   I also prefer stories I can read online.   This better for me (no libraries!) and better for blog readers.

Mel u

J by Kenzaburo Oe-大江 健三郎

J by Kenzaburo Oe  -大江 健三郎 (1963, 127 pages,  translated by Luk Van Haute)

Link to all my Kenzaburo Oe Posts

Link to all my Posts on Japanese Literature

It has been eight months since I read and posted on Kenzaburo  Oe and that is way too long for me.   Oe (1935-Japan-Nobel Prize 1994) is on my "Read Everything I can List".    J is the 13th of his works I have read so far.   I think this leaves me five or six works still to go (it is my understanding that less than half  of his fiction has so far been translated)   There is background information on Oe in my prior posts for those interested.

J  is one of Oe's first novellas.     Oe is one of the very greatest of living writers in all the world.   Numerous other writers sell many more books than Oe but no Japanese author is as respected.     His image among those who do not really know his work is of an ultra-serious author whose work should be approached only when in a properly reverent state of mind.    His work is a world class treasure and in the right frame of mind it can be a lot of fun.    Oe is shunned in some quarters of Japan for his complete opposition to the militaristic activities and the state of mind that lead the Japanese into WWII.    

J  is a very funny near x-rated book that centers on three men, one sixty, one thirty or so and one eighteen that ride the very crowded Tokyo commuter trains at rush hour wearing nothing but a trench coat and shoes.    They bring themselves to orgasm by rubbing up against women train riders.    J goes into graphic details as to how they do this.    It details the reaction of their victims (not everyone realizes what is going on) and the reaction of others on the train when they become aware of what is going on.   (I guess  this is a world wide issue-there are female only cars on the commuter trains here in Manila)

We get to know the central character J pretty well before he decides to cruise the trains and subways.    There are very openly described sex scenes and descriptions of the nude bodies of young women in J.    It is kind of a boy's fantasy book in that the women in the novel are all beautiful and all eager to have sex with anyone.   J's wife is a film maker.   There is a lot of unconventional sex acts in J, besides the ones on the train.    I think some readers will be put off a little by the ages of the women in the book and the way they are depicted.    Any mention of a woman is sure to be followed by a description of her breasts and her sexual availability.   A lot of the time the women in J sit around naked just because they feel like it.

OK maybe you think J might be fun but what is so profound about a bunch of subway perverts?      Is this how you get the Nobel prize?    Under the weird behavior and sex antics this book is a deep study of aloneness,  transcendence, crowds,  the collapse of values of an old world culture, and it is deeply about how we feel most alive while fixed on that which can destroy us.  

J  might not be liked by a lot of readers for its seeming treatment of women.    It is harsh and portrays some very ugly attitudes.   One woman, who sees what is happening to her on the subway, is described as being so ugly she should be honored to have any kind of male attention.    She has a growth on her head which is so disfiguring that J says the woman should thank him for bothering with her instead of carrying on and screaming like she has been in physically hurt.  J and his two cohorts tell themselves that none of the women are actually hurt, and in their perceptions, some of the women seem to find it quite thrilling.

There are some unanswered questions in the novel.   The biggest one concerns the eighteen year old subway pervert (he sees himself as doing this to seek inspiration for a great poem he will one day write).   I was left wondering whether or not he tossed a very young girl in the path of a train or whether or not he rescued her.   In a very interesting introduction to the book (it comes with another of Oe's early short novels, 17),  Masao Miyoshi  suggests Oe is having fun with the youthful suicidal  heroes in the works of Mishima-I can see this also.)

I have three more Oe books on hand to read and review.   When I complete these I will have read sixteen of his works.    I may do a Reading Life Getting Started with Kenzaburo Oe Guide then.  

J  is out of print but can be found on Amazon.com, sometimes for less than $5.00.  17 is in the same book so it is a fair value.   The print is large and the production value is high.

If you love Oe and do not mind (or if you like it, go for it) r/x rated descriptions of sex then you will for sure like this book.   If you just pick it up  at random to read while on the subway (OK I could not help it) to work, you might at first honestly and fairly ask "what  is so profound about subway perverts?".    I think when you can begin to answer that question, you are on the way to "getting" Oe.  

The next Oe I post on will be 17.    I will also soon begin posting on many short stories by Japanese authors.  I will wait until the Japanese Literature V Challenge begins July 1, 2011 to  begin.      Japanese literature is one of my reading passions and it will be a permanent feature of my blog.    Like my other interests, sometimes it will seem to dominate my blog, sometimes it may seem I have totally moved on.   I have found over the years that new interests deepen my understanding of old ones, they do not end them.



Mel u

Uma Varatharajan-Sri Lanka-"The Advent of the King"

"The Advent of the King" by Uma Varatharajan (2002, 2 pages)

A Parable of the Sri Lankan Civil War

Uma Varatharajan is one of leading contemporary authors of Sri Lanka.   His work is very concerned with the human costs of the Sri Lankan civil war.   The war (1983 to 2009) cost the lives of 1000s of innocent citizens and displaced millions.    It caused a diaspora of much of the more elite elements of the population.   (There is an informative article HERE which provides a good explanation of  the history, causes and terrible effects of the conflict.)

"The Avent of the King" is set in the far distant past of Sri Lanka.   It has two central figures.   One is Uumayan, a simple man whose strongest concern in life is to take care of his elderly mother.   The second is a king who has just triumphed in putting down a revolt on part of the island.   The story is said to be a parable of the last 18 months of the life of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, killed in  a suicide attack.   (The war was partially over what languages should be dominant.)

It is a big day in Uumayan's home town.   The king is coming to announce he is going to have a temple that was destroyed in the war rebuilt.   This is to show his great love for his people.   The war has been over for a while but the memories do not fade.

"The city stood on the banks of the Red River, lined by groves of bamboo, quick to catch fire from the smallest spark borne by the slightest breeze. Though the war had ended three years ago, the sound of trumpeting elephants, neighing horses, the clash of steel and the piteous cries of people could be heard even to this day. The stench of burning bodies still hung suspended in the air. Vultures had abandoned their eyries in the jungles nearby and flocked to the city in the wake of the army and roosted among the giant trees, anticipating another conflict. Blackened walls and houses with their roofs caved in revealed how this once beautiful city was ravaged by war. The silence of the night was disturbed by the constant hooting of birds of evil omen and the howling of dogs. "

As you can see, Varatharajan has a very powerful visually oriented narrative style.

Uumayan can barely speak.   He was beaten by soldiers for the weakest of reasons (he owned a razor which was a crime) and lost his voice in this episode.   All he really cares about in life is taking care of his mother.     He has lost hope of one day having his own family as no potential father in law would permit his daughter to marry a man with little money who can barely speak.   

One day troops come in and take many of the men of the town to jail.   They are to be kept there so they can be released to be an audience for the king's dedication of the new temple.   

As the king speaks, a much needed rain begins to fall.   The king says he has brought the rain for his people.   He asks them what else they would like him to do for them.   The crowd, watched over by the soldiers, sang a song in praise of the king just as they had for other kings.   

The ending of this story is very powerful (somehow it takes on more power with the events of yesterday).

"“I am honoured and flattered to see you here in your thousands to welcome me in spite of the heavy rains. What do you need from me? Speak up!” said the King.

Uumayan once again raised his eyes heavenwards. There was no sign of the rain abating. Rather, forks of lightning flashed and snaked across the sky, followed by loud thunderclaps. The waters swirled and eddied and surged along the earth, creating new watercourses.

“I’ll build you mansions. I’ll order the immediate repair of roads, the restoration of tanks… Do you need stadiums, grain, silk? Ask, I am prepared to give you all these and more, but never…”

Before the King could complete his sentence, a blinding flash of lightning linked earth and sky. Uumayan closed his eyes in fear. When he opened them again and looked at the stage, the king was not there any more, he had vanished mysteriously."

You can read this story in The Little Magazine.   It is in translation from Tamil.

This is my first posting on a work by a Sri Lankan author.    There is a  great tradition in the literature of Sri Lanka (Leonard Woolf was a colonial administrator back in the time when it was part of the British Empire and was known as "Ceylon"-unlike most, he made a deep study of the culture of the country) for short stories.   


I hope those with direct experiences of the matters mentioned in this post will leave a comment.   


I am but in the opening stages of The Reading Life South Asia Short Story Project.   The history of this region is delightfully rich and complicated and is opening up a giant new world of learning and reading for me.   I expect to pursue it as a permanent interest.   I already have links to 100s of short stories by an incredibly diverse range of authors.     As one goes further back in history, there are fewer female authors and the authors  come mainly  affluent families.    Most of the authors whose works I have so far read, are highly educated both formally and through a life long pursuit of the reading life.    


Mel u

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lillian Pizzichini

The  Blue Hour:   A Life of Jean Rhys by Lillian Pizzichini  (2009, 302 pages)


The Wild Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys completely stunned and enthralled me with its sheer beauty when I read it for the first time in January of last year.  (I would welcome any comments on my post on the book.   The biggest issue in the book blog world is whether or not Rhys is fair to Rochester.)


The Wild Sargasso Sea is sort of a prequel to Jane Eyre.   It is the story of the first wife of Edward Rochester, the mad woman in the attic.   I like to know something about the backgrounds of the authors of the books I read, especially of the books that move me as deeply as The Wide Sargasso Sea did.  I have come to rely on Wikipedia as my first resource in learning about authors and it has a good article on Jean Rhys.   There was also some biographical data in the edition of the novel I read.   I wanted to know more and thanks to the biography of Lillian Pizzichini I do.


I do not want to retell much of the life of Rhys here.    It is a tragic heartbreaking story.    Jean had a lot of problems!    I knew that for long period of her life Rhys had lived off the kindness of her admirers, that she worked as a chorus girl and a nude model.   I knew she was a prostitute for a period of her life.   I thought  she must have just met a wealthy man or three  who kept her.   In fact she did meet several wealthy men  who would have been happy to do just that if only Rhys could act half way decent.   Rhys really seems to me to have preferred the excitement and real danger of being a street walker to a comfortable but dull to her life.   The only men she could find any love for were parasitic bad boys.   She drank and drank and then when she remembered where she left the bottle she drank some more.   She wrote four pretty successful novels, had a couple of office jobs during WWII, but she was a sex worker on and off for years.     Sometimes it was with  a baron or such an old chorus girl friend introduced her to over dinner  but a lot of the time it was with a nameless stranger met in the roughest bars in Paris or London.   Rhys could have lived in comfort but she loved the excitement of the bars and the streets.  


I liked the  descriptions in the book of the wild life in Paris among the apaches and the scenes out on the town with Ford Madox Ford.   I was fascinated by Pizzichini's treatment of Ford Madox Ford, one of the lovers of Rhys.   I really liked it when I found out one of the admirers of Rhys was the unpaid English agent for the great Indian writer, Rabindranath Tagore.   Rhys was deeply into the reading life and loved to lose her self in what she read.  


For about 20 years she lived from the marginal earnings of her husbands.   She had a daughter who she did not really have much part in raising.   I think part of Rhys problem was that she saw so deeply into things that so called "normal" people bored her.   She was also supported by other family members.   She was in and out of jail for public drunkenness and brawling (OK she was a mess!).   Then in one magic moment she finds a classified advertisement in the newspaper asking anyone who knows the whereabouts of the author of Jean Rhys to please get in touch with the BBC as they wanted to produce one of her books.   Rhys still has her issues (she was not a quiet drinker-she was given to screaming in the streets etc-if you saw her you would have said "bag lady" and looked away) but long story short she was encouraged by the contacts she made at the BBC to write another novel (it had been twenty years since her last one) and the world was given a great master work, The Wide Sargasso Sea.  


If you want to learn more about Rhys life than you can find on the internet, then The Blue Hour:   A Life of Jean Rhys will suit your purpose.    I must say as a biography it appears that Pizzichini read all the novels and short stories of her subject but most all of her facts, she acknowledges this, pretty much come from an earlier biography of Rhys.   There are also a lot of projections of ideas and feelings into the mind of Rhys that are pure speculation.    It is decently written and a fast read.   As a literary biography, this book is way below the standards set in Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones.   I am glad I read this book but I endorse it only to those really interested in Jean Rhys and even then I would say you probably should first read Jean Rhys:  Life and Work by Carole Angier.   It is from this book that Pizzichini gets her facts though she does have a lot of interesting things to say.   I am glad I read this book.   Most people on Goodreads say it is an OK biography but not at all an original work.   It almost seems exploitive  to write a book this like this  but that is a different question than whether or not it is worth reading.   


It is funny, Rhys had plenty of chances to have a room of her own with steady money but she ran from this to the bars and the after hours clubs to live in seedy hotels.   Maybe she needed this to create.  A lot of 100 best novels or feminist classics lists contain The Wide Sargasso Sea.   Rhys lived from 1890 to 1979, she was 76 when her most famous work was published.    She was approached to speak in conferences and such on feminist causes but she was not at all interested.    Rhys became pretty well off in her final years (she lived to 89) and lots of people who loved her books came to see her but she said it was to late to matter. 


Mel u


  

"Nagapushpam" by Kannan Lakshmi-leading Tamil author

"Nagapushpam" by Kannan Lakshmi (2003, 3 pages)

Female Infanticide

"There is a little-known battle for survival going in some parts of the world. Those at risk are baby girls, and the casualties are in the millions each year. The weapons being used against them are prenatal sex selection, abortion and female infanticide — the systematic killing of girls soon after they are born.

According to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of the World Population Report, these practices, combined with neglect, have resulted in at least 60 million "missing" girls in Asia, creating gender imbalances and other serious problems that experts say will have far reaching consequences for years to come."-from UNESCO 

"Nagapushpan" by Kannan Lakshmi-Chennai, India) is a beautifully told 

story that deals directly with a terrible evil, the practice of female infanticide in India.   An estimated minimum 500,000 female babies are killed at birth (mostly in rural India) every year.    The practice is illegal but no one is arrested for it.  

As the story opens, a young girl from a wealthy family is hiding up in a tree.  She is sulking because she is demanding that nagapushpan flowers be used in a celebratory event her family will soon sponsor.    Her mother tells her this cannot be as once years ago her family brought one of these flowers into the house at it attracted a poisonous snake that killed  a  young female child.   "Naga" means snake and has deep roots in the cosmology and culture of South Asia.   The image of giant snakes are all over the temples of South Asia.   

As the girl gets older she wonders why her parents gave her a name that seem to honor the snake (the naga is most often depicted on temple carvings as a hooded cobra), "Nagapanchami".    One day her mother tells her she is old enough to go with the women to the temple for a special occasion.   There is a lot to be learned in this story about Indian culture.   The scene in the temple had to be very confusing for the girl.   Her mother, her grandmother and many other women are giving ambulations to stone statues of snakes.   The pour milk over them.   They walk around the statues until they  collapse in exhaustion

These snakes have a special function in the lives of all women (no need to get too Freudian!).   I will let the story tell itself.

"The snakes functioned by taking on different forms and shapes. They got into the delicate spinal cord of the newborn Nagaratnas, bent it backward and snapped it, helping the midwife kill the female baby. The snakes transformed themselves into ropes, twined around the neck of the tender, young female infant and strangled her. Or they turned into a large, black rock salt, blocked the mouth of a baby till she struggled for breath and choked to death. They even metamorphosed into fertiliser and finished their mission by poisoning the baby. They changed into various forms. They became ropy dough that was coiled around the lid of the large earthen pitcher to seal off all air. The female infant stuffed inside struggled for breath. Slowly, very slowly indeed, they granted freedom to the female soul that was trapped inside the pitcher and helped the midwife again in snuffing out the young life.

The snakes also entered the bodies of husbands whose wives protested against the killing of their baby daughters and who sobbed and screamed. The snakes made the husbands hiss in fury and spread out their hood. They slithered into the strong, muscular arms of these fathers of tiny daughters, helped them fling their own infants against the walls of the saurighar till the tender young brains spilled out. Snakes and more snakes. Venomous snakes, wherever you looked."

As the story closes, the young girl has grown up and is married.   She recalls her grandmother telling her if a wife does not give her husband a son then there is no point in her living.   

Kannan Lakshmi lives in New Delhi.   She has a Phd in English from Cambridge.   She has taught at several prestigious universities and is a leading advocate of the rights of women in India.   She writes in Tamil (a very old language spoken in parts of southern India and in Sri Lanka-it is also one of the official languages of Singpaore).   She translated this story herself.   She has written numerous novels, short stories and works of non-fiction that have been widely translated.   You can buy collections of her short stories on Amazon.   


This story can be read online HERE.   

Mel u

"Sweet Milk" by Kerala Das-കമലാ സുരയ്യ

"Sweet Milk" by Kamala Das-കമലാ സുരയ്യ-aka Kamala Suraiyya (2003, 3 pages, translated from Malayalam by Sindhu V.  Nair)

Kerala Das (1934 to 2009-Punnayurklam, Malabar District, India) was born  into a sucessful and prominent family.   Her mother was a famous poet, her father was  involved in the marketing of Rolls Royces and Bentleys in all of India.    Her native language was Malayalam, spoken by about 35 million people in southern India.   She also wrote in English but her short stories, which will be her lasting legacy, were in Malayalam.    She also had a weekly newspaper column for many years in which she discussed issues relating to the lives and rights of women.   She wrote about,  at the time,  near forbidden topics such as the sexuality of women.   She was socially and politically active.   At one time she was director of the forestry commission for the Malabar district.  She ran for Parliament and lost.  In 1989 she converted from Hinduisms to Islam.   She changed her name to "Kamala  Suraiyya.     (I have used her prior name in my post in conformity with the usage in the source for the story I read, The Little Magazine.)   Her work has been translated into French, English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and several other South Asian Languages.

"Sweet Milk" is a very moving quite poignant story about a less than storybook marriage that never the less works for both of them.   I guess a lot of marriages wind up like that.   

"At work, he did not think of her at all. They had married, against the wishes of their parents, after a courtship of a year or two. But they never did regret it. Lack of money, the children’s spells of illness — they were often dejected. She became careless of her appearance. To an extent, he lost the ability to laugh.

Still, they loved each other. Their three children also loved them. They were boys. Unni, 10, Balan, 7, and Rajan, 5. Three boys whose faces were always smeared with dirt, who had neither outstanding beauty nor brilliance. But the mother and the father said to each other —

"Unni is always making things. He has a taste for engineering."

"We should make Balan a doctor. See his forehead: such a wide forehead denotes intelligence."

"Rajan is not afraid of the dark. He is smart. He should join the army.""

The story takes a terrible turn.    The man finds his as far as anyone knew perfectly healthy wife dead on the floor of their flat.     Das a very good job in her treatment of the emotions the husband feels, including anger at his wife.   "Sweet Milk" is short, you can read it in two minutes.    It made me wonder what I would feel if left alone in similar circumstances with my three  daughters, even though this is the very last thing I wanted to think about.  

"Sweet Milk" is in the end but a simple story, not a great work of art, not Virginia Woolf , but it did make me see very clearly the humanity in people whose lives are very different from mine.    There is real wisdom in this story.   I will read another one of her stories soon, I hope.

You can read it online at The Little Magazine.    I read it twice, it will stay with me.  

I hope others with experience with the South Asia Short Story will offer their reading suggestions.    For sure there are interesting parallels here with the Irish Short story.     I did yesterday discover a new to me very interesting Irish writer of "weird stories" (he was a big influence on H. P. Lovecraft) and will post on him soon.  

Mel u