"Year's End" by Jhumpa Lahiri (from The New Yorker, December 24, 2007)

My Posts on Jhumpa Lahiri

Since beginning my blo log in July 2009 I have read and posted on eight short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri as well as her recent excellant novel, Lowlands.  Most of her work focuses on highly educated India emigrants living in America, often in Boston or New York City.  Her work deals with the difficulty of maintaining one's cultural identity while striving for material success in a new country.  Often her work centers on the children of first generation emigrants. 

I was very happy to find in the recently and temporarily opened archives of The New Yorker a story by Lahiri I had not yet read.  "Year's End" easily lived uo to my high expectations.  The narrator is a college student attending Swathmore, an elite college.  His father emigrated from Bombay along with his mother.  He was born in The U. S.  His mother died just a few years after he was born and he can hardly recall her.  One day he gets a call from his father,fifty-five and a successful businessman, letting him know he is back from a family visit to India. The father shocks him by telling him that he has remarried and his new wife and her two young daughters are with him. The marriage was arranged by his family, just as that of his parents was.  The father tries to say his family coerced him into it but the son knows nothing would have happened had he not wanted it.  His new step mother, a widow, is twenty years younger than his father and has brought her two young daughters with her.  Christmas is coming soon and the father wants to be sure his son, an only child, will be home.  Of course the son is shocked.

Meeting your new step-mother and much younger step sisters is a a very emotional minefield for the son.  He tries hard not to hold this against his father,not  to see it as a betrayal of his mother.  He tries to see the girls as his sisters and it is clear they desperately want him as a big brother.  He ends up taking revenge on them in a heartbreaking way.

"Year's End" is a very rich, subtle highly nuanced story.  I have deliberately left out the just overwhelming second half of the story.  

You can read this story here, as long as the archives are kept open.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/years-end

Mel u

"The Pura Principle" by Junot Diaz (March 22, 2010, in The New Yorker)

If you are a fan of the short stories of Junot Diaz, you will be happy to know that several of his stories are now available in the open to the public for the summer archives of The New Yorker.   

A couple of days ago I posted on his story "The Cheater's Guide to Love".  Like that story, "The Pura Principle" is set among emigrants from The Dominican Republic living in the New York City area.  You have to be tough to survive in the world of the stories of Diaz.  Father's abandon their families for much younger women, people smoke a lot of marihuana and drink a lot,  mothers tend to run and hold the family together.  A young man's dominant motivation is the continuous pursuit of women, often called "putas".  Of course a Dominican man's best love is his mother, which does not mean he won't take advantage of her.  If a Domincan girl won't have sex with her boyfriend it means she is a bitch trying to act like a white girl, if she does then the boy's mother will see her as a whore out to trap her angel.  Dominican women are known to have large rear ends and the stories make constant sexual refrences to this.

"The Pura Principle" plays all this out.  A woman whose husband left years ago for a young "puta" supports two late teenage early twenty year old sons.  She is very dedicated to the Catholic Church. One is not a bad kid, goes to college and the other runs the streets.  The bad one is diagnosed with Leukemia and everything changes.  He goes through chemo, loses a lot of his hair and his strength.  He is supposed to stay home but he goes stir crazy.  He meets a Dominican girl named Pura.  The two sons were born in the USA so they can get a permanent visa for a Dominican wife and eventually citizenship.  You can get a good feel for the prose style of Diaz in the morher's reaction to Pura:

"Pura, man, was another story. For some reason, Pura brought it out in Mami. Right from the beginning it was clear that Mami did not like this girl. It wasn’t just that Pura was mad obvious about the paper thing, dropping hints non-stop about her immigration status—how her life would be so much better, how her son’s life would be so much better, how she would finally be able to visit her poor mother and her other son in Las Matas, if only she had papers. Mami had dealt with paper bitches before, and she never got this pissy. Something about Pura’s face, her timing, her personality, just drove Mami batshit. Felt real personal. Or maybe Mami had a presentiment of what was to come."

This story takes place in a very macho culture.  Violence, especially within the family, is always a risk.  This is a fun story to read.

I hope to read more Diaz stories from the archives, which are only open for the summer.

You can read it here 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/22/the-pura-principle

Please share your experiences with the work of Junot Diaz with us.

My Post on "Miss Lorna" contains background information on Diaz

"Midnight in Dostoevsky" by Don Delillo (November 30, 2009, The New Yorker)

I am having a great time rummaging through the Archives of The New Yorker, reading for free stories by world famous writers.  Some of the authors I have read have been very familiar to be, like Roberto Bolano and Jhumpa Lahiri.  Others are new to me writers, like Don Delillo (USA, 1936, author of Underworld, White Noise and numerous other highly regarded works.  He has also published a lot of short stories.  

"Midnight in Dostoevsky" is set on a college campus in the U.S. It is located in a very small town.  It is a very interesting story centering on the ruminations of two male college friends as they go on walks.  They minutely pick apart everything they see and each other.  They begin to observe a man in his middle seventies who also walks.  They wonder who he is, where he is firm and how he ended up living in a college town.  We are also there as they attend a class taught by a fifty or so year old professor, the kind of teacher who scared undergraduates (Imagine Ford Madox Ford teaching at Olivet College in Michigan or Vladimar Nabakov at Cornell).  There is a girl in the class that ran into the professor  at a restaurant  and had dinner with him.  He was carrying a book by Dostoevsky and told her he  read him "all the time ".  The boys decide the older man must be the son of the professor, at first they think he must be Russian then they decide maybe Albanian or Lituanian.  

A very shocking hard to understand event happens at the end of the story.

This is a very interesting story on lots of levels.

You can read it here this summer only.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/30/midnight-in-dostoevsky?currentPage=all

Here is the narrator's description of the professor

"What did he mean by “things”? We would probably never know. Were we too passive, too accepting of the man? Did we see dysfunction and call it an inspired form of intellect? We didn’t want to like him, only to believe in him. We tendered our deepest trust to the stark nature of his methodology. Of course, there was no methodology. There was only Ilgauskas. He challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false. Isn’t this what great teachers do, the Zen masters and Brahman scholars?"

Mel u

Two Short Stories by Spanish Authors in Best European Fiction 2013

If you want a sense of what is going on in the short story in Europe you would be hard pressed to find a better source than the Best of European Fiction series published annually  since 2011. I recently posted on a very interesting story by a Spanish author from the forthcoming in October Best European Fiction 2015.  Today I want to talk briefly about the two stories by authors from Spain in Best European Fiction 2013 (all volumes published by Dalkey Archives).

"Pirpo and Chamberlain, Murderers" by Bernardo Atxaya starts in the Basque region of Spain around 1935.  Pirpo and Chamberlain were killers for hire, having, as they repeat numerous times, "carte Blanche" to do what ever they want in the largely lawless Pyrenees Mountain Region of Spain.  They also smuggle people out of Spain into France, or kind of do.  What they often did, collecting the money up front, was to walk people up into the mountains and the tell them they were in France even though they were not.  Big trouble for them comes when a maid tips of Pirpo, depicted as a great ladies' man while Chamberlain spends his earnings in brothels, that a rich couple wants to smuggle them into France and that they will be carrying a fortune in gems.  I won't spoil the ending.  The story was a lot of fun to read and I did feel transported back in time to Basque Spain in the 1930s.

Bernardo Atxaga 

Bernardo Atxaga (Joseba Irazu Garmendia, Asteasu, Guipúzcoa, 1951) belongs to the group of young Basque writers that began publishing in his mother language, Euskera, in the Seventies. Graduated in Economics for the Bilbao University, he later studied Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.  You can learn much more about him on his webpage.

http://www.atxaga.org/

"The Mercury of the Thermometers" by Eloy Tizon is an interesting story about a younger family members making a duty visit to an elderly widowed aunt who lives alone above a pharmacy.  She only goes out to shop and attend mass.  The story revolves around the differences concerning how the young people perceive their aunt's life to have been and what it really was.  The perceptions are interesting and the story is psychologically perceptive.

 

"The Cheater's Guide to Love" by Junot Diaz (from The New Yorker, July23, 2012)

My Post on "Miss Lorna"

I have previously read and posted on an excellant short story by Junot Diaz, "Miss Lorna".  Prior to starting my blog I read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Pao and his first collection of short stories, Drowned.  I hope to read his very well reviewed second collection, This is How You Lose Her one of these days.

"The Cheater's Guide to Love", from the archives of The New Yorker, centers on a Harvard Professor and author from The Domincan Republic and his romantic issues.  A reductionist approach to the writings of Diaz could summarize his work as "man from the Domincan Republic living in New York City or Boston adjusting to society while constantly looking for women to have sex with".  

I think I liked "The Cheater's Guide to Love" more than his novel or other stories I have read.  It is about obsessive love, about the consequences of adultery, about machismo, Dominican culture, about objectifying women, about male bonding all while teaching at Harvard.  The narrator faces racial prejuduce all the time in Boston, of the crudest sort.  When he tries to enter buildings at Harvard security demands to see his ID but lets in others with no checks.  

This is an excellant story and I thank The New Yorker for letting us read it for free this summer.

You can read the story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/the-cheaters-guide-to-love

Mel u

The Meaning of the Reading Life

A young woman in Gaza searches through the ruins of her house for her precious books.

This is not meant as a political statement at all.  

To me when I see the horrors of war and greed found everywhere in the world I think what a much better place the world would be if world leaders in all areas had the priorities of this young woman.

Mel u

"Big Week" by Zadie Smith (Paris Review, Issue 209, Summer, 2014)

My post on "Miss Adele Among the Corsets" by Zadie Smith

I was very happy to see The Paris Review has generously allowed non-subscribers to read online a story by Zadie Smith (UK, 1975) in the just published Summer of 2014 issue.  In the Spring 2014 issue they published a wonderful story by Smith about a performer in a transvestite show, "Miss Adele Among the  Corsets" which I greatly enjoyed.  

"Big Week" is a very moving and insightful story focusing on a fifty six year old ex-Boston policeman of Irish parentage.  He works as a bartender and drives a limo sometimes.   He has three grown sons.  He talks about how one has a Korean girlfriend, one is married to an African American woman, and one is currently without a girlfriend but he jokingly says maybe he will round things out by hooking up with a Chinese woman.  He is getting divorced butthe tells his son his thirty years with his wife was the greatest part of his life.  

The story has a kind of second half when he picks up a woman from Uganda at the airport, in Boston to speak at a conference on architecture.  You can tell the woman is not really interested in talking to him but he goes on anyway to his captive audience.  You can see his is trying hard to force his spirits up, his divorce is this week.  We learn the pathetically sad reason he lost his job and his police pension.

This is an excellant story.  I have a copy of her novel NW and hope to read it soon.

You can read "Big Week" at this link

http://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/6315/big-week-zadie-smith

Mel u

The Human Beast by Emile Zola (1890)

My Posts on Zola

The Human Beast is the seventeenth of twenty works in Emile Zola's grand Rougon Macquart Cycle.  It centers on the railroads of France and Zola's conception of heriditary mental degeneracy playing it self out  through successive generations of a family.  

There are three central characters in The Human Beast.  Jacques Lantier, the son of Gervaise Lantier from The Dram Shop and the brother of Etienne from Germinal works as a locomotive engine driver.  The other two central characters are a deputy station master and his wife.  The station master thinks years ago his wife had an affair with a director of the rail road and that she used that relationship to get him his good job.  Jacques loves his locomotive, calling it "La Lison".  Zola does a wonderful job describing how it feels to control the train, at that time the most powerful man made thing in the world.  We go along as he races through France.   

Murders play a central part in the story.  Jacques develops a driving passion for killing women while having sex with him.  This is depicted as caused by his depraved  ancestory.  

The best by far scenes  in the book were of a terrible train wreck in which many are killed.  We also are there when the train is stuck in snow in another very good scene.  Zola in a very interesting remark says in situations like this only the American passengers get out and help shovel snow.

I really liked the portions of the book set on the train and learning about the railroad business.  The romantic intrigues did not grab me that much.  

Three to go!  

Mel u

"Sarrasine" by Honore de Balzac (1830, A Short Story Component of La Comedie Humaine)

My Posts on Balzac

I guess  people liked stories about scandals among the rich as much in 1830 as they do now, especially ones with a touch of sexual scandal.

"Sarrasine", translated by Clara Bell, is set in Paris and is the tellings of conversations the narrator heard at a party in the grand mansion of the de Lanty family.  No one seemed to know the origins of their fortune, or at least those who did kept discrete.  Their parties were near the height of high fashion.  The narrator hears a number of stories.  The dominant one turns out to be about the relationship a sculptures to his model.  In the literary and social conventions of the era, artists models, especially those who posed nude, were seen as part of the demi-monde scene.  These lines capture the excitement the narrator felt on being at the party.

I will let the close of this story out, contrary to my normal practice.  The sculpturer's model, with whom he is madly in love and whose beauty is the talk of Paris, is revealed to be a man.

Clara Bell (1835 to 1927, UK) was part of a culturally accomplished family.  She was fluent in French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Norwegian.  I find her prose very readable.

Mel u

"The Breeze" by Joshua Ferris (September 30, 2013, The New Yorker)

The New Yorker's A Summer in the Archives event is a tremendous gift to short story lovers.  Through it I read my first works by two of America's highest regarded short story authors, George Saunders and T. C. Boyle.  This morning I read my first work by another award winning American writer, Joshua Farris.

"The Breeze" is about a young New York City couple living in an apartment so small they call it "The Brig".  On the Spring day on which the story occurs there is just a wonderfully lovely breeze.  They both have off work that day and they discuss what will they do.  The wife wants a picnic in the park but the husband has already bought movie tickets.  She defers strongly insisting they always go to the Central Park and have a picnic.  The story is about what happens on their outing.  We see them argue, have two minutes of sex in the backwoods of the park, fight over where to eat, and end up at the movies.  

"The Breeze" is a very well done married love story.  The couple feel very real.

You can read it here 

http://www.newyorker.com/collection/love-stories-from-the-archive

The Archives are just open for the summer.

Joshua Ferris is the bestselling author of three novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”writers in 2010. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

 

 

 From the aurhor's webpage.

http://www.joshuaferris.com

 

 

"The Love of My Life" by T. C. Boyle. (March 6, 2000, in The New Yorker)

I am greatly enjoying A Summer in the Archive by The New Yorker.  ( You can check on it at http://www.newyorker.com/collection/love-stories-from-the-archive/).  So far I have read short stories by Roberto Bolano and George Saunders from the archives.

T. C. Boyle is a very prolific highly admired American novelist and short story writer.  "The Love of My Life" is my first encounter with his work.   It is heart breaking story about teenage love gone horribly wrong.  Parents of teenagers, especially daughters, will feel like locking their kids up after reading this story.  It does read a bit like the plot of an American crime show.  Anyone who was once a teenager in love (lust) will relate to this story.

I do not want to spoil the plot lines.  It kept me totally involved and the prose was a pleasure to read.

Official Web Page

http://www.tcboyle.com/

Mel u

The Most Dangerous Book The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (2014)

The Most Dangerous Book The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham is a very comprehensive account of the extensive efforts of censors to block sales and distribution of Ulysses.  This was done, as Birmingham details at length, though pressures exerted on publishers, the banning of the book by American customs and postal authorities, legal charges of obscenities and other methods.  Birimgham details the eventual success of the book's advocates.   We are made to see the cultural wars centering on the greatest work of literary modernism.

This book does what it purports to do.  If you want an exhaustive account of the difficulties of first distributing Ulysses this will provide that.  I recently read James Joyce -  A New Biography by Gordon Bowker.  It covers the same ground and gives you an insightful and interesting biography of Joyce, and costs less.  Most people will find they can get all the information they might want with a Google search and a few minutes on Wikepedia.  This is not a reflection on the excellant research and literary ability of Birmingham. It is just a fact.   Probably Bowker and Birmingham's books were in press about the same time.  

                                                                      

Mel u

"Jon" by George Saunders (January 27, 2013 The New Yorker)

I

The New Yorker, the premier destination for short stories, has given lovers of the form a great summer gift through opening up the archives of ninety years of short stories by posting every week more of the best of their stories.   I am not yet sure exactly how this will work but yesterday I was able to read a short story by Roberto Bolano, "Clara" and today I read my first work by George Saunders.

"Jon" is a dystopia whose great great grandfather is Aldous Huxley.  It opens in some sort of youth education center where children are encouraged to fondle their own sexual organs as much as they like.  We don't learn what has happened to the old world but there are refrences to MTV, mom baking an apple pie, Lysol and such so we know it is set in America.  The center seems designed to produce happy workers.  

Girls and boys live in proximity in units separated by Velcro.  One night our central character slips into the container of the girl next door and she ends up pregnant.  At first he fears he will be in trouble but the pregnancy seems welcomed by the authorities.  They get a joint dwelling.  

Part of the fun of this story is trying to figure what is really going on, filtered through the brainwashed perceptions of the young narrator.  

I greatly enjoyed this story and will, I hope, read many more stories by George Saunders.

newyorker.com

Mel 

"Clara" by Roberto Bolano (August 4, 2008, in The New Yorker)

My main purpose in writing this post is to let my readers know of a very generous gesture by The New Yorker.  The New Yorker is for a couple of months opening up its vast archives of short stories for all to read.  I am not quite sure yet how this just announced feature will work but yesterday I checked it out and found stories by big name writers.  Among them was a story from 2008 by Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile).  Anytime I can read a Bolano work for free, I do.  I have previously read his two big works, several minor novels and short stories.

"Clara", it can be read in just a few minutes, is the story, told by an ex-lover of the life of Clara.  Here is the attention gathering opening paragraph:

"She had big breasts, slim legs, and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and at the start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine; then Clara returned to the city where she lived, in the south of Spain (she’d been on vacation in Barcelona), and everything began to fall apart."

Of course the story is one of heart break, dispair and loss.  We follow, through the occasional contacts and phone calls of the narrator, Clara go from beautiful young woman to much transformed forty five year old woman.  The story was translated by Chris Andrews. 

I am reading this as part of my participation in Spanish Literature Month.

http://caravanaderecuerdos.blogspot.com/2014/05/spanish-lit-month-2014.html

You can read "Clara" and lots more great short stories here

http://www.newyorker.com/collection/love-stories-from-the-archive

Don't wait too long to read this story as once summer is over it will go back to paid subscribers only archives

Mel u

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood (1935 and 1939)

I think I first heard of Christopher Isherwood (1904 to 1986, born in England, died in Santa Monica, California) about forty years ago when I read in "Notes on Camp" by Susan Sontag that Isherwood was the first writer to use the word "camp" to describe a sensibility.  His works about Weimer Germany inspired the famous movie Cabaret.  His fiction focuses on outsider sexual cultures, prostitution, gay life styles, bondage and domination.  His characters are on the edge and look at straight society through layers of irony.  He is strongly identified world wide as an iconic gay writer.

Berlin Stories is actually two novellas marketed together.  In this format it was first is published in 1963.  The two works are Mr Norris Changes Trains (first published in 1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (first published in 1939).  Both are set largely in Berlin in the  early 1930s, from just before the Nazi's took over to their initial domination. 

Mr Norris Changes Trains begins in a rooming house in Berlin.  The story did make me think of the works in Katherine Mansfield's collection In A German Pension.  Mr Norris is English and I think the narrator is an American.  Mr. Norris is a bit of a mystery.  Sometimes he seems to have a great fortune in reserve somewhere and sometimes he seems dead broke.  He has no job but always claims to be on the verge of closing a big venture.  For a while he is a communist, very big in Germany at the time.  He is friends with and seems to patronize female sex workers and sadists.  Maybe he has gay relationships also, it is not laid out explicitly.  The narrator gets drawn more and more into the mysterious life of Mr. Norris.  There are lots of conversations about what Germany needs to pull out of a terrible slump.  As time passes, the Nazis begin to take over.  Mr Norris Changes Trains kept me interested, the characters were intriguing and I enjoyed the ground eye view of Weimer Germany.

Goodbye to Berlin is the source for Cabaret.  Sally Bowles plays a big part in the story.  This story also is partially set in a boarding house in Berlin.  The stories have common characters but were first published separately.  It focuses a lot on demi-monde Berlin.  Sally and other prostitues live in the same rooming house as the narrator.  The Nazis are now in power.  There is a lot of sadness in hearing ordinary Germans talk about how Hitler is what Germany needs.

I acquired  this book when I was notified that the Kindle a Edition was on sale for one day for $1.95.

I am glad read Berlin Stories but probably won't buy more of his work.

Mel u

"Facino Cane" by Honore de Balzac (1836, A short story component of La Comedie Humaine)

"Facino Cane" (estimated reading time is 14 minutes) is a short story component of Balzac's La Comedie Humaine.  He placed it in the Scenes de la Vie Parusienne section.  For the time being I am approaching the cycle by reading short stories and novellas.  

"Facino Cane" is in the format of one man telling a story to another.  This is a common narrative mode as one goes back in the short story's history.  A man encounters a blind musician at a social gathering. He engages the obviously impoverished old man in conversation and discovers he was once a member of the senate of Vienna, a position held only by the quite wealthy.  He asks the man what happened to him.  The old man tells him a long story about his life history in Vienna and how he got to Paris, how he lost his sight and his fortune.  It was interesting and involved a lot of intrigue.  Dumas would have turned it into a 1000 page novel.

"Facino Cane" depicts the French fascination with Vienna, shown strongly in the works of Stendhal. It makes use of an early narrative method.  

I am including this written and set in Paris short story as part of my participation in Paris in July, 2014.

Mel u

A Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci (1975)

Oriana Fallaci (Florence, 1929 to 2006) was a highly regarded political journalist and war correspondent for leading Italian journals as well as an essayist and multi-awarded novelist.  During W W Two she was a partisian.   Controversy surrounded her the ought her life for her outspoken views.  She feared no one.

 A Letter to a Child Never Born (1976, translated by John Shepley) is my introduction to the work of Oriana Fallaci.  This novella length work is in fact what the titles indicates.  It is a long letter to a child a woman carried for three months and lost in a miscarriage.  The woman, the letter is a long interior monologue, is almost a replication of the thoughts of everyone pregnant with a half dreamed for half dreaded baby.  The narrator has a very nihilistic out look on life. A lot of space is devoted to the development of the foetus.  There are serious ruminations on the morality of abortion.  She tells her unborn child that no matter what revolutions take place someone will always be washing someone else's dirty underwear.  In fact she says this several times.

This is a very philosophical more than a bit bitter work.  I am glad I read it.   It is not for everyone.

In the interest of full disclosure I was given a free copy of this book by the publisher.  

"True Milk" by Aiya de la Cruz (from Best European Fiction 2015, forthcoming October 2014)

I am happy to be able to participate in Spanish Literature Month - 2014 hosted by Richard of Caravana De Recuerdos and Stu of Winstondad's Blog.  There are lots of great reading ideas on the event page.

I have chosen as my participation in the event to post on an excellant very creative story "True Milk" by Aiya de la Cruz.  The story will appear in the to be published in October Best European Fiction - 2015.  (I was kindly given an advance review copy by the publisher and it might be the best so far of this marvelous series of collections.)

"True Milk" is a vampire story with several interesting twists.  The narrator knows a vampire story is gone to be seen by Literati as pure pandering to teens and young adult readers and tries to rise above this.  There are really two intertwining narrative threads, one is a scholarly academic type account of the role Lord Byron had in shaping the notion of how a vampire should appear (I found this very interesting and well done.  The first vampire story, "The Vampyre"  was written by John Polidori in 1819.  He based the dress and style of the vampire on Lord Byron and that is why vampires are portrayed as suave overly stylish gentlemen.  (My post on Polidor's story http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2011/09/vampyre-by-john-polidori.html contains background on this).

The narrator gives birth while she is doing her research on vampires. The story is told from her post birth hospital bed. The research part of the story is in italics and is really good, maybe the best part of the story.   Now the story takes a turn some would protest and babies are seen as kind of vampires.  The close of the story is very clever and I will leave it untold.  

Aixa de la Cruz was born in Bilbao, Spain, in 1988. She used the time afforded by an Antonio Gala Foundation grant to write Cuando fuimos los mejores (When We Were the Greatest) in 2007, which was a finalist in the Premio Euskadia de Literatura in 2008. With the help of a scholarship from the Caixa Galicia, she wrote De música ligera (On Light Music) in 2009. Her stage play I don’t like Mondays is being shown in Mexico this year as part of the Muestra Nacional de Teatro de Monterrey.

You can read this story here.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/true-milk-by-aixa-de-la-cruz

I liked this story a lot.  

I hope to post on the second short story originally in Spanish from Best European Fiction 2015 before the month ends.

Mel u

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

I have been wanting to read Stoner by John Williams (1922 to 1994, USA) for couple of years.  It was the Guardian book of the year for 2013. I am kind of reeling now from the impact of the telling of the life of William Stoner, trying to decide if is a work of terminal sadness or if there is redemption under the pain of Stoner's life.  My blog is in theory about literary works devoted to people who lead reading centered lives and this is just what Stoner did.  Stoner started college at The University of Missouri around 1908 or so.  He grew up on a simple farm owned by his parents.  He goes to college to study agriculture science, planning on returning to the farm on graduation.  He takes a class in literature and starts to love reading classical texts above all else.  I don't feel like telling the plot.  Stoner makes a terrible marriage, sticks with it for life, has a daughter but above all he loves reading.  He never leaves the university, teaching there for forty plus years.

Stoner is an excellant view of the petty world of academic politics.  Pedagogical professionals may be made to feel uncomfortable by the reasons offered as to why people choose to teach  at universities.

It is also a historical look at life in America from around 1908 to 1945.  We see the impact of World War One and Two on the campus, the depression and all is portrayed with great subtly.  

I love the prose style of Williams.  The characters are brilliantly done.  The portrait of the marriage is just harrowing in its understated intensity.  

I add my voice to the chorus of those who see this as must reading.  It is a very powerful work and many will find it depressing.

Please share your experience with Stoner with us and let us know if you have read other works by John Williams.

Mel u

  

The Square by Choi In-Hun (1960 in Korean, to be published in translation 2014 by Kim Seong-Kon)

The Square by Choi In-Hun (born in North Korea in 1936, moved with family to South Korea in 1950) is an award winning work of Korean Modernism.  Dalkey Archives Press has recently begun publishing translations of highly regarded post World War I I Korean novels and short stories.  They have kindly given me review copies of a number of them, including The Square.

The Square focuses on a young man, Lee Myong-Jun whose life reflects the divisions in Korean society.  He struggles to decide if North Korea with its Marxist society and militant nationalism represents what is best for Koreans or if the capitalistic industrial Western looking South Korea is the right path.  When the Korean War  (1950 to 1953) starts Lee joins the North Korean Army and ends up being taken prisoner.  After the war he is released and decides to leave Korea, not being able to decide which side is in the right, for India.  I was delighted to see the ship was called "The Tagore".  The story is told through a series of somewhat fragmented interior monologues while he crosses  the Indian Ocean.  

I enjoyed my first venture into Korean modernism and will endeavor to read more works this year.

I offer my thanks to Dalkey Archives (dalkeyarchives.com) for a generous gift of books.  They publish lots of great books and have a very multicultural catalogue.

Secrets of The Princess de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac (1839, A Novella, A Component of La Comedie Humaine )

I am currently reading Christoper Isherwood's Berlin Stories, about his years in Weimer Germany.  In the added much latter preface he said at first he wanted to do a grand novel based on all the people he met in Berlin but he soon realized it would take a writer with the power of Balzac to write it.  

I like large scale reading projects.  I am nearing the end now of the twenty novel Rougon Macquart Cycle by Emile Zola, heavily influenced by Balzac.  Balzac's La Comedie Humaine, in the edition I have, contains 91 works.  Included are novels, short stories and novellas.  Reading the full project is not perhaps as daughting as it sounds at first.  I am approaching La Comedie Humaine cautiously for now, reading short stories and novellas.  There are something like thirty five full length novels in the cycle, I have read five of them so far.  I am reading older public domain classics in The Delphi Edition of the Works of Balzac. It does purports to be the full Comedie but not all of Balzac's incredibly huge output. It is organized along the final ideas of Balzac.  

I do intend to post individually on each component of The Comedie Humaine I read, mostly to help me remember them.   

Secrets of the Princess de Cadignan (reading time maybe 75 minutes) focuses on a woman once part of the aristocracy whose but lost her husband in  The July 1830 which overthrew the Bourbon King.  Her husband fled France with King Charles.  She once had a reputation as a "coquette", I admit I am not quite sure what this was a euphemism but she was still quite a beauty.  Since her royal connections were displaced she has been keeping a low profile.  The action of the work  centers on her developing relationship with a famous writer.  It is set in Paris.  I enjoyed reading it.

I am including this written and set in Paris short story as part of my participation in Paris in July, 2014

Mel u

The Dream by Emile Zola (1888, work 16 in The Rougon Macquart Cycle)

The Dream is very different from the prior fifteen novels in Ths Rougon Marquart Cycle.  It set in rural France among mostly  decent people.  My post read research revealed that in The Dream Zola set out to show he could write a successful work that did not depend upon sensationalism and depravity for its power.  

It centers on a young girl we first meet as an orphan, Angelique.  She is a fourth general Rougart.  She is adopted by a happily married couple in their early forties whose only child died while an infant, long ago.   I sense in Zola an antagonism toward sexual activity, a feeling that sex is inherently corrupting.  His ideal female is very beautiful, falls in love while quite young and dies a virgin.

The family in the novel make their living by producing grand embroidered tapestries and gowns.  The testify to the glory of the saints.  Angelique is very into the love of Catholic Saints, especially Saint Agnes.  Agnes died in Rome around 300AD at 13.  She was very beautiful and had many suitors but she had made a vow of lifetime chastity, declaring her love of God overrides any possible earthly attachment.   A high ranking Roman official had her tortured and executed when she refused to renounce God and marry him.  There is a lot of powerful religious imagery in The Dream.

Angelique and a rich very handsome man of great character meet and fall in love to everyone's delight, especially her adoptive parents.  

A beautiful wedding ceremony takes place in this fairy tale like story.  The ending will not come as much of a surprise to Zola readers.

The next novel is The Human Beast.

Mel u

"The Black Square" by Chris Adrian (2011, an O Henry Prize Story)

My post on "A Tiny Feast" by Chris Adrian

A few days ago I read "A Tiny Feast", a wonderful dark fairy tale by Chris Adrian (there is a link to the story, from The New Yorker, in my post where you can and should read this really creative work).

I was happy to find two more short stories by Chris Adrian in short story anthologies I have on hand, one in the O Henry Prize Stories 2011.

"The Black Square" is a very interesting combination of a story about a Gay man vacationing on the very affluent island of Nantucket going over half bitter half poignant memories of his relationship while he contemplates stepping into what seems to be a very mysterious black square that seems to lead to either another dimension or just oblivion.  The central character is trying to decide if he should step through the black square or not.  He has given 100s of men, some he knows and some he doesn't, blow jobs.   You wonder if all this frantic sex is a search itself for oblivian.  The depiction of the sexuality of the man is handled in a matter of factual kind of way.

I liked this story, not as much as "A Tiny Feast" which I just loved.

Chris Adrian, M.D., M.Div., M.F.A.  Chris Adrian has written three novels: Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and The Great Night. In 2008, he published A Better Angel, a collection of short stories. His short fiction has also appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Story. He was one of 11 fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.Adrian completed his Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1993. He received his M.D. from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 2001. He completed a pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco, was a student at Harvard Divinity School, and is currently in the pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSF. He is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  There is a story by Adrian in 20 Under 40.  - from The New Yorker and I am looking forward to reading it soon. Mel u

Concluding by Henry Green (1948) - with my suggestions for those new to Green

My Posts on Henry Green

Henry Green (1905 to 1973, Yorkshire, England, real name Henry Yorke) is widely described as a "writer's writer".  His friend Elizabeth Bowen said he was a consummate master of dialogue.  He published eight novels and a few short stories and a bit of journalism.  (You can find background information on him in my prior posts.)   I am happy and sad to say I have now read all of his novels.

Concluding is set in a girl's school in an alternative future England.  The job of the school is to produce future civil servants.  For reasons we never learn, all the first names of the students begin with an "M".  Some sort of mildly oppressive regime is running England though we never learn what happened or much about it.  One morning two students are reported missing.  Much of the undertone of the novel centers on the sexual awaking of the girls.  The principals think 16 to 18 year old girls have no consciousness at all about sex.

The central characters, all partially ciphers, are an elderly man who lives with his granddaughter in a cottage on the ground and two female school leaders who want to kick him out.  Everything is very understated as Green readers would expect.  This is a novel for a Green believers.

I would strongly suggest anyone wanting to begin to read Green, start with the collection of three novels sold as a bundle, Loving, Living, and Party Going. My guess these works will send you, as it did me, on a journey through complete novels of Green.  Most are about 200 pages.

Green is a modernist writer.  His conversations are wonderful.  

Mel u

"Roast Beef, Medium" by Edna Ferber. (1913 an early short story by Pulitzer Prize Winning writer of Show Boat and So Big

My post on "The Homely Heroine" by Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber (1885 to 1968, winner of the Pultizer Prize in 1924 for Show Boat got her literary start with a series of short stories centering on Emma McChesney, a traveling saleslady specializing in petticoats with a very independent with it kind of "with it" attitude.  Traveling sales ladies were rare in 1913 and Emma has heard more than her share of propositions and such in her years on the road.  

The story starts out in the dining room of hotel.  Emma orders a solidly predictable meal, Roast Beef Medium.  A man much younger than Emma also dining at the hotel, most of the guests are traveling sales men, once a big part of American retail, younger by decades than Emma strikes up a conversation with Emma.  Now Emma is a lady but life on the road can get lonely so she agrees to go for a walk with him.  The best part of the story were Emma's comments about life.

There is an interesting moral in this story, the title tells it.

I liked this story and am glad I read "Roast Beef, Medium".

I read this in this well done anthology.

Mel u