Today's story, "Segue" by Carol Shields, can be read in full, along with the illuminating introduction by Margaret Atwood, in the Kindle edition of her Collected Stories.
"This ability to strike two such different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’ writing—the iridescent, often hilarious surfaces of things, but also their ominous depths. The shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx. Carol Shields died on July 16, 2003 at her home in Victoria, British Columbia, after a long battle with cancer. She was sixty-eight. The enormous media coverage given to her and the sadness expressed by her many readers paid tribute to the high esteem in which she was held in her own country, but her death made the news all around the world. Conscious as she was of the vagaries of fame and the element of chance in any fortune, she would have viewed that with a certain irony, but she would also have found it deeply pleasing. She knew about the darkness, but, both as an author and as a person, she held on to the light. “She was just a luminous person, and that would be important and persist even if she hadn’t written anything,” said her friend and fellow author Alice Munro." From the introduction by Margaret Atwood
Next year Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,will be doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. After reading and personally relating to "Segue" I hope to participate fully in this event.
http://www.buriedinprint.com/
The story takes place in Chicago. The narrator is a 67 year old woman, a minor poet, married for forty years to a highly regarded novelist. They have a daughter but no grandchildren.
"Our Sunday self-consciousness, the little mid-morning circle around Max and me, was bisected by light and dark. The day bloomed into mildness, October 7, one year and one month after the September 11 tragedy—event, spectacle, whatever you choose to call it. Max is a well-known Chicago novelist—he both loves and hates that regional designation—and he was, of course, spotted by other Sunday morning shoppers. That’s Max Sexton. Where? Over there. Really? A little buzz travels with my husband, around him and above him, which, I believe, dishes out the gold dust that keeps him alive. To be noticed, to be recognized. With his white beard, white swifts of soft hair swept backward, his old-fashioned, too-large horn-rimmed spectacles, he is a familiar enough sight in our immediate neighborhood, and—allow me to say—in the national journals too, even to the point that he has been mentioned once or twice in the same breath with the Nobel Prize (as a dark horse, the darkest of horses). Not that we ever speak of this. It does not come up, we forbid it, the two of us. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer—we don’t speak of that either."
Mary Sarton, as one would expect, loves literature, Flaubert, Wordsworth and her thought processes are intimately involved through decades of reading. She is the director of a Chicago society that meets monthly to discuss sonnets members have written.
The story took me deeply into how the couples mutual entery into their late sixties has impacted their mutual and self-perceptions,
"Segue" is a beautiful story. I look forward to reading many more of the author's stories next year.
The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography
https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html
Mel Ulm
1 comment:
These are great quotations you've included here, Mel. Thanks for including them. I, too, enjoyed the depiction of this couple's marriage and the intricate but ordinary details about their days and weekly routines. I'll add a link to your post when I get to writing about the stories in January. Thanks again for sharing in all this.
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