"Dimmer" by Joy Williams

"Dimmer" by Joy Williams (1969, 33 pages with an introduction by Daniel Alarcon)

Joy Williams

I am enjoying reading the short stories in the just published Object Lessons:  The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story.   The editors of collection asked twenty-one contemporary masters of the short story, pretty much all Americans as are most of the story authors, to pick a story published in The Paris Review and write a brief account as to why they liked their pick.   The editors say the purpose of the collection is to show of the short story form to those who do not give it the attention it deserves.   In all I plan to post on six of the stories.  

Joy Williams (USA, 1944-graduate of University of Iowa creative writing program) has written two novels and three collections of short stories.   She has been nominated for The National American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.  She has taught creative writing at several major universities.

This story, like the others in this collection, cannot, as far as I know, be read online unless you subscribe to the review.   I will keep my post quite short and it will be more for me to recall it than for others,

"Dimmer" is about a mentally dysfunctional man named "Mal", a bit too close for comfort to my own name!   He is from Australia, in the outback type area.   His father dies and his mother abandons him as a young boy but with some charity from neighbors he is able to keep himself alive.    He gets into some trouble, impregnating a woman married to a war veteran and he ends up being sent to Los Angeles on a one way flight.   He spends some days in the airport, he cannot speak and then he is up being picked up by a woman that transports cars across country.   The fun in this story, and it really is a pleasure to read, is in the crazy capricious life of Mal.   I hope to read more Joy Williams one of these days.  


Mel u
The Reading Life

"Emmy Moore's Journal" by Jane Bowles

"Emmy Moore's Journal" by Jane Bowles (1973, 21 pages)

Jane Bowles

1917 to 1973

Jane Bowles, wife of Paul Bowles, was born in New York.  She published her only novel, Two Serious Ladies in 1943. She also wrote a play that was produced on Broadway, In The Summer House. She published  twenty short stories.   She moved to Tangiers with Paul Bowles in 1948.    While in Tangiers she is said to have had very intense relationships with a Moroccan woman and the famous torch singer Libby Holman.   She  was an alcoholic   Here is a quote from the book description of My Sister's Hand:  The Complete Works of Jane Bowles

Paul and Jane Bowles

"Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed, her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives."

I confess I had never heard of her until I saw her name in the anthology, Object Lesson:  The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story.  When I saw that Linda Davis greatly admired her work I was very happy to be presented with my first opportunity to read her work.   After reading the introduction of Davis I would say I would love to have had the opportunity to take a class in the short story from her.

I really love "Emmy Moore's Journal".   It is a partially autobiographical story about a woman who wants to join her husband.   The story is told in the first person and the woman's observations transcend the merely amazing, some are very accurate some make little sense as we she her thin grip on reality.  She has odd attitudes about Turkish women as somehow very exotic and feminine.  How things change as I suspect most Americans, the woman refers to herself as an American, would not list Turkish women as especially exotic.  There is little I can say about this story that Davis has not already said much better.   There is a letter to her husband (named "Paul") that is a classic.   It also shows the orientalizing in the mind of Emma of Asian women.  Here is what she says about herself "I am so wily and feminine that I could live by your side for a lifetime and deceive you afresh each day".   Femininity is equated with deception and uses the power tactics of the weak against their masters.

There is much more in this wonderful story.  Sadly none of her work, as far as I could find, can be read online.  My thanks Linda Davis for picking it.   

If you have read Jane Bowles (or Paul, who I will post on soon as this story made me curious about him) please share your experiences with us.

Mel u
The Reading Life

"Several Garlic Tales" by Donald Barthelme

"Several Garlic Tales" by Donald Barthelme (1966, 9 pages)

Donald Barthelme 

1931 to 1989 USA

Donald Barthelme was a very prolific very highly regarded short story writer with 100s of published works.   In addition to being a writer he was also a reporter, a curator of an art museum and worked as a visiting professor of creative writing at several universities.   I am currently reading some of the short stories in a brand new anthology Object Lessons:   The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story and I was excited to see a story by Barthelem in the collection.  

It is not terribly easy to see fully what is happening in this story.   It seems to be about a wealthy man, perhaps in the movie business, travelling the world in the company of his Japanese girlfriend.   As the story opens Amelia and Paul (I wonder why the Japanese girlfriend has been given a very English name-is it not her real name-is this story orientalizing her?  Her nickname is "Yum-Yum") are looking at some travel pics of Denmark (this was in the day when people saved their pictures in physical albums).   The point of this story, as most postmodern short fiction is in the twists, the language and the images.   I loved it when they went to see one of my favorite Greta Garbo movies, Queen Christina.  (question of the day-is Queen Christina camp?)   We wonder why Paul wanted Yum-Yum to wear white rubber pajamas.   Is the world a toy for Paul as is perhaps Yum-Yum.  

This is a very interesting story.   The language is magical and the images and scenes evoked are fascinating.

I hope to read more of the author's work one day.

Mel u

The Reading Life

"Ten Stories from Flaubert" by Lydia Davis

"Ten Stories from Flaubert" by Lydia Davis  (2010, 10 pages)

Lydia Davis

"Later I heard that after this exhibition of savages, their manager abandoned them."

I have wanted to read a short story by Lydia Davis (1947, USA)  for sometime.  Davis is known for her short stories and her translations of  Madame Bovary and Swann's Way.   I was very glad to see one of her short stories included in Object Lessons-The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story.   All of the stories have previously been published in The Paris Review and each story is introduced by a short story writer who has also been published in The Paris Review.   "Ten Stories from Flaubert" is introduced by Ali Smith, author of numerous novels, plays and short stories.  

Davis is known for the extreme compression and precision of her short stories.   Many of her stories are just a few lines and some just a sentence.     Given that, a ten page short story by Davis is almost like a 100 page  work by most writers.  All of the stories in "Ten Stories from Flaubert" read as if they were translations from letters or journals by Flaubert, and in most of our cases including mine, how would one  know the difference.    I will reveal enough about the stories to give you a feel for them.  

"The Cook's Lesson" is that she does not know that France is no longer a kingdom but is now a republic even though there has been no king for five years.  She says the fact that there is no longer a king simply "does not interest her in the least-those were her words.    And I think of myself as an intelligent man!  But compared to her I am an imbecile."

"Pouchet's Wife" lets us in just a few sentences feel the terrible pain of a man whose beloved wife has passed.  He was a doctor and his wife, a pretty Englishwoman, helped draw him out and makes him seem more human.   The narrator says he has been told that he does not have much compassion for people, common complaint about Madame Bovary was that it looks at its characters almost like they were insects.

There is a story about a man who hates the tapeworm in his stomach so much he decides to kill it by killing himself.   There is a very interesting story about the fate of tribal people from a very primitive area brought to Paris for a show of some kind and then abandoned. 

"Ten Stories from Flaubert:" is a brilliant story and helped me understand Flaubert just a little better.   In fact this morning I completed my second reading of A Sentimental Education and will post on it soon.  A few of the short stories of Davis can be found online.   I see myself buying her collection of short stories once it is available as a Kindle.  

"I knew Flaubert, Turgenev and de Maupassant"
Carmilla

Mel u

"Funes, the Memorious" by Juan Luis Borges

"Funes, the Memorious" by Juan Luis Borges  (1968, 8 pages, translated by James Irby)

Juan Luis Borges (1899 to 1986-Argentina) is best known for his fables and short stories as well as his essays.   He is one of the dominant figures in Latin  American literature.   I was very happy to see that included in Object Lessons:  The Paris Review Presents Art of  the Short Story edited by Lorin and Sadie Stein, 2012, was a short story by Borges.   I have read his work before but it has been several decades.   Each of the stories in the collection has a brief introduction by a well established short story writer.  Borges' story is introduced by Aleksandar Hemon, author of three short story collections and The Lazarus Project, a 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Set in the middle of the 19th century in Buenos Aires, the story centers on a man with incredible mental capacities, a man who wants to know everything.    There are strong connections for many people, myself included, between a compulsive love (that is the wrong word but will let it go for now) for the reading life and a compulsion to know as much as you possibly can.  As illustrated in the story, these compulsions are at least as isolating as they are connecting.

As Hemnon says in his great introduction, the work of Borges "belongs to the tradition of literature with cosmic ambition:  the Bible, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses..works that strive to convey complete universes, containing everything".   In order for this to work, human language has to be able to articulate all  knowledge.   The vision in this story and the other works in the tradition us that you cannot really conceptualize humanity without literature.

Funes, the central character in the novel cannot forget anything.  He can pull up the number of leaves on a tree he saw 25 years ago.   The story focuses on the attempt of the narrator of the story to tell of the life if Funes, a near impossible task as his very project transcends human limitation.  This is a beautiful fable.   It has a lot to tell us about the reading life.

Mel u
The Reading Life