"God and the Cobbler" by R. K. Narayan

"God and the Cobbler" by R. K. Narayan (16 pages, 1976)

My Prior Posts on R. K. Narayan

People liked to claim back in the 1970s that they read Playboy magazine for the great prose.   In August, 1976 this might actually have been true when R. K. Narayan (1906 to 2001-India)  had his really wonderful and captivating short story, "God and the Cobbler" published within its glossy pages.

I encountered the story today in his collection of short stories, Malgudi Days.   The collection, with a very interesting introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, has stories from two of his collections and a number of new stories not previously anthologized.   There are seventeen stories from An Astrologer's Day and Other Stories, I have already posted all of these stories.   There are sixteen other stories in the collection I have not yet read.   I have also read a number of Narayan's thirteen novels and will be reading two more soon, The Guide  and The Sign Painter.   I love the work of Narayan and was happy to see Jhumpa Lahari classified him along with just a few other writers as one of the geniuses of the short story.   (There is some background information in my prior posts on him.)

This story reminded me a lot of Narayan's story "A Horse and Two Goats", one of my personal favorites.   In this story an affluent American tourist and a local goat herder have a conversation in which neither understands what the other is saying but both leave the conversation quite happy.  

In 1976 India was awash in the unwashed of the west.   I think it was Jack Kerouac who coined the term "Dharma Bums" to describe western young people traveling through India looking for spiritual enlightenment.  

This story is just so great.  (I hope Narayan was well paid to class up Playboy.)   A western man, referred in the story as a "hippy" (the word did not have just negative connotations in 1976 as it does now, I think) comes upon a man besides the road who repairs old shoes for a living.   They can converse a bit in English.  The hippy thinks the cobbler has found enlightenment in his simple work and sees his work on the shoes as a holy exercise of some kind.   The cobbler things the hippy may be a god in disguise sent to test him so he is very cautious in everything he says to him.   The fun and power in this story is the absurd ways that the two men interpret what the conversation is about and how they size up each other.  

This is a very good story beautifully told in the simplest of language.   I suspect the beauty of the women depicted in Playboy thirty five years ago have long since faded but that of Narayan's story still shines through.   I wonder if any of the readers of the magazine went on to read more Narayan!

I am glad to be reading and posting on Narayan once again.   Narayan is not just a curousity read, not just an Indian writer.   He is one of the great writers of the 20th century and he is a lot more fun to read than many of the other great writers!

Mel u

Flannery O'Connor-Three Wiseblood Stories from 1949

"The Peeler"  (1949, 12 pages)
"The Heart of the Park" (1949, 14 pages)
"A Stroke of Good Fortune" (1949, 12 pages)

In The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor there are four stories that were worked into her first novel, Wiseblood  (1952).  I have already posted on one of them "Enoch and the Gorilla".   I have not yet read Wiseblood  but I think I can safely say it has got to be a strange and wonderful book with enough symbolism, hidden depths of meaning and sheer verbal brilliance to amaze anyone.  There is some background information on O'Connor (1925 to 1965,  Georgia, USA) in my prior posts on her.

These stories are a quantum leap up in depth and complexity as well as beauty from the six stories in her master's thesis, The Geranium and Other Stories,  submitted to the University of Iowa writers program in 1947.

I think with these three stories I will just sort of do a brief entry on each story.   I can already see I will at the end of my first read through of her stories see her as a "must read" genius of the form.   Also I am  not sure if  O'Connor really meant these stories to be experienced as standalone works.   Maybe she just for practical reasons found it necessary to publish these stories while she was working on Wiseblood.  


"The Peeler" starts out in front of a traveling salesman who has set up an impromptu shop where is he selling a marvelous potato peeling machine.    The machine takes the potatoes in brown and turns them out pure white.  Remember that in rural Georgia in 1949 to be white was considered the best thing to be.   Hazel Motes is at first fascinated by the machine and held captive by the pitch of the very practiced salesman.   He ends up being distracted by a blind preacher who is accompanied by a young woman who is handing out religious leaflets.    He runs into Enoch, one of the central characters in Wiseblood  and they both end up following the blind man down the street.

"The Heart of the Park" is about Enoch's very strange personal  life.   I was surprised to see his attitude to women and to find the large number of prostitutes in the world of this story.   The narrator of the story calls the women that Enoch as sex with whenever he can afford the two dollars they charge, "whores".    It is not clear if this is meant literally or is a devise to get us into the mind of Enoch.   He also likes to go to the public swimming pool as a lot of the women there have splits in their bathing suits and sometimes he gets to see more than he is suppose to.   I know there is enough symbolism in this story to fuel numerous dissertations.      For sure there  is a lot to think about in this story.

"A Stroke of Good Fortune" is mostly about a married woman in her mid-thirties.   Her brother has just come home from the war in Europe so that makes the date 1946 or so.    When her brother left he was according to the woman the worst most ignorant kind of backwoods slow minded hayseed.   She hoped the years away had smartened him up and made him worldlier.     She is very disappointed when the first food he asks for upon coming home is not some fancy French dish but simple down home collard greens.   We learn about the very dysfunctional family the brother and sister are from.   We learn how their mother was an old woman worn out at thirty four.   There is just a lot of great lines in this story.   Who else but Flannery O'Connor would describe a car like in this fashion:

"He saw a high rat, colored car passing, which sounded as if
its motor were dragging out the back."


I will be posting on additional stories soon.  


Please share your experience and feelings on O'Connor with us.

Mel u

Flannery O'Connor's First Six Stories-Her Master's Thesis

"Across on the river bank the Lord was waiting
on him with a troupe of angels and golden vestments for him to
put on and when he came, he'd put on the vestments and stand there
with the Lord and the angels, judging life."-from "The Wildcat"

O'Connor 1948 Iowa

Flannery O'Connor (1925 to 1965, Georgia, USA) received a MA degree from the very famous University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1947.   (I guess the degree was from the University, with the workshop being a division of the school.)   As her required thesis for her degree she submitted six short stories.   Upon completion of her degree, she spent another year at the workshop on a fellowship.   I have already posted on her very first story, "The Geranium".   I will today briefly post on the other five stories in her thesis The Geranium and Other Stories.   Three of the six stories were published on their own and three were published for the first time in  the posthumous 1971 The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, edited and with a very good introduction by Robert Giroux, who was her publisher and knew her well.  (There is a good article on her time at the Iowa workshop on the webpage of the workshop.)   There are thirty one stories in the collection (I think there is one story not included in the collection but I will worry about that latter.)  I have already posted more or less at random on seven of them.   I have now been given an e-book of the full collection by a very kind follower of my blog from Calcutta.   I have decided I want have her stories in the "read" category" before much more time goes by.   I will be reading through them in sequence and posting at least something on each one.  I know there is deep religious symbolism and really profound themes in her work.   .   The symbolism in her stories may be rooted in her Catholic theology  but the very far from Catholic Kenzaburo Oe treats her work as a near holy text.    Many consider Flannery O'Connor among the very best short story writers of all time.   I am among those of that opinion already.

"The Barber" (written when O"Connor was twenty one-1947-6 pages) will be a bit hard to read for a lot of people.   This is partially because the story is almost entirely told through conversations in the rural dialect of Georgia in the 1940s.  (When O'Connor attended the workshop some, including the workshop's director, could not at first understand her because of her own spoken dialect.)    I have said before I am not over all a fan of dialect but maybe that is just because it takes a master to do it without seeming as if they are condescending to rural "hicks".   Henry Green is another master of this.  Many will be shocked over the constant use of very politically incorrect racial expressions by the characters in the story and the extremely racist  milieu of the story.    Basically the story turns around an argument in a barber shop about who one should vote for.  One white candidate is seen as coddling the blacks and the white people in the barber shop, but for one man who is a teacher, all hate him.  There is a black young man that works in the barber shop that is sadly oblivious to the constant racial comments of the white men.  

"Wildcat" (1947, seven pages) also is a story about race relations and shows the extreme contempt and hatred that whites in region by and large had for blacks.    One of the characters says several times that he can smell blacks a long way off (only he uses a very ugly term).   The story is set like most of her others, in rural pinewoods Georgia.   There were still wildcats in the area and one of them had recently killed a cow.  Here is a good sample of the prose of the story and it shows what I am talking about pretty clearly.

"How many wildcats you killed, Gabrul?" Their voices, rising to
him through the darkness, were full of gentle mockery.
"When I was a boy, there was a cat once," Gabriel started. "It
come 'round here huntin' blood. Come in through the winder of a
cabin one night an' sprung in bed with a nigger an' tore that
nigger's throat open befo' he could holler good."

The religious themes of O'Connor are also developed in this story.

"The Crop" (1947, six pages) starts out at a meal in a household.   O'Connor does a great job in just a few paragraphs of bringing a whole family history to life.
The man character, a young woman, is trying to write a story.  She has chosen for her theme the lives of sharecroppers, basically a very poor class of mostly white rural Georgia people.   You can see the young woman knows nothing about the people and dehumanizes them into violent troglodytes.   It is a brilliant account of prejudice.

"The Turkey" (1947, eight pages) seems the most interesting of the stories.   There is nothing immature about it.   It centers on a family with two sons.   One of the sons seems, according to his father, "destined for the penitentiary".   He sometimes listens outside his parent's bedroom at night as they argue about what is wrong with him.    I really don't want to tell any of this story.   You just need to read it.

"The Train" (1948, eight pages) is  the most complex of the stories in terms of narrative action.   It centers on a train ride in the old days when people slept on trains and when riding one  a long distance was a special event.   It tells us a lot about class consciousness and status.   Like all of her stories, there is a world of symbolism and meaning in the smallest details.

The next three stories in the collection became part of her first novel Wiseblood.  I will post on "The Peeler", "The Heart of the Park" and "A Stroke of Good Fortune" soon.   As her stories go on from here her work is considered to become even more brilliant and very rich in meaning.   I will post on each one and will decide latter how to do it.

I am very glad I am at last reading through the short stories of O'Connor.

Please share your experiences with O'Connor with us.

Mel u

"Three Letters and a Footnote" by Horacio Quiroga

"Three Letters and a Footnote" by Horacio Quiroga (1925, Podcast, 14.5 minutes)

Quiroga and second wife

 Horacio Quiroga (1878 to 1937-Uruguay) is often called the Edgar Allan Poe of the Amazon.   I have previously posted on four of his short stories, each of them very much in the Gothic horror genre.   There is additional background information on Quiroga in my prior posts on him.   I think most who read one of his stories, will want to read more.   My favorite of his stories so far is "The Decapitated Chicken", I almost can guarantee it will "creep you out".     His stories are short and can be read in just a few minutes.

I was looking around yesterday at Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast for something to listen to and was very happy to find a story by Quiroga that was new to me.   Miette in her description of "Three Letters and a Footnote" said it was totally unlike most of his other stories and also is told from the point of view of a young woman so I decided to experience it.  

Basically the story begins with a  twenty year old woman writing the editor of a magazine.    She encloses a story about her commute to work on a street car (the setting for the story has not been given but based on the text and the life of the author I am guessing it is meant to be seen as Buenos Aires, Argentina or Montevideo, Uruguay.)    The woman tells the editor she wants him to publish the story but change the author to himself as people will not believe a woman could have written it.   It is about her experiences over the last five years riding the street car to work.   It is really all about how she sizes up the men who ride the street car in terms of their interest in her.   There are special commuter train cars for women here in Manila (and elsewhere) for women only because of "train perverts" who use the crowded conditions to press up against women and I guess this is not a new thing based on this story.

Quiroga does a good job projecting the thoughts of the young female narrator as she described her five years twice a day rides on the street cars, packed with mostly men.    There is a kind of interesting surprise twist to the story but it is just incidental to the pleasure of the story.

I experience podcasts very differently from a written work.  I am sure most people do also.  I listened to the story three times.

For sure read his "The Decapitated Chicken" first then try some of his other works if you like that.     My guess it will be your first read by an author from Uruguay so you will also add another country to your list if you are trying to read with a lot of diversity, not a bad goal at all.  

The main purpose of this post is to spotlight for a second time Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast.


Mel u

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "Enoch and the Gorilla" by Flannery O'Connor

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (1955)

"Enoch and The Gorilla" (1950)

Podcasts of Two Flannery O'Connor Stories

A Great Podcast Resource

So far I have read and posted on five of Flannery O'Connor's (1925 to 1965-Georgia, USA) thirty two short stories.  (There is some background information on her in my prior posts.)    The five stories I read, particularly "Good Country People" were enough to convince me she was true master of the form (and to put her picture in my header collage!)   

My main purpose in this post is to spotlight a new too me resource I have recently discovered, Miette's  Bedtime Story Podcast, which has online 100s of literary quality short stories as podcasts.   The selection is just brilliant including some items you will be shocked to see.   Miette has been posting podcasts for four years now and her webpage has a strong personal feel and reflects a deep love and appreciation of the short story as an art form.   Miette has a beautiful speaking voice.   She does her posts at home and sometimes you can hear her dog barking in the background and the doorbell or phone ringing but this just added to the charm for me.   

Podcasts are a kind of a trade off for me-they take a lot more time to experience than simply reading a story which is bad but they do force me to slow down a bit and reflect on what I hear.   They are also good when you are feeling lazy or are in a car for a long ride etc.   I am just a newbie when it comes to podcasts and such but I was after a bit of a learning curve easily able to listen to them on my Ipad.   

I listened to both of these stories twice, once last night and once this morning.   

"Enoch and the Gorilla" (running time  17.5 minutes) was turned into a chapter in her first novel, Wise Blood (1952).   Enoch (the name comes from an ancestor of Noah-I looked it up!) is a young zoo keeper in Georgia (part of the American South) in the years right after WWII.   Enoch hears that there is a gorilla at the local movie theater, there to help promote a movie.   He goes to the theater to see the gorilla and is shocked to realize it is a man in a gorilla suit.  (not everybody in O'Connor's stories is real bright).   The gorilla for pretty much no reason curses at Enoch and tells him to go to hell.   This causes him to have a minor revelation of sorts.   There is a lot of religious, Catholic, symbolism in her stories and I am sure there are biblical references and symbolism galore in this story.   

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (running time 35 minutes) seems the deeper of the two stories and is very typically O'Connor in its use of dysfunctional characters right out of the core of the Southern Gothic vocabulary.   (Personal fantasy disclosed, I wish O'Connor could have written some True Blood episodes.)  O'Connor seems to have a thing for amputees, women and their daughters who have their lives heavily impacted by a wandering stranger in the form of a single man.   The men are near rootless close to tramps.   Relationships form quickly and are ended just as fast.   Men are pretty much the villains in these stories.   In The Life You Save May Be Your Own" a man shows up at the home of a single woman and her sixteen year old daughter.   The man is a carpenter by trade ((OK Jesus was a carpenter also-run with the idea!).   The woman offers him work but says she can give him only food and he can live in her broken down for 15 years car.  In the old South it was, I believe, common for people to have broken down cars in their front yards.   This is taken kind as a class mark kind of item.   The daughter is 15 or so and is supposed to be quite beautiful.  She also might be mentally dysfunctional as she does not speak much.   When the mother decides she wants the man as a son-in-law, she uses that as a selling point for the girl.   I will leave the rest of the story untold.   This is a really brilliant story and I am sure it also has a lot of symbolism just below the surface.   

Fact of life, a lot of material that is not in the public domain can be found online.   Who knows how this happens and maybe in some cases it is legal or the web master has permission.   Maybe podcasts are an exception.   The laws of some countries are very specific on Internet posts of material, other countries legal codes have not been updated for decades so the question is not addressed.   Maybe residents of one country can legally download material that others cannot.   In some places  publishers and authors have easy recourse to remedies, in others pretty much nothing can really be done.  

Take a good look at Miette's  Bedtime Story Podcast-

It looks like as great resource and there are a lot of works on there that really shocked me to see.   Miette has superb taste and a wonderful voice and her write ups on the stories are also delightful.   She posts a new story about once a week.   

Mel u

A Saki Sampler: In Honor of his 140th Birthday

Saki (aka Hector Munro) was born December 18,1870 in Burma, the son of an English officer in the Police force.    He and O Henry are thought of as the kings of the surprise ending short story.  

Don't be a literary snob!-   Read some Saki


Saki wrote over 300 short stories before he was killed at age 46 by the bullet of a German sniper during WWI.     I have almost by accident posted on 19 short stories on Saki since I began my blog in July 2009.   This came about to some extent because East of the Web:   Short Stores,  a great source of reading ideas for short stories, often posts one of his works as the story of the day.

Most of Saki's stories are gentle satires of the pretensions of the upper crust in Edwardian society.   Almost all of them are written in a mannered style of prose that seems a little antiquated to many now.    I would describe Saki by and large as an entertaining writer with a highly educated prose style who at his best is quite good and at his worse (some of the stories do really seem like just set ups for the ending) will at least make you smile.    Sometimes it seems Saki, who I dearly love, may have been a bit of a lazy writer just pumping out the story of the week for a magazine as a few of his stories are really brilliant.   Today in Honor of the 140th anniversary of his birthday, I want to spotlight two of his stories that show him at the top of his typical form, one that kind of shocked me to see him writing so deeply in just a few pages about the Burmese colonial experience,  and one story that could have been written by Thomas Hardy or Joseph Conrad, on a good day.

"Open Window" (1911)  might be the most anthologized most taught in Freshman English Saki Short Story.   Saki has been called sort of a perpetually adolescent writer aiming to have some fun with the grown ups in his life.   "Open Window", if you read only one Saki story, this one will give you the flavor of his work for sure.   As the story begins a candidate for political office in England is so worn out he is told to go stay for the weekend and just relax at the home of one of his relatives.   When he gets there he finds only one of the teenage girls in the family is there to greet him.   I did not see the ending coming in this story at all but once it happened it was quite inevitable and logical.   That is sort of the test of a good surprise ending for me.  This is just a flat out totally fun story.   It is light hearted and handed and won't leave you amazed but you will say too your self, OK next time I want to read something just for fun, I will look for one of his stories.

"Tobermory" (1913) is a really fun story about a talking cat and I know the book blog world is full of cat lovers, like myself, who will like the concept of the story as soon as they hear it.   I will let people discover the story for themselves but here is a sample of the cat's speech (and a very characteristic sample of the prose of Saki).

"  "You put me in an embarrassing position," said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. "When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested, Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the one they call 'The Envy of Sisyphus,' because it goes quite nicely up-hill if you push it."

"The Comments of Moung" (1906) is very interesting in that it is set not in Edwardian England but in the Burma of the British Raj.   Before India was partitioned in 1947,  the large province of Bengal was partitioned along religious lines from 1905 to 1912 when the partition was abolished.   "The Comments of Moung" is not set in India, but in Burma (I prefer to use the old name) in a village on the shores of the Irrawaddy River.  (Saki was a military policemen in Burma from 1893 to 1895, just like his father was.)    Moung is a prosperous rice merchant who travels quite a bit in his business so when he comes home people ask him what is going on in Indian and England.   He tells everyone how the province of Bengal is going to be partitioned.   He says even though the people do not want it the English do and they must know best.     Now he explains that he heard that England is also to be partitioned into two countries.  

"The Hounds of Fate" (1911) is as good as a one of the best of Thomas Hardy's short stories,  which it kind of reminds me of.   It is the only tinged with real pain story of  Saki I have read (I have read 43 since my blog began, and as I said earlier, posted on 19 of them).   "The Hound" sounds almost like something Thomas Hardy might have written.   It opens with a man very down on his luck, homeless and with only a few pennies to his name.     Saki does a wonderful job setting things up for us in the opening paragraph so I will let him speak (and I also want readers to see his prose style in this story):

In the fading light of a close dull autumn afternoon Martin Stoner plodded his way along muddy lanes and rut-seamed cart tracks that led he knew not exactly whither. Somewhere in front of him, he fancied, lay the sea, and towards the sea his footsteps seemed persistently turning; why he was struggling wearily forward to that goal he could scarcely have explained, unless he was possessed by the same instinct that turns a hard-pressed stag cliffward in its last extremity. In his case the hounds of Fate were certainly pressing him with unrelenting insistence; hunger, fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain, and he could scarcely summon sufficient energy to wonder what underlying impulse was driving him onward. Stoner was one of those unfortunate individuals who seem to have tried everything; a natural slothfulness and improvidence had always intervened to blight any chance of even moderate success, and now he was at the end of his tether, and there was nothing more to try. 

Martin decides to stop off at a farm house he passes and ask for a meal.    When he comes to the door and old man, seemingly a family employee, greets him as "Master Tom" and says he always knew he would return from Australia one day.  He offers to get him dinner and serves him the best meal he has had in years.   He then tells Martin that his employer, a very old woman and seemingly the mother or grandmother of Tom, had told him that if Tom ever returns he is to stay and be told he will inherit the property one day just as planned before he left.  Martin has now figured out they are mistaking him for someone else but he sees no reason to explain the error.     One day he looks at a number of old family photos and the resemblance of himself and Tom is striking.   Soon Tom is told by the old family servant and farm manager that people in the community have not forgotten the terrible thing he did that made him flea to Australia.   We never learn what that was but everywhere he goes people give him hate- filled looks.   Martin is worried over what Tom did but he cannot ask as it would expose his false identity.  I will leave the rest of the plot untold.      There is a surprise ending to the story but it is organic to the plot.   "The Hounds of Fate" makes me wish Saki would have taken himself  a bit more seriously.


Saki is often dismissed as a surprise ending writer.  OK no denying this that is by and large what he is but he is funny, very perceptive, wise when he tries to be and his mannered prose is a joy to read.   Maybe as some say his intelligence is of the too smart malicious child but we need that also.

All of Saki's stories can easily be found online.


Mel u

"The Birth of a Man" and "The Icebreaker" by Maxim Gorky

"The Birth of a Man"  (1916, 20 pages)
"The Icebreaker" (1914, 32 pages)

Some Rambling Notes on Why Gorky

is not a very  popular writer.  

"The Birth of a Man" and "The Icebreaker" are both included in the collection of Gorky's short stories, Through Russia, first published in 1923.   (All of the stories in the collection  are translated by C. J. Hogarth).   I recently "discovered" that the short stories of Gorky (1868 to 1936-Russia) are amazing looks at life in late Czarist Russia among the poorest of the poor.   I have known off Gorky for many years but just read my first work by him a few days ago.   There are as far as I could find very few blog posts on Gorky.   A little research quickly revealed the reason he is now so little read and is held in almost contempt by many.    (There is some background information on Gorky in my prior two posts on him).


'Gorky is seen as the "pet" of Joseph Stalin.   There are lots of pictures of  Gorky and Stalin together and even a famous in its day painting of Gorky reading to an apparently thrilled Stalin.   There are pictures of Gorky posing with the head of the secret police, with generals, and with Lenin.  He was on stamps and coins and statues all over Russia.   Everyone in Russia at one time had to say they loved his work even if they never read it at all.    To be the pet writer of Stalin had to have been near the literary kiss of death among the readers of the western world.   Meaning this pretty literally,  being the favorite writer of Stalin is on a level with being endorsed as a great writer by Hitler.   I do not yet know if Gorky knew of the horrible consequences of Stalin's policies and turned a blind eye to them in exchange for mansions and great fame or if he sincerely believed Stalin was a great man.  A writer can have barbaric or totally naive political views and still be a great writer.   I think Gorky was not taught in English and American schools because of his political views so no one ended up reading him.

I kind of think as one reads more of Gorky, his work was "pure" up until the Bolsheviks took power and then he became increasingly a political writer.   In Gorky's defense, if Stalin decided to make a "pet" of him it would have been very dangerous to refuse his kindness so maybe Gorky was trapped.

OK enough on my no doubt half baked theories!

The five short stories I have so far read by Gorky (I now have found 17 translated stories online) are incredible depictions of life among the sub-peasants in late Czarist Russian (1895 to 1915 or so).    The poor in his stories make the poor in Hugo or Dickens look comfortable!   The realism of his stories did get him locked up by the Czarist secret police and noticed by Lenin.

If every there was a writer who wrote about those who had no one to speak for them, it was Gorky.   He does not write like Tolstoy or Turgenev of the rooted in place peasant but of the very rootless millions that were turned out by their masters with no where to go and no real way to live.   Millions of the people like those in Gorky's stories died as a result of state policy and the total indifference of the Czarist policies.  

I will just speak very briefly of the two stories by Gorky I most recently read as I will be reading and posting on more of his work in 2012.

"The Birth of a Man" is set in the Russian country side.   It is narrated in the first person by a tramp, a man without a master.   He encounters a group of  "famine pilgrims" out on the road looking for food and facing death by starvation.   One of the women is pregnant and is about to give birth.   The narrator wants to help her but first he has to be sure she has no man in her life that might cause him trouble.   She has been abandoned.   The scenes of the man bringing the baby into the world are like nothing I have read elsewhere.     He knows pretty much nothing about the procedure and it is the woman's first baby.    It is all very moving without being mawkish like one might find in most of the writers of the era.    You will not find a scene like this in the lady writers of the era.

"The Icebreakers" is set on a frozen river.   There are a number of people in the story, all working poor stuck on or around an icebreaker ship whose job it is to keep the river open for traffic.    (If my memory of history is right-and no I was not there in person-workers on icebreakers and naval ships were among the first to support the Bolsheviks with the revolution began.)   Workers have their conflicts with their boss, a 15 year old son of the owner of a business.   The workers steal nails to trade for drink and when the son threatens to tell his father they just tell him go ahead we will just say we  have been stealing for a long time only you never saw it.   The fun in this story is in the normally behind the scenes conversations of the workers with each other.   We also feel a real sense of danger as they try to walk across the thawing ice.

I am very glad I gave Gorky a try.   I will be reading a lot more of his work,  for sure 13 or so more short stories and his major novel about women in the revolution, Mother.   I will post on the ones I think are most worth reading, maybe all of them.


Question- If Gorky knew Stalin was a mass murderer (20+ million as a minimum) and wrote in defense of his policies for the sake of personal comfort, would that turn you off so much that you would not read his work?    I admit whenever I read the work of German writers from the WWII era,  I look to see if they supported the Nazis.   I would probably not read the work of a Filipino writer who was a great supporter of Ferdinand Marcos (an angel compared to Stalin!)

Both of these stories can be downloaded as Kindles or in other formats (and read online) at eBooks@Adelaide, an excellent easy to use source for free e books.

Mel u