"Stick Fighting Days" by Olufemi Terry-2010 Winner of the Caine Prize for African Literatrure

2010 Caine Prize Winner

"Stick Fighting Days" by Olufemi Terry (2009, 10 pages)

The winner of the Caine Prize was announced yesterday.    I admit until I read about this in a Tweet from one of the great people I follow now on Twitter I did not know what this was.    The Caine Prize is considered Africa's Leading Literary award.    Entry is open to anyone from an African country and the form of work is the short short.   The patrons of the prize include three African winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka.    Chinua Achebe, winner of the International Man Booker prize,  is also a patron.    The award comes with 10,000 British Pounds  and is given out annually at a celebratory event in Oxford.     The short story is seen as a continuation of the tradition of African story telling which is one of the reasons the award focuses on that genre.    The award began in 2000.   

Olufemi Terry is from Sierra Leone.   (You can see his photograph and learn more about the award at the official web page for the Caine Prize).     There is very little biographical data on Terry on this web page and I could not find any in a quick search.   He is young and hopefully has a long writing career ahead of him.

"Stick Fighting Days" is set in and around a huge garbage dump in an unspecified African city.    The lead character is 15, has no sign of having any family or home, and prides himself on his skill with stick fighting.    Stick fighting is a form of martial arts using a long narrow hand held stick.   (I learned about it from this article.)

Prowess at stick fighting is the basis for the self esteem and Identity of Raul, the lead character and narrator of    "Stick Fighting Days".    Terry does a very good job in the creation of the world inhabited by Raul.   He does not make use of exposition but rather lets us see the world through the narrator's eyes.   Raul has his rivals in stick fighting whom he respects as fellow warriors.    Raul lives from  food he finds in the garbage dump.     There is a long literary tradition of detailing the effects of drugs on the consciousness but "Stick Fighting Days" is the first work I have read that focuses on the effects of glue on the psyche.   

I think one of the deeper aspects of this very well done story is the sense that Raul and his fellow stick fighters are the descendants of once proud warriors who were the creators of strong cultural traditions in which one could take pride.     Proud warriors no more, they are considered old at 17 and violent capricious ends will find most of them.    I do not want to give away the ending of "Stick Fighting Days" but it was very well done, exciting and very cinematic in realization and more than a little shocking    The language is simple and direct.    We feel a sense of loss when we realize that all of the characters in this story -and their real life models-will probably end up with short pointless lives.    

A good short story creates a world whose logic we can understand and enter into if we wish.   The world of  "Stick Fighting Days" may be very far from our world and through a well written story Terry has brought it to life for us.   

You can read the entire story (as well as all the other short stories that were short listed for the prize) here.

Mel u

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (1938, 386 pages)

Rebecca is the first book by Daphne Du Maurier (1907 to 1989-London) I have now had the extreme pleasure of reading.   I was sucked into the world of Manderley (the English estate where the novel is set) from the very start.     I loved the prose style much more than I thought I would.    I was kept completely in suspense as one shocking mystery after another was revealed.    Some of the characters at first seemed not totally developed but I think maybe that is because Du Maurier is so subtle in how she does things.    I do not want to give away any of the plot of this wonderful book.   Even though it has sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages there are still millions of people who have not yet read it and I hate spoilers in posts myself.     The story is told from the point of view of the second wife of Mr Maxim de Winter, his first wife being the deceased Rebecca.

I would have liked to know more about Rebecca and her secret life, I admit.    It seemed strange at first how everyone smoked but this is a product of the time of the novel (1938).    Some will find the portrayal of a mentally handicapped character infelicitous.   I have not yet seen the Alfred Hitchcock movie based on this book but I could visualize it making a great movie with panoramic shots of the estate and the sea coast  and close ups of the marvelously evil Rebecca.        I found the scenes where the second wife of the husband of Rebecca (the narrator of the story) first came to live at the estate to be really well done.   The novel had a very Gothic feel to it with evil servants, mysterious pasts, sea fogs and people who are not quite who they seem to be.    


Du Maurier wrote over 30 novels.   Rebecca is the most highly regarded one, it seems.     The action of the book is easy to follow.   The style is good old fashioned story telling.   The quality of the prose is good, in places really good and in places seems like it was written in a hurry (she did write a novel a year).    I liked this book a really lot and endorse it for anyone who likes a good mystery centering on interesting people.    It is not a heavy intellectual book and it does not break new literary grounds.   It entertained me, drew me into its world and made  me sorry when it was over and some of the prose was wonderfully done.    I enjoyed all of the minor characters and I was never able to second guess her plot developments.  


Du Maurier came from an interesting literary family.   Her father was a novelist and a Punch cartoonist.   


I am participating in two reading challenges for which this book can be counted.


The Daphne Du Maurier Challenge hosted by Books-a-Rama


The 1930's Challenge hosted by Things Mean a Lot


I want to read at least two more books by Du Maurier soon and would appreciate any suggestions.   


Mel u

"A Telephone Call" by Dorothy Parker

"A Telephone Call"  by Dorothy Parker (1930, 5 pages)

Dorothy Parker (1893 to 1967, New Jersey, USA) is someone whose work I have wanted to sample for a while.    Parker achieved a lot in her life.    She was on the original board of directors of the New Yorker magazine upon its founding in 1925, she was a theater editor for Vanity Fair magazine, an editorial assistant on Vogue , wrote book reviews for Esquire Magazine and published over 300 short stories, articles, and poems in a wide range of American publications.   She also wrote screen plays for Hollywood and received two academy award nominations for best script, one for A Star is Born in 1937 and one for The Little Foxes in 1941.   Parker became an advocate for various organizations seeking social justice and as a result of this was blacklisted as a communist and found it difficult to work in Hollywood after that.    Parker had a tumultuous drama filled alcohol fueled personal life.    

I have wanted to read one of her short stories ever since I began reading short stories a few months ago.   I just found an example of her work on line for the first time yesterday.    Under the terms of American Copyright law (as I understand it) Parker's work should be protected until 2037 so I am assuming either the web page where I read this story got permission to reprint it or it slipped under the radar but that does explain why it is very hard to find any of her work online.    Of course not all countries have bound themselves  by these laws so there could be other reasons why this story is online.

"A Telephone Call" (1930, 5 pages) is the interior monologue of a woman waiting for a man she is infatuated with to call her as he had promised he would.     This story does a good job at capturing the anxiety of someone in this situation and conveying the emotions that can have sway during such a period.     I am glad I read this story to satisfy my curiosity but she is far inferior in talent to Mansfield, O'Conner, Chopin, and of course Woolf (based on my small sample of her work).    Mansfield and Woolf did not have to please editors and the public whereas Parker depended on the popularity of her work to make her living (she did very well at her peak).     Here is a sample of her style:

"I'll call you at five, darling." "Good-by, darling.,' He was busy, and he was in a hurry, and there were people around him, but he called me "darling" twice. That's mine, that's mine. I have that, even if I never see him again. Oh, but that's so little. That isn't enough. Nothing's enough, if I never see him again. Please let me see him again, God. Please, I want him so much. I want him so much. I'll be good, God. I will try to be better, I will, If you will let me see him again. If You will let him telephone me. Oh, let him telephone me now.

The story goes on for five pages just like this.    "A Telephone Call" is not high art and was not meant to be.   It was written to be in a magazine that catered to a sense of laughing at the fate of the unfortunate  between ads  for whiskey, cigarettes and expensive clothes and to be easy to read and follow for purchasers of the magazine.      Parker was a very big contributor to the New Yorker  and was known personally for her acerbic wit and we can see that in this story.     I am glad I got to sample her work.  

Final thoughts-you can read it for free in less than 5 minutes so I am glad I satisfied my curiosity and I laughed a bit-her work has some historical import in the development of the short story  as she did come to epitomize  a New Yorker style writer during the period the New Yorker came to be a great place to publish a short story.

you can read it online here


Mel u

Rabindranath Tagore "Hungry Stones"-First Asian Nobel Prize Winner for Literature

"The Hungary Stones" by Rabindranath Tagore (1916, 8 pages, trans. from Bengali-trans. unknown)

Yesterday I was looking at the list of Nobel Prize Winners in Literature.    The first Asian Nobel Laurette was Rabindranath Tagore who won in 1913 for his vast output  of poetry and short stories.   I confess I had never heard of him and turned to  Wikipedia for help.   Tagore (1861 to 1941) was born in Kolkata, Indian into a family whose wealth and life style can now only be seen in movies.    His father owned an estate so huge that at one point in his life Tagore traveled through it on a luxurious barge and was met on the river bank by tenants paying token rents to him.   Tagore was raised mostly by servants as his mother died young and his father was very busy administrating the vast estates he owned.   Tagore was educated in classical Indian literature and at age eight began to write poetry and ended up reshaping the Bengali Language.   Later in his life he founded a school and devoted himself entirely to his writing and teachings.   His moral authority became so great that he was able to write the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, give Gandhi the title of Mahatma (teacher),  and in fact in his life had a status as a moral leader on a par with  Gandi.   He traveled to the west and met William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and other notable literary figures.   This was in a period when western writers were fascinated by Indian thinkers and Yeats wrote the preface for one of his first translations in English.   He is considered prior to WWII and perhaps even now the most widely read Indian author both in the west and in India.   

His most famous short story seems to be "Hungry Stones" published in 1916 in Hungry Stones and Other Stories.       "Hungry Stones" begins on a train.   The story is told by a man just out of college on his way to his first job.    He and his companions meet a  odd man who possesses  deep practical and spiritual knowledge.    As I read this passage I could not help but feel sad upon seeing the great respect in which this stranger was held versus how he would be received in much of the world today:

Be the topic ever so trivial, he would quote science, or comment on the Vedas, or repeat quatrains from some Persian poet; and as we had no pretence to a knowledge of science or the Vedas or Persian, our admiration for him went on increasing, and my kinsman, a theosophist, was firmly convinced that our fellow-passenger must have been supernaturally inspired by some strange "magnetism" or "occult power," by an "astral body" or something of that kind. He listened to the tritest saying that fell from the lips of our extraordinary companion with devotional rapture, and secretly took down notes of his conversation. I fancy that the extraordinary man saw this, and was a little pleased with it.

Our lead character and narrator is on his way to a new job, as collector of duties on cotton.   The area where he will pursue his occupation (the day to day operations of his job are not set out and perhaps Tagore assumed his readers would know such things) used to be the site of the palace of a great Rajah.   Now all of the palace is gone but for the stones.   He decides to live in a modest cottage there even though he is advised it is an area beset by the spirits of the dead of the palace from long ago.

The fountains play no longer; the songs have ceased; no longer do snow-white feet step gracefully on the snowy marble. It is but the vast and solitary quarters of cess-collectors like us, men oppressed with solitude and deprived of the society of women. Now, Karim Khan, the old clerk of my office, warned me repeatedly not to take up my abode there. "Pass the day there, if you like," said he, "but never stay the night." I passed it off with a light laugh. The servants said that they would work till dark, and go away at night. I gave my ready assent. The house had such a bad name that even thieves would not venture near it after dark.

At first the narrator works himself to exhaustion every night.   Then slowly the history of the location begins to work on him and he imagines (or is it real) that the occupants of the palace, especially the harem and dancing girls come to him in his dreams.   The boundary between the dream and the so called real world becomes blurred.   Soon he thinks back to the strange man on the train who spoke of the illusions behind so called reality.    He is experiencing a rebirth of the ancient beliefs of his ancestors or so he thinks at times.  At other times he thinks he has been living too long by himself in this hut and needs the company of a woman.   His faith in his own sanity is being undermined and in a deeper way he begins to see through to the concepts beneath these western impositions on  India.

  Einstein held Tagore in great regard for  his conceptualization of a non- Newtonian universe.

The world of  the stories of Tagore is remote to us but one in which we can still find great spiritual nourishment, an entry into another world and some good entertainment as well.    We really cannot say much on the literary quality of the work as it is in translation but Tagore is considered the greatest stylist of all time in the Bengali language.

Here is a link to this story and more of Tagore's work.

Mel u 
Mel u

Welcome Book Blog Hoppers

Every Friday Jennifer of Crazy For Books hosts The Book Blogger Hop-The Book Blogger Hop is a great chance to meet new to you bloggers, find some new blogs to follow and gain some great readers for your own blog.   Every week about 200 or so bloggers from all over the world participate.    I have found some excellent new blogs this way and gained some wonderful readers.    I will will follow anyone back who follows me as this is the best way to get to know about new to us blogs.

I started my blog a year ago so I could keep track of my reading, connect with others into the reading life all over the world and to learn about new books.    My blog for the last few months has been one third Asian literature, one third classics and one third short stories but I do read contemporary fiction also and even some YA once and a while.    I have various reading projects I am working on also.    My latest one is short stories by Australian writers of the 19th century.    

If you come to my blog via the hop please leave a comment so I can return the visit.    I  always return all follows.    If you are on Twitter and follow me (from my side bar button) I will return the follow

thanks for stopping by-if you have a suggestion for a short story I might like please  leave it in your comment.

Mel u

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie-Two Short Stories

"A Private Experience" 6 pages, 2008-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Quality Street" 9 pages 2010    by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977-Abba, Nigeria)  is a   a writer of huge potential.   This potential was also seen by the New Yorker  when they named her recently among 20 writers of fiction  under the age of 40 to watch.    The MacArthur foundation also recently gave her a grant.   She has written two novels, set in Nigeria, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and the Orange Prize winning Half of a Yellow Sun in 2007.    Her work centers on the cultural conflicts in Nigerian society and the life of Nigerians outside the country.    She left Nigeria at age 19 to attend college in America and has an MA from Yale.   I have to admit that up until a day or so ago when I got tweet suggesting I might like her short stories I had not yet heard of Adichie.   A number of her short stories can be read online (I will give the links at the end of the post) as well as essays, interviews, and extracts from her novels.   I read two of her short stories yesterday and really liked them both a lot.    She has just published a collection of short stories and both of these works are in that collection.    

"Quality Street" centers around the planning of the wedding of a young Nigerian woman who attended  college in Ohio.   Her mother, a wealthy widow very concerned about making bigger show of the wedding than was  had at the wedding of  the daughters of her friends, is not happy about the changes the time in American seemed to have caused in her daughter:

Perhaps Sochienne should never have been sent to school in America. But who knew a private university in Ohio would mean that Sochienne would return six years later, announcing that she was engaged to a Kenyan, refusing to eat meat, asking the baffled houseboys about fair wages, and wearing her hair in long rubbery dreadlocks.

Sochienne's mother had chosen this school because she had been assured that only the children of the wealthy went there and she was appalled when she visited and saw the casual dress of the students and worse yet the professors.   A lot is conveyed in the few lines above.    We sense that marrying a Kenyan is simply too much for the mother and she is appalled by her daughter's new found interest in  social justice.   The story just sort of jumps into the lives of the characters and does allow us to get a good grasp of their world in just a few pages.    I  think her stories have a universal appeal well beyond those interested in just the Nigerian experience.    The stories are about, among other things, the effects of colonization on the rich and the poor of any country once dominated by outside powers.  ( It should be noted that not all colonizers are western countries).  

"A Private Experience" is told from the point of view of young woman from an upper class family who went out with her sister to experience the street markets where the "common" people of Abuja (the capital of Nigeria) shop.     She is suddenly caught up in a violent riot in which having the wrong tribal background (or just look) can result in your arm being cut off with a machete.     In her extreme terror an obviously very poor woman takes her with her into an abandoned store where they should be able to safely wait out the riot.    The young woman can barely find away to relate to her rescuer as she seems so different from her.    She both fears and pities her rescuer.   In one really telling and poignant remark she tells the woman that after the riot she will have her chauffeur take the woman home.     Adichie does a very good job setting out the cultural conflicts in the world the two women are caught up in:

Even without the woman's strong Hausa accent, Chika can tell she is a Northerner, from the narrowness of her face, the unfamiliar rise of her cheekbones; and that she is Muslim, because of the scarf. It hangs around the woman's neck now, but it was probably wound loosely round her face before, covering her ears. A long, flimsy pink and black scarf, with the garish prettiness of cheap things. Chika wonders if the woman is looking at her as well, if the woman can tell, from her light complexion and the silver finger rosary her mother insists she wear, that she is Igbo and Christian. Later, Chika will learn that, as she and the woman are speaking, Hausa Muslims are hacking down Igbo Christians with machetes, clubbing them with stones. But now she says, "Thank you for calling me. Everything happened so fast and everybody ran and I was suddenly alone and I didn't know what I was doing. Thank you."

To me these are two good stories that in just a few pages build a world we can enter into.    Adichie has a sharp eye for small telling details.   Sometimes she might tell where the masters might show but that is OK.    I liked these stories a lot and I will read Half of a Yellow Sun soon, I hope.    I endorse these stories without reservation to anyone who likes a well crafted short story or wants to learn about a new to them writer who hopefully has a very prolific future ahead of them.

"Quality Street" can be read here

"A Private Experience" can be read here

If anyone has any suggestions as to other short stories that I might like (and can read online) please leave a comment.  

I think it is very generous of Adichie to allow so much of her work to be read online and look forward to watching her develop into a great short story writer.    Some might say she relies a lot on the intrinsic cultural interest of the subject matter of her stories  to make them interesting but she is writing about what she knows and is clearly passionate about.  

Her very well done official web page (link here) has links to a lot of her work.

Mel u

June 2010 Reading Life Review

June 2010 Reading Life Review

June 2010 was a good reading month for me.   I lost a little time to the World Cup.     

Japanese Novels

1. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
2. Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka
3. Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
4. The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi
5. Vita Sexualis by Ogai Mori
6. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
7. Pinball, 1973  by Haruki Murakami

I recommend without reservations all of these works with the exception of Coin Locker Babies which I enjoyed but I can see others seeing it as a work driven by one overly sensational  scene after another.    Pinball, 1973 should be read after you have enjoyed some of Murakami's major novels first.    

Western Novels

1. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendahl
2. Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev
3. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

Jacob's Room was a very enjoyable read for me though it is not among the top five Woolf novels on any list.    Diary of a Superfluous Man (really a novella by most counts) would be a great first Turgenev.   The Charterhouse of Parma is a great master work of 19th century literature that anyone into the classics should have on their one of these days list.

Short Stories

I continued reading more short stories in June.   I read twenty seven short stories and posted on all but three of them.      I began a short story related project in June, Australian Bush Writers, and read stories by several new to me Australian authors from the pre-WWI era all set in the outback.    There are a lot of these stories and I found some of the authors very talented.   Barbara Baynton's  "The Vessel" was the stand out for me so far in this category.   I continued on with my Katherine Mansfield reading project.    I read  "The Metamorphoses"  (some would count this as a novella) by Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov's lecture on it.    I also read James Joyce's "The Dead" which is on most lists of worlds ten best short  stories.   Three months ago I had, like I have found a lot of readers do, an aversion to the short story.   I now see I was wrong in this prejudice and am actively seeking out the world's best short stories along with a lot of fun minor ones.   A short story is a good way of seeing if you will like a writer.    There are 1000s and 1000s of short stories online.   Most are older stories but you can also find some newer stories by top and up and coming writers also.   


New Discovery for me of the Month-Australian Bush Writers-


 My one year Blogaversary will by on July 9 and I will do a look back post on my first year then and a second one on my blogging and reading plans for the next 12 months.  I have found, as have many, that a blog begins to take on a life of its own after time.  


  As always I thank very much those who read my posts.


I always love to get comments and suggestions of any kind-


This month I got into Twitter for the first time and am finding it a good way to connect with other book bloggers, publishers, authors, etc.   I have a twitter follow me button in my sidebar and I will happily follow back anyone who follows me.   




Mel u