The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1872)

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880-France) spent thirty years working on The Temptation of Saint Anthony before the final version was published in 1872, longer than any of his other works.    His Madame Bovary (1857) is nearly always listed among the ten best novels of all times.   I personally prefer his Sentimental Education (1869).   His few short stories show a very different side of Flaubert and are must reading for lovers of that form.   

As I began to work my way through The Temptation of Saint Anthony (as translated by M. Walter Dunne) my first reaction was "this is really a weird book" by a man truly obsessed with what he is writing about.   

It was inspired by a painting Flaubert saw of the temptations suffered by a third century saint, an anchorite, who lived in complete isolation on a mountain top in Egypt.   Written to a large extent as if it were a play, it depicts the fleshly temptations and the intellectual doubts that the devil sent to Anthony one night in the form of an incredible dream.   

There are  a lot of historical and religious references in this book.   Flaubert, a Catholic, had his own issues and temptations and I think this book stems in part from that.   

I really enjoyed The Temptations of Saint Anthony.   It is not what you might expect of the author of Madame Bovary.   I found it a wonderful almost compulsive work that I am glad I have now read.   As I began to the book my first thought was "this is really a weird book".  As I ended it my thought was "wow, weirder than it was at the start".   

I hope in 2012 to reread Sentimental Education and read for the first time his novel set in Carthage, Salammbo.

Please share with us your experience with Flaubert, beyond Madame Bovary.   

Mel u

Access Thirteen Tales by Xi Xu

Access: Thirteen Tales by Xi Xu (2011)

Access: Thirteen Tales  is an amazing collection of short stories by Xu Xi.   Set in Hong Kong and among those in the vast Chinese diaspora,  the stories are mostly about women, the ties of family, the inescapable consequences  of deep enculturation, the pervasive power of money, sex and loneliness.   Some of the women are highly educated and successful and some barely eke out a living.    The collection  is also very much about what it means to be a Hong Kong Chinese in the opening decades of the 21th century.   The people in the stories are very real.   Xu Xi makes them come alive for us in just a few pages.   We understand the people in these stories and how they got to where they are in their lives.   Xu Xi's stories show literature can also help us understand how we got to where we are in our own lives.   Xu Xi helps us see the universal in the very particularized people in her stories.   

I will spotlight two of the thirteen short stories in the collection so readers can get a feel for her work.  Most of the stories are between ten and twenty pages long.


"Space" is a brilliant short story about a never married sixty seven year old woman with no children living by herself in Hong  Kong.   Her brother has recently died and her nephew and his wife want her to move to America to live with them.   As the story opens, it was exciting and very interesting to learn the aunt has a close near intimate Internet relationship with a seventy year old American living in New York City who is a self taught Sinologist.   Her nephew Francis and his wife are in Hong Kong for a visit.   They are doing all they can to persuade Aunt Kar-Li to move to America.   They tell her they have a big room for her and also mention a retirement community. Kar-Li suspects their motives may be impure as she thinks they want her to sell her apartment in Hong Kong to invest in the three restaurants they own.    There is a great deal in this story.   It deals in a very subtle fashion with the conflicts between older Chinese and their younger relatives in terms of adherence to Confucian values.     The aunt knows that she is in part going to be used by her nephew and his wife once she moves but the family ties are just too powerful for anyone to really try to throw away.   


"Lady Day" is a really amazing story about a post operative transsexual prostitute.   The story line is very interesting and kept my attention level very high.    This is a story about deception of the self and the other.   About the power of sex to dominate and the reverse side of this when a person transforms  into  a commodity.   All swords seem to be two sided in the world of Xi Xu.   "Lady Day" is fairly explicit in its descriptions of what the clients want her to do.   It is in a way a woman's fantasy story about how the life of prostitute works out when  things goes very well.  Of course the story ends before Lady Day's looks begin to fade and we know the dark side of this fantasy world will take over soon.   


The people in these stores are often defined by their jobs.   Almost everyone works hard and is very money driven.   I was glad to see that many of the women in the stories are very high achievers both in commerce and education.   


Xu Xi is from Hong Kong.   She has published nine books.   She won an O Henry prize for best short story. (It is included in the collection.)  She has been a distinguished visiting writer at the University of Iowa.   She teaches at the City University of Hong Kong as well as the Vermont College of Fine Arts.   


Access Thirteen Tales will be published on November 25, 2011. There will be a book launch party November 25 at 630PM at the  City University of Hong Kong to which all readers are invited.   


(There are additional details about the launch event and about the very interesting and highly impressive  career of Xi Xu on her web site.)


I was provided a complementary e-book of this work.   


Readers of the stories of Jhuma Lahiri will relate very well to these stories.    I am very glad I had the opportunity to read the work of Xi Xu and endorse her work without reservation.   


Here is a link to the publisher's web page.


Mel u

"Almos' a Man" by Richard Wright

"Almos' a Man" by Richard Wright (1940, 8 pages)

I am having a lot of fun reading the short stories in a 1947 collection of short stories my cousin Bonnie kindly sent me.   I was happy to see a story by Richard Wright (1908 to 1960-Mississippi, USA) included.   Out of seventy stories, it is the only one by a person of color included in the collection.   Wright is most famous for Native Son, then Black Boy followed in popularity among his works by Uncle Tom's Children and The Outsider.   His work is mostly about the lives of African Americans living in the American South and the great racial prejudice they experienced.   Of his work, in the long ago I have read  Native Son.   Wright is considered a very important writer.    


One of the things I have seen in the several works of fiction I have read about the colonial experience is that one of the very worse consequences of colonialism is that the colonized come to believe they are inferior to their masters.   This can and does stay inside the psyches of people for generations after political independence is achieved.    One side effect of this is that the men of once colonized countries often feel a need to behave in a very "macho" way to prove their manhood.   Sadly manhood is equated with a gun.   


I will keep my post short as I do hope others will one day read this story.   The lead character is a 17 year old African American man living in the American South.    He maybe a bit learning disabled as his mother keeps his wages for him as she feels he does not have the good sense to handle his own money.   There is one thing Dave wants more than anything else, something that will prove he is a man.   He wants a gun.   He asks his mother to give him the $2.00 it costs to buy a used gun.   She is at first very upset by this but she gives in to him.


Not to my great surprise, something terrible happens as a result of it.  OK it is terrible but it made me laugh and unless I am warped you might laugh also.   When his neighbors and his boss find out about what happened with the gun they all laughed also.   Everybody laughed but Dave who saw no humor in it at all.    I will leave the rest of the plot unspoiled.   This is a very good short story, it will make you think and unless you are a saint it will make you laugh.   


This brief story (it does use politically unacceptable language and dialect that might offend also) really gets deep into the consequences of racism.   


There is a good article on Wright here which also has links to some of his work.   


Please share with us your experience with Richard Wright.


Mel u

"Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad

"Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad (1912, 28 pages)

I have recently posted on two short works of fiction by Joseph Conrad  (1857 to 1924).  He was born in Poland but became a British citizen and is considered one of the greatest of English novelists. In the long ago, I read most of his major novels, in the last year I have read his "The Lagoon" and his very famous The Heart of Darkness.   I ended up doing two posts on The Heart of Darkness, the second one was a follow up to some great comments from readers.   


I am reading through all of the short stories in a wonderful 1947 anthology of short stories my cousin Bonnie kindly gave me.   It has been in the family since publication so the book means a lot to me.  There are a lot of wonderful stories by new to me authors and I have posted on some of them.   "Secret Sharer" was one of the stories included in the collection.   


"The Secret Sharer" is a very weird hard to put a meaning on story, or at least it was for me.  There are two main characters in the story.   The captain of a ship at sea is one of them.   He is  newly appointed and does not know much about the crew or the ship.   The second main character is a man who swims naked up to the ship while it is far from sea.   The captain is the only one who sees the man and he takes him into has cabin and hides him.   He finds out the man has murdered a man on a ship and jumped overboard to escape.   The captain keeps him hidden in his cabin for several days.   He even endangers the ship to help the man escape.


The mystery in this story is why the captain does what he does.     Maybe it is wrong to look for a profound meaning in this story, maybe it is just a very well done story of the sea.  


You can find almost all of Conrad's fiction online.  


The next Conrad work I read will probably be "Amy Foster".


Mel u

"The Indigo Terror" by Satyajit Ray

"The Indigo Terror" by Satyajit Ray  সত্যজিত রায়  (1968, 7 pages)


Indian Literature on The Reading Life

Satyajit Ray (1921 to 1992-Calcutta, India) is a towering cultural icon.   He came from a very distinguished family know for its accomplishments in the arts and literature.   He is universally acknowledged as the greatest of all Indian film directors.   He was given an honorary Academy Award in 1992 for the body of his work.    (There is a detailed article on his life and accomplishments here.)   He was also a very prolific writer.   He wrote numerous highly regarded children's books as well as twelve collections of short stories.  


" The Indigo Terror" is a brilliant story that combines an account of the life of a man in contemporary Indian with some fascinating history lessons and a brilliant dream sequence that seems very real as we read it.   


The lead character Aniruddha Bose works in an office but his real passion is for his work as an amateur short story writer and  his studies of the history of indigo production in India.   He read everything he could find on this topic and really was an expert.  In order to more fully appreciate this story I think it helps to know that during the 19th century the British had a monopoly on the production of indigo dye.   The workers on these plantations were kept in virtual slavery and treated with the utmost cruelty.  Almost 10,000 square kilometers in India were devoted to  the production of indigo.  Before synthetic dyes this was a very lucrative business.   


"The Indigo Terror" does a really good job of making the central character seem real.   He is a single man who lives a simple life of work, reading and writing and time with his family.   One day he gets a letter from an old friend five hours a way by car inviting him to come stay for a week.   He has a car so he takes some vacation time and sets off to go to the house of his friend.   The route will take him through the heart of the old indigo plantation area.   


The scenes on the road are fun.   I really felt like I was on the road in rural Bengali.   He ends up with two flat tires and one spare, in the middle of the night, so he is forced to seek lodging along the way.   It is dark and there are not a lot of houses so he knocks on the first door of the first house he finds.   The people inside are very hospitable and offer him food and tell him he can sleep in a bungalow on the property.   (Interestingly, to me any way, "Bungalow" entered the English language in the 17th century as a borrowed word from Bengali).    


I debated whether or not to tell the rest of the plot.   "The Indigo Terror"  is extremely  intelligent and takes us very deeply into the traumatic effects of colonialism and it is also a lot of fun to read.   I want others to have the pleasure of reading this story so I will not spoil the story for anyone.


I endorse this story without reservations to all.  


You can read it online HERE.  


It was translated from Bengali by Barnali Saha.


Please share with us your suggestion for other South Asian Short Stories.


Mel u

Harold Hardrada: The Last Viking by Michael Burr

Harold Hardrada: The Last Viking by Michael Burr (2011, 416 pages)

An Exciting Historical Novel

Set in the 11th Century

Harold Hardrada: The Last Viking by Michael Burr (New Zealand) is a very exciting debut historical novel.   Set in the second half of the 11th century, it opens with a vividly described Viking raid on a convent in France, in the Brittany region    The violence and the terror of this event is brought totally to life by Burr.   The scenes of the rapes of the nuns are very powerful and are not for those who want to hide from the horror of history.  An attack on a convent is great fun for the Vikings and is also a very low risk target.     

During the raid we meet the character who is to be the central driving narrative force in Harold Hardrada: The Last Viking.   A fifteen year old boy, crippled and deformed and left by his parents at the convent, kills one of the attackers just as he is getting ready to rape a nun. The way he is killed is kind of funny or at least appropriate.   At first the other Vikings want to kill him but the leader Harold Hardrada decides to keep him as a kind of pet and thinks his ability to read and write will prove useful.   He is given the name "The Scraeling".

The Scraeling stays with Harold for many years and sort of becomes "the brains" of the Viking troop.   He is never really accepted but he is tolerated.   

Burr's narrative covers a lot of ground.   In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Harold and his men are body guards to the Byzantine empress Zoe and get involved in very devious murder plot aimed at the very highest levels of society.  

This is just one of the several adventures of the Vikings Burr treats us to.

This book reminded me a lot of the great historical novels of Garry Jennings such as Aztec.    There is a lot of sex, a lot of violence and intrigue combined with meticulously researched historical detail.   It never gets boring and something exciting is always about to happen.    The ending caught me by surprise but it felt very right.

More information about the book and the author can be found at the web page of the publisher, Knox Robinson Publishing.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was sent a free E-book by the publisher.

I feel it is overpriced as hardback at least and do not endorse purchase at this price.

Mel u

Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon-Two New York City Writers

"Some Like Them Cold" by Ring Lardner (1924, 12 pages)
"Blood Pressure" by Damon Runyon (1932, 9 pages)

Two Very American Writers

Ring Lardner

Ring Lardner (1885 to 1933-Michigan, USA) and Damon Runyon (1880 to 1946-Kansas, USA) have a lot in common.   Neither were born in New York City but as soon as they were old enough they moved there.    Both died in New York City.   Both married and had several children.  Both were long time sports writers and both mostly wrote about baseball in their newspaper  columns.   Both wrote for the Broadway stage.  Both made use of a lot of New York City slang in their fiction.   Both treat women as  "girlies"  to be valued for their looks and attitude.   Both write about "tough guy" type of characters and both were comic writers.   Both wrote straightforward unpretentious entertainment that is still a lot of fun to read.

Ringgold Lardner's (he never liked his real first name) first novel was about a minor league baseball player and was an epistolary novel.   Virginia Woolf greatly praised  this work, You Know Me Al.   He was very successful in marketing his short stories and wrote the script for a Broadway Play with George S. Kaufman.   He was friends with many New City writers.   He is said to have used so much New York City slang in his short stories that when they were reprinted in England (where he enjoyed immense popularity) a glossary was often included.    "Some Like Them Cold" is the first epistolary short story I have read.   The story opens with a long letter from a young unmarried man, by profession a piano player who aspires to be a big time music writer, to a woman he met on a train from New York City to Chicago.   He says over and over that he does not want her to think he is the kind of "fresh guy" who talks to all the girls on the train.

She writes him back, they start out addressing each other as Mr and Miss, saying she is not the kind of girl who normally speaks to strange men on the train but she felt something good about the writer.   Their correspondence gradually becomes more intimate and they become close through the letters.   Lardner does a great job of individuating the characters.   When we see the man addressing his letters to "Dear Girlie" and hers to "Mr Man" maybe we know this is not from the 21th century!   Gradually the man begins to brag of his great success as a music writer and tells the woman he is meeting a lot of women but he does not want a "fast New York City" type of woman.  (The woman is from Chicago.)   As the letters go on the man gets phonier and phonier in his claims.   The final letter form the woman is just a flat out work of genius.   She gets mad and gets even but she never loses her dignity.       I do not see anyone disliking this story.   It is very good entertainment, well written and is in a kind of unique format for a short story.

Here is what Virginia Woolf said  about Lardner

"Virginia Woolf. In a review of "You Know Me Al" that must have startled Lardner, Woolf said that he "writes the best prose to come our (Britain's) way," often, she noted, "in a language which is not English." Further probing Lardner's Americanness, she observed that "It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner's stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner's interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the American writer; it has given him a clue, a center, a meeting place for the diverse activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother." 

Damon Runyon

Damon Runyon is even more a New York City writer than Lardner.   He specialized in near gangster type characters (but decent gangsters who give to Salvation Army and all) and disreputable people in general.  He was very much into the world of Broadway.   As I began to read "Blood Pressure" I thought to myself I have heard these conversations some where before but I was not sure where.   Once the narrator of the story, who has been told by his doctor to watch his blood pressure, starts to talk about the floating crap game of Nathan Detroit I flashed to a movie I have seen numerous times, Guys and Dolls (1955- starring Marlon Brandon, Frank Sinatra, and Jean Simmons).   It turns out "Blood Pressure" was the basic source for the musical which became the movie, Guys and Dolls (still often show on TV).   "Blood Pressure" is a story about New York City tough guys.   In 1932 (at the start of the Great Depression in the USA) this meant shooting dice, selling then banned alcohol, and gambling on the horses.

"Blood Pressure" was also a lot of fun to read and I think most will enjoy it.

Both of these stories were in a  1947 collection of short stories my cousin Bonnie very kindly gave to me.   A lot of Lardner's work can be found online at Project Gutenberg but it appears the work of Runyon may not yet be in the public domain. 

Please share your experience with Lardner or Runyon with us.

Mel u