Seamus Heaney

"The Banks of the Vistula" by Rebecca Lee (1997).

read the story here

The Guardian this week named Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee as their pick for a top short story book of 2013.   I was very glad to find a link to one of the stories in the collection on the public web page of The Atlantic.  

author bio (from web page of Penguin)

Rebecca Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The City Is a Rising Tide and the short story collection Bobcat and Other Stories. She has been published in The Atlantic and Zoetrope, and in 2001 she received a National Magazine Award for her short fiction. Originally from Saskatchewan, Lee is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is now a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

My main purpose in this post is to let my readers know that one of Rebecca Lee's short stories can be read online.  "The Banks of Vistula" is set in a university.   A young female college student is taking a challenging class in psycholinguistics.  The professor is from Poland.  His background is a bit mysterious or even malevolent as he served as an officer in the Soviet Army when the occupied Poland.  The student finds and obscure book in the library, one know one has checked out in decades.  She copies a chapter nearly word for word and turns it in as her work.   The professor is convinced it is plagiarism and he calls her into the office.  She tells him it is her work but she did talk it over with her roommate.  The professor then wants to meet the roommate.  There are lots of great twists and turns in this story.  It gives us a great feel for academic life and its conflicts.   

I really liked this story and hope to read more of her work.

Mel u

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Nora Hurston ( 1891 to 1960, Alabama, USA) is an American classic and historically an important book.    Many value it for the great insight it shows into the lives of African Americans in Florida in the 1930s.  I would say it is near must reading.  

Hurston graduated from a very elite women's college, Bernard, the first person of color to do so.  She majored in anthropology, studying under Francis Boas and with Margaret Mead.   Her anthropological field studies were among poor African Americans in rural central Florida and the Everglades.   She was criticized by some for making the people she wrote about, especially the men, seem like unintelligent, poorly educated people driven by their sex drive to self destructive life styles.  The men have nick names like "Tea Cake" and the women fall for any fast talking man who comes along.  As is accurate, society was very divided along racial lines.  Much of the lasting power of the book is in seeing how the savage legacy of racism has impacted the people in the story.

The conversations are meant to be in a dialect that mirrors the speech patterns of the people who lived in the world Hurston wrote about.  Some are going to be turned off by some or much of this and I can see why some found it patronizing.  I don't normally like dialect in fiction and I did get tired of it here sometimes.  Hurston can write exquisite prose and there is much to relish in this book.  

The heart of the book is in the character of Janie.  In her quest for love, she made some very bad decisions.  The story is told as if it were Janie relaying her story to a friend.  I thought one of the highlights of the book was in a description of a major hurricane in the Florida Everglades.    

Anyone into African American literature must read this, most probably already have.  If you want to learn some fascinating real Florida history, read this. If you are into post colonial literature read this.  Hurston died in obscurity and poverty in Fort Pierce, Florida.  One can only wish she would have benefitted from the movie made of her book, with Haley Barry in the starring role. 

Mel u

"The Grave" by Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter (Texas, USA 1890 to 1980) won just about every American literary award worth winning, including the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award.  Her most famous work is her novel, Ship of Fools.  I was very glad to see that an excellent web page I follow, Recommended Reading had placed one of her short stories online.  Her full collection of short stories comes to nearly 1000 pages and many say they are her best work.  Her stories work the same ground as Eudora Welty, William Faulkner,  Flannery O'Connor and Nora Hurston, the rural American south in the days between the world wars.  Like these stories, teachers should note that "The Grave Yard" contains politically incorrect racial terms.  

My main purpose in posting on this story, besides trying to seal it in my porous memory, is to give my readers the opportunity to read one of her stories online for free.  The story is set in rural Texas.  The grandmother of the family moved there some years ago as her husband wanted to buried there. In tie they start a family graveyard and lots of people join the grandfather.  A brother and sister, 9 and 12 are out hunting rabbit.  In an amazingly powerful scene, they begin to skin a rabbit they shot only to find she was about ready to give birth.  This deeply impacts the girl.   There is a lot in this story about life in rural Texas. I loved the closing lines of the story:

"Miranda never told, she did not even wish to tell anybody. She thought about the whole worrisome affair with confused unhappiness for a few days. Then it sank quietly into her mind and was heaped over by accumulated thousands of impressions, for nearly twenty years. One day she was picking her path among the puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city of a strange country, when, without warning, in totality, plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened, the episode of the far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind’s eye. She was so reasonlessly horrified she halted suddenly staring, the scene before her eyes dimmed by the vision back of them. An Indian vendor had held up before her a tray of dyed-sugar sweets, shaped like all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. They were in gay colors and smelled of vanilla, maybe… It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had remembered vaguely always until now as the time she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves. Instantly upon this thought the dreadful vision faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face she had forgotten, standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands."

There is a deep wisdom in this story.   

Mel uRead the story here

"Everything is Nice" by Jane Bowles

"Everything is Nice" by Jane Bowles

my prior post on Jane Bowles -contains background data

As far as I can find, up until yesterday you could not read any of the work of Jane Bowles online.  My main purpose in this post is to let people know they can now read, for free, one of her magnificent short stories online. 

As the story opens, in a "Blue Muslim town" a Muslim woman starts a conversation with a Nazarene woman she does not know.  It is a small town with a mixed population of Muslims and Christians.  The Muslim woman asks the other where she is going.  She shows the Muslim woman a porcupine she is taking to her aunt, country people eat them we learn.   There is no big plot action in the story, nothing really happens but two women of different cultures see more of their similarities than they once did.  

I really recommend this story.   

Mel u

This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann (2003). The Reading Life Recommended Reading Order for His Novels

I am now a bit sad to have read all six of Colum McCann's novels.   I know it will be a few years until I have the pleasure of reading another one.  This Side of Brightness is my least favorite of his novels but I still enjoyed reading it.  McCann's descriptive powers make anything he writers worth reading.  

This Side of Brightness is about the men who dug the first tunnel into New York City.  The work begun as W W I was firing up.  The men, a very diverse group, who dug the tunnel were called "sand hogs".  The work was very dangerous and very hard.  The sand hogs bonded across national and racial boundaries.  You were a sand hog before you were Irish, Italian, Black, or German.  A lot of the book is taken up with the ramifications of racial prejudice.  We follow several sand hogs as they live on after the tunnel is completed, through three generations.    

Here are my suggestions as to reading order for his six novels.

1.  Let the Great World Keep on Spinning.  His most awarded book to date.

2.  Transatlantic is actually my favorite but it is not yet as famous as the above work.  It is nominated for The Booker Prize and has to be a strong contender for the 2014 Irish novel of the year prize.

Proceed on in McCann if you really like these novels, I certainly did.

3.  Zoli - revolves about a Roma woman (gypsy) who became a well known poet.  I am very interested in this culture so that helped me like the book.

4.  Dancer - about Rudolph Nureyev, fascinating in parts.  

 

5.   Everything in this Country Must. -   An internationally roaming but rooted in Ireland search by a man for his father.  Parts are brilliant

6.  This Side of Brightness 6th place McCann still worth reading.

What are your favorite McCann novels and stories?

Mel u 

"The Bed of Arrows" by Gopinath Mohanty

an award winning novelist.

"Gopinath Mohanty (Oriya: ଗୋପୀନାଥ ମହାନ୍ତି) (1914–1991), winner of the prestigious jnanpith award, eminent Oriya novelist of the mid-twentieth century is arguably the greatest Oriya writer after Fakir Mohan Senapati."

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/

"The Bed of Arrows" is an interesting story about a marriage.  The couple in the story have been married a long time.   It was customary for girls to be married, via brokered arrangents, shortly after reaching puberty.   By age forty, women were off very physically taxed, worn out, by numerous yearly child births and household work.   In the marriage in this story the 45 year old wife see herself as an old woman while her husband is in his prime.   We see them slowly drift apart.  It is obvious the husband is  having affairs but the wife cannot or does not want to see it.

Mel u