"Miss Grief" by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1880, republished in Miss Grief and other Stories, edited by Anne Boyd Rioux, forthcoming February, 2016)

Any day I discover a new to me writer whose first work I read makes me want to read all their work is not an entirely bad day.   My most recent "discoveries" are Iréne Némirovsky and Clarice Lispector.  After reading  "Miss Grief" I am close to adding Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840 to 1894, USA, her grand uncle was James Fenimore Cooper) to my read all I can list.

When I saw a collection of her short stories offered to reviewers on Edelweiss I decided to request it largely because Colm Toibin contributed the foreword. I based this on my love for his novel on Henry James, The Master.    I was embarrassed as I read the foreword and introduction to learn she was at one time one of America's best selling authors, I had never heard of her.   I learned she faded from public view and was only mentioned by and large because of her long term friendship with Henry James.  James lived for a while in a villa Woolson rented in Florence.  Toibin and Anne Boyd Rioux make a lot of interesting observations about the use James might have made of their relationship in Portrait of a Lady and a few of his short stories.  The fioreward and introduction are really well done.

The anthology of her short stories is truly  a first rate production.  Every story is  introduced  and full details on the publication history of the stories is provided.  (One of my bet literary peeves centers on collections of short anthologies that do not include first publication data.)

"Miss Grief" is set in Florence.  An older slightly impoverished looking woman begins making daily visits to the home of a very sucessful American writer.  He thinks she is probably an antique dealer who knows he collects.  He keeps avoiding her, having his butler tell her he is not in.  Finally he relents and it turns out she has written something  she wants him to read.  He reluctantly agrees and she insists she will come back in a few days for his reactions.  He sees lots of faults with the work but he is deeply impressed by the sheer depth of her creation. When she returns he tells her of changes she should make in the work.  He tells her if she follows his suggestions, he will submit it to his editor for possible publication.  She adamantly refuses to his great surprise.   She begins, in the company of what he takes to be her maid, to visit regularly.  He reads more of her work and is amazed.  He tries himself to rewrite her work but he finds he cannot change it without the work falling apart.

I will leave the close unspoiled.  It is very interesting, sad and moving.

Part of the power of the story is in the very brilliant way the relationship between Miss Grief, which is actually a mispronouncing of her name, is depicted.  Of course as I read it I found it hard not to see the writer as Henry James.

I think this anthology will revise interest in Constance Fenimore Woolson.  In her day, her work way out sold Henry James.  Writers come in and out of fashion, maybe her time has returned.

I also was kindly given a forthcoming biography of the author by the editor of the collection, Anne Boyd Rioux and I will soon begin it.  I hope to read all of the stories in the collection.  

Probably I will add Woolson as one of my "project" authors but I want to read at least one more story first.

Mel u

"The Sharing of the Loaves" by Clarice Lispector

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser 

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, Clarice is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.” Benjamin Moser"

Yes, Clarice is witchcraft.  

"There was no holocaust: it all wanted to be eaten as badly as we wanted to eat it. Saving nothing for the next day, there and then I made an offering of whatever I was feeling to whatever was making me feel. It was a way of living that I hadn’t paid in advance with the suffering of waiting, a hunger born when the mouth is already nearing the food. Because now we were hungry, a complete hunger that encompassed everything down to the crumbs."

The more I read of the stories of Clarice, the more drawn under her spell I fall, the more I read, the more mystified I become.  Sometimes I feel a contempt for people and a deep hatred for the human condition in her work combined with a striving not so much to rise above that, Clarice knows that will not happen, but to simply be in an unreflective way. To eat, to bask in the sun of Rio while pondering the holocaust.  In the story the narrator is on a train trip on Saturday to go to dinner with people she does not care about, she resents to lose of her Saturday.  The food served becomes. almost a religious experience, eating an act of worship.  

I love this so perhaps all the more because I know my three readings and my Lispector  neophyte status make it beyond my comprehension.  Maybe like the feast, it simply is. 

"The food was saying crudely, happily, austerely: eat, eat and share. All that belonged to me, it was my father’s table. I ate without tenderness, I ate without the passion of piety. And without offering myself to hope. I ate with no longing. And I really did deserve that food. Because I can’t always be my brother’s keeper, and I can’t be my own any longer, oh I don’t want myself any longer. And I don’t want to shape life since existence already exists. It exists like some ground over which we all advance. Without a word of love. Without a word. But your pleasure understands mine. We are strong and we eat. Bread is love among strangers"

Mel u

"My Neighbor Radilov" by Ivan Turgenev (1856, story four in his Sportsman's Sketches, translated by Constance Garnett, 1895)

A Post by Ambrosia Boussweau, European Correspodent of The Reading Life

For a while now I have been reading on and off novellas and short stories by Ivan Turgenev (1818 to 1883).  Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature said the short stories of Turgenev are among the greatest of all literary works.  The stories were drawn from his experiences as a outs an hunting on the vast estate of his mother, said to include over 5000 serfs, basically slaves.  The stories were all first published individually before being published in 1856 in Sportsman's Sketches.  

For those totally new to Turgenev, I would suggest you first read his very famous novel, Fathers and Sons.

"My Neighbor Radilaw" is a simple story.  The narrator is out on the estate hunting partridges.  A man unknown to him approaches and tells him he is his neighbor, Radilov.  After a bit of conversation Radoliv invites him back to his place for Sunday dinner.  We meet his mother and and the widow of Radilov's brother.  Sunday dinner is a river fish feast with bountiful sides.  The mother is largely silent.  After the meal Radilov invites him to return anytime he is nearby.  On his return visit he finds something shocking has happened.  

The beauty in this story is in how Turgenev makes us feel we are wandering the estate with him.  

Ambrosia Boussweau 

"Where Were You at Night" by Clarice Lispector (1973)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser 

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"He-she was already there atop the mountain, and she was personalized in the he and he was personalized in the she. The androgynous mixture created a being so terribly beautiful, so horrifically stupefying that the participants couldn’t take it all in at once: as a person adjusts little by little to the dark and gradually starts to discern things. Gradually they discerned the She-he and when the He-she appeared before them in a brightness that emanated from him-her, they paralyzed by the Beautiful would say: “Ah, Ah.”

As Clarice becomes more read and taught in the short story world, people will begin to make comparisons of her work with other female short story writers.  I see resemblances in her early stories to the work of Katherine Mansfield, who she greatly admired.  That being said "Where Were You at Night" is a simply amazing work that has left me deeply puzzled and stunned after five days of reading the story.  I think I am beginning to understand that the opening segment of the story is a kind of composite dream or vision of the Rio night world infused with ancient religious cult beliefs from a period beyond our conscious memory.  The story is like a deep dive into our collective unconsciousness.  It does reek of the sensual power of Rio de Jeniro. 

I was tempted to include many more quotes but I did not.

I would love one day to feel I can say, "Yes, Clarice, I understand the extreme depths of this story, the pain, the dark wisdom, the loneliness" but I fear I never will.

Many will, I think, be near repulsed by the baffling power of this story, others will be sucked into depths few other short stories can take us.

As I read on in Clarice, my obsession grows.   

Mel u

"In the Act of Falling" by Danielle McLaughlin - from The New Yorker,September 7, 2015

I

My Q and A with Danielle McLaughlin

Ethel Rohan's Guest Post on Danielle McLaughlin

My post on "Bewitched" 

My post on "Midnight at Ali's King Kehab Takeaway"


My Post on "The Dinosaurs on Other Planets" - Danielle McLaughlin's First New Yorker Story

My Post on "The Governor's Gin", a great story set among the British Raj

(All of these stories can as of now be read online.)

I have been a devoted follower of the work of Danielle McLaughlin ever since I read her amazing short story, "Bewitched" on July 5, 2012.  At that time I was doing a feature on "Emerging Irish Women Writers".  I have happily watched several of the writers I featured begin to take their place on the world literary stage.  With two short stories published in The New Yorker in the last twelve months and a forthcoming collection of short stories to be published by The Stinging Fly, The Dinosaurs on Other Planets has certainly transcended the category of emerging writer.  

In my reading of Irish literature I have been very influenced by Declan Kiberd's monumental work, Inventing Ireland - The Literature of the Modern Nation.  Kiberd helped me see modern Irish literature, post George Moore and Dubliners through the post colonial perspective developed by Edward Said and Franz Fanon.  Kiberd's central thesis is that the basic core theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father.  After "Midnight at Ali's King Kehab Takeaway" which directly focuses on this theme with three missing fathers in the story I was very intrigued to see the figure of the weak father playing a central part in McLaughlin's latest story "In the Act of Falling".

One of the other themes I find in the stories of McLaughlin is that of the cultural impact of the intersection of people from very different worlds.  We see this in "Midnight at Ali's King Kehab Takeaway" and "The Governor's Gin".  Sometimes lonely isolates become attracted to the occult or visions of an alternative apocalyptic world which takes them out of a world they don't like and don't succeed in or fit in well.  This is in several of her stories.  This ties in with the theme of the missing father, manifesting itself as an eroding cultural base.  "In the Act of Falling" is set in the recession that followed the fall of the Irish economy, just about ten years ago. All you have to do is to take a quick scan of the economic and political headlines about Ireland to see a vision of a country whose leaders, the politicians and the Catholic Church, have failed.  

I don't want to give away much of the plot of this very rich story, my main purpose in posting is to let my readers know her latest story can be read in The New Yorker and to journalize my reading experience.  The story centers on an Irish married couple with one son, maybe ten.  The father was recently made redundant from a decent job and now just plays the role of house husband and kind of pretends to look for job.  McLaughlin does just a wonderful job of showing us how this impacts their marriage as the wife becomes the only earner and the husband spirals into a cocoon of odd near occult preoccupations. 

Omnimously looming over the marriage but lurking way in the background, is a mysterious woman and a sinister seeming man who are working their way into the psyche of the man. His condition as a weakened father has left him vulnerable to darker realities or fantasies than he otherwise might have been.  

You can read this story HERE

Danielle McLaughlin’s stories have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, The South Circular, Southword, The Penny Dreadful, Long Story,Short and The New Yorker. She has won various awards for her short fiction, including the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition 2012, The From the Well short story competition 2012, The Willesden Short Story Prize 2013, The Merriman Short Story Competition 2013 in memory of Maeve Binchy, and the Dromineer Literary Festival Short Story Competition 2013.  She was shortlisted for the Writing.ie Irish Short Story of the Year category in the Irish Book Awards in 2013 and 2014, and her story ‘The Dinosaurs on Other Planets’ was shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Award 2014.  Her stories have been broadcast on RTE Radio, and have been published in various anthologies, including The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013, What’s the Story? (2014) a selection of new Irish writing from the Stinging Fly Press in association with Solas Nua, Washington, The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 2014, and Davy Byrnes Stories 2014. She was awarded an Arts Council bursary in 2013 and has read her work at various events in Ireland and the UK, including the London Short Story Festival 2014 and the Cork International Short Story Festival 2014. She is currently Editor for Short Stories in English for Southword Journal. Her debut collection of short stories Dinosaurs on Other Planets will be published in Ireland in autumn 2015 by The Stinging Fly Press, and in the UK and US by John Murray and Random House. She lives in Donoughmore, County Cork with her husband and three children. -from webpage of West Cork Literary Festival

I am greatly looking forward, I hope, to many years ahead reading more by Danielle McLaughlin.

The Truce by Primo Levi (1963, translated by Anna Goldstein)

The Complete Works of Primo Levi is an act that transfigures publishing into conscience at its most sublime.” — Cynthia Ozick

I salute Liveright Publishing, a division of Norton and Company, for having the moral vision to publish (forthcoming September 2015) The Complete Works of Primo Levi.  At 3008 pages, it is of major service to the Anglophone literary universe.  Containing fourteen novels, numerous essays and short stories as well as excellent introductory articles and many brand new and never translated works. I think many will one day consider this three volume set as among their most treasured literary possessions.  People will  pass down this collection to their descendants.  

The best known work in the collection is his memoir of his year in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man.  Recently  I read a beautiful beyond my ability to praise novel by Iréne Némirovsky, Suite Francaise.  I felt great sadness and shame at the human condition when I learned she died in Auschwitz in 1942.  I see the Holocaust, in part, as a war on a culture and a people as dedicated to the reading life as ever existed.  

Primo Levi was sent to Auschwitz on Febuary 21, 1944, arrested for his membership in an Italian anti-fascist organization.  He was there until the Russians liberated the camp on January 18, 1945.  If This is a Man is his memoir of that time.   The Truce is about his experiences when Auschwitz was liberated and his journey back to his home in Turin, Italy.  

Few will,read the Truce before reading If This is a Man.  It is an amazing account of Levi's experiences when Auschwitz was liberated.  There was a great sense of chaos and people did not know they were really no longer under the control of the Nazis for several days.  Of course many ex-camp inmates are terribly sick but everyone wants to get home, even though in many cases their home areas have been totally ravavaged in the war. 

We go along on the trip back home, mostly in packed railroad cars under Russian supervision.  

Of course the trip is very hard but the will to survive and the elation of being free drives Levii on.  There are all sorts of people on the trains, a babel of languages and cultures.  The search for food is paramount. 

Levi calls this work a novel but it reads as a memoir.  This work and If This is a Man are lasting tributes to the human spirit.  I hope no one ever has to write books like these again.  

I was kindly given a copy of this collection by the publisher. 

Mel u

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan (2015)

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopa is the debut novel of Vaseem Khan.  I loved it and hope it is the first of many to come.   The subtitle of the book is A Baby Ganesh Agency Investigation, is giving me hope it is the first in a long series of works centering on retired Mumbai Police Inspector Chopra, his wife Poppy and Baby Ganesh, a four hundred pound baby elephant he unexpectedly inherited from an uncle.

Vaseem Khan is from Mumbai and he totally brought the sprawling mega-city of twenty million to life, as seen though the eyes of a veteran police inspector, a head officer of a police station.  As portrayed police officers of all ranks are very tempted to fall into corruption.  The pay is not huge and giving into graft can bring riches.  Inspector Chopa in his thirty year career has never given in.  He is fifty and has recently had a heart attack and is being forced into early retirement.  He and his wife Poppy have no children, they live in a good  high rise community.  He worries what he will do once he retires, his wife wants him to just relax but he really has few outside interests.

On the last day at work there is a nice party for him.  He also gets a very unexpected gift, a baby elephant.  He names him  "Ganesh" and takes him home and chains him up out front of the building.  Needless to say, Poppy is not real thrilled.  Near his last day a woman came into the station saying her son has been murdered but because he is from a poor family know one will really investigate his death.  Chopa is bothered by this and from that feeling the story unfolds.  

Poppy is a great cook and foodies will relish all the meals she cooks.

Chopa starts on an investigation that takes him to the mansions of a lord of Mumbai gangsters, to a huge slum, almost gets him killed and infuriates Poppy by his failure to stay home, with visits to all sorts of interesting places perfectly included.  As Chopa continues on his investigation there are several interesting and so much fun to follow subplots.  At first Poppy is very mad over the baby elephant, but soon she is feeding and bathing him and fighting with the president of the building owner's group over their right to keep a baby elephant.  Ganesh actually becomes a "house pet" for a while.  The ban and shame of Poppy's life is her medically established inability to have a child.  She hatched a truly crazy plot to make her husband  think she is pregnant and will have a child.  Ganesh bonds more and more with Chopa and he takes the elephant along on his investigations.  In a scene I loved, a few may groan over it, Ganesh saves the Inspector from being murdered by gangsters.  

The denoumont  of the novel is just wonderful.  It is a happy feel good close I really enjoyed.  I never saw it coming but I loved it.  Something exciting and unexpected happens every few pages.  The characters, including Baby Ganesh, are really well realized.  This feels like it might be the start of a series and I certainly hope so.

About this author

You should have a look at his very interesting webpage vaseemkhan.com

Vaseem Khan is the author of 'The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra', first in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series set in India and featuring a baby elephant! He first saw an elephant lumbering down the middle of the road in 1997 when he arrived in the city of Mumbai, India to work as a management consultant. It was the most unusual sight he had ever encountered and served as the inspiration behind his light-hearted crime novels. Vaseem was born in London in 1973, went on to gain a Bachelors degree in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics, before spending a decade on the subcontinent helping one of India's premier hotel groups establish a chain of five-star environmentally friendly 'ecotels' around the country. He returned to the UK in 2006 and has since worked at University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science. Elephants are third on his list of passions, first and second being great literature and cricket, not always in that order. - from Goodreads.

This book would make the basis for a very good T V series.