Maxim Gorky: Two Great Short Stories

"One Autumn Night" (10 pages, 1901)
"Her Lover" (9 pages,  1904)

One of the many benefits of short stories is they let you try out new to you writers without a huge investment of time.    Yesterday I was looking around on Manybooks (now my first go to web page for free E-books) and I ended up downloading a book from 1930 Best Russian Short Stories, edited and selected by Ignath Potapenko.   (I found nothing when I did a Google search on that name-if you know something about him, please leave a comment or E-mail me.)   In the introduction it is stated that it is the first substantial collection of Russian short stories in English. There are all the expected writers, plus a few writers I have not heard of (I will read and perhaps post on them soon) and there are two stories by Maxim Gorky.   I read both of these stories and I totally loved them.    They fit perfectly Frank O'Connor's  idea that short stories at their best are about sub-groups in society that have no one to speak for them.    Maxim Gorky was the voice of millions of Russians in late Czarist Russian who had been displaced as serfs and left with no where to go but roam the countryside or seek what work they could find in the big cities.  Gorky did not simply observe the poorest of the poor in Czarist Russia, he lived among them for many years.

Gorky with Stalin

  
Gorky (1868 to 1932-Russia) was orphaned at age 12.   He went to live with his grandparents.  His grandfather beat him regularly.   He ran away from the jobs he was given as soon as he could.  From age 21 to 26 the "tramped" all over eastern Russia, working at the roughest of jobs and sleeping where he could and eating what he could.    This experience radicalized Gorky and by age 30 he was supporting the causes of Marxist revolutionaries.   Gorky was taught to read by a cook he met and became an extreme autodidact in the literature of Russian and in anti-Czarist political writings.   Gorky became a journalist and ended up being arrested numerous times.   In 1902 he met and became a life time friend of Lenin.   He led a tumultuous personal and professional life, scandalizing even his  fellow revolutionaries with his womanizing.  He left Russia for a time to seek a warmed climate for health reasons but returned when Stalin invited him back.   He became kind of a pet of Stalin (a dangerous position!).   Stalin endorsed him as the voice of the people.   Long story short, he died under clouded circumstances, some say killed by the head of the Russian Secret Service because Stalin feared what he might say about him.   Stalin was one of the pall bearers at his funeral.   After his death he was turned into a great hero of the people and his stories were assigned reading in Russian schools and expressing a public dislike for them was for a long time a very bad idea.   (There are very interesting articles on Gorky here and here.)   

Gorky and Anton Chekhov

I think one reason he is not more read now is that western intellectuals and teachers were somehow put off by his being raised to the status of a saint of the people during the era of Stalin.   At one point in the USA to admit one liked the work of Gorky would be almost like endorsing communism.   Gorky was identified as the writer of the Bolsheviks when that was a code word for anti-American and anti-British politics.  


"One Autumn Night" is just a beautiful story which tells us a great deal about life among the sub-peasants in late Czarist Russia.  It also shows us Gorky's attitude toward women and lets see how women were thougt of in this period.   The story is narrated by an 18 year old man, basically a homeless tramp.   He is desperately seeking food on a freezing night in Moscow when he sees a young girl eating a thrown away by someone loaf of bread she found in the gutter.  She tells him it is only a little rotten and shares it with him.   They end up sleeping together (of course the narrator finds out she is also 18 and quite beautiful) without sex just for warmth.   It turns out she had fallen in love with a handsome man who had beaten her terribly over and over and has now thrown her out.   The attitude of the woman is amazing and is really a tribute, I think, to how women functioned at the very bottom of society.  It is a powerful statement about the courage and love of the women from the very bottom of late Czarist society. The ending is heartbreaking.   


"Her Lover" is a really hilarious (in a laughing past the grave yard kind of way) story about a young man living in a slum building in Moscow.   One of his neighbors is a very big woman, over six foot tall who has a very unsavory reputation.   The narrator is a prim and proper young man and he tries to avoid any type of contact with the woman.   One day she knocks on his door and asks him to write a letter to her lover for her, she cannot write herself.   At first he is incredulous and basically says how could a woman like you (he describes her in a very Russian image as "a great mastodon of a woman") possibly have a lover.   She tells him her story and she writes him a letter.   She ends up doing his laundry in exchange (the narrator is horrified when she at first she says she wants to do him a favor to repay his help when he thinks she is offering sex) and they become kind of friends but the man always looks down on her.  (It seems even among the Bolsheviks in 1900 in Moscow if a woman is not beautiful, she is not of much value.)   The ending is deeply ironic.


I will be reading more of Gorky's stories soon and will probably post on them also.   


You can download Best Russian Short Stories here in numerous formats, all free.   


The written output of Gorky was huge in all sorts of genres from theater to political hack work.   He is best known now for his short stories.   There are about thirty of them.   I hope to have read them all by year end 2012.   


Please share your experience with Gorky with us.  


Mel u

"Amy Foster" by Joseph Conrad

"Amy Foster" by Joseph Conrad (1901, 15 pages)

"Amy Foster" is the third short story by Joseph Conrad (1857 to 1924-there is some back ground information in my prior posts on Conrad)  I have read in the last few months.   I have also posted on two of his shorter novels, The Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent.   Both of the prior stories I posted on "The Secret Sharer" and  "The Lagoon" are partially about men who are in foreign to them countries because of sea voyages.   Conrad was himself a seamen for many years.  

As in Secret Agent, a mentally challenged adult plays a central part in "Amy Foster".  I do know if this is a frequent thing in the work of Conrad or not but I thought it was very interesting to find it in two back to back reads.

The story line also felt like it might be expressing something of Conrad's feelings about spending his life among people who did not speak the language of his native land, Poland.  (Conrad grew up speaking Polish, then learned French, then English and went on to become one of the greatest of English prose stylists.)

As the story opens, Janko Goral a Polish national on his way to move to America, is shipped wrecked right of the coast of England.   He makes it to the shore.   When the local people find him he can speak only Polish which no one understands so they take him for a mad man raving on in some sort of pure gibberish.   He is put into jail by the local residents who also whip him and throw rocks at him in an effort to make him speak English.   We also meet a local girl, Amy Foster, who clearly seems mentally challenged.  

Janko, who is renamed by the locals, Yanko Gooral, gets a job working for a well off local.   He saves his employer's daughter from drowning and is given his own cottage as a reward.     He and Amy meet and they fall in love and Marry.  (The descriptions of Amy are really very interesting).   I do not want to tell more of the plot.

"Amy Foster" is about xenophobia, loneliness, fear of anyone different from you.   I felt somehow Conrad was relating to his own experiences as a stranger in a strange land as I read this story.   Readers of the short stories of Hardy will relate well to "Amy Foster".  

It was included in Typhoon and  Other Stories (1903)

You can down load this and much of Conrad's other work in Kindle and other formats from Manybooks.

On Conrad, I think I will read a few more of  his short stories before reading another novel.     I hope to read four Conrad novels in 2012.  

I know many book bloggers have expressed dislike of Conrad.   Some simply do not like his prose style and others think he is a racist.    The first question is sort of a matter of personal taste.   The second question seems to me to rest on a misunderstanding of the narrative method of Conrad and might represent a rush to judgement against what some see as a hard to read writer.  

Please share your experience with Conrad with us.

Mel u

The Value of the Rain by Brandon Shire

The Value of the Rain by Brandon Shire  (2011, 214 pages, 237 KB in Kindle edition)


 “Promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money.”-Rick Perry-Governor of Texas


"We need to have profound compassion for the people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It's not funny, it's sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle-we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It's anything but gay."  -Michelle Bachman- a leading American Politician in the Republican Party

Brandon Shire's  The Value of Rain is a beautiful, stunning, brutally real look at growing up Gay in the America where people admire politicians who make remarks  like those of  Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman.   


Richard Nixon was president of the United States of America when the story begins.   To help those not familiar with the atmosphere of America toward the GLBT community at that time consider these remarks on San Francisco made by President Nixon:


""But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. . . . It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."




The Value of Rain is the story of Charles who was sent to a mental hospital at age fourteen  by his mother to be "cured" of his homosexuality.  He ended up spending the next ten years in a series of "treatment" facilties.  Much of the book is taken up with Charles many years in these barbaric programs. The story begins in 1971 when his mother finds out he is gay.   The Value of the Rain took me on an emotional roller coaster ride over years of Charles life.    There is extensive treatment in the  book of the extreme hatred Charles has for his mother and his life long quest for revenge on her for all of the terrible things that happened to him in the institutions he spent many years in.   He met and loved wonderfully kind and gentle young men in these places.   He was thrown in with young criminal sex offenders almost all of whom had been horribly molested as children.   The doctors and workers were themselves full of loathing for those they are allegedly treating.


The story is narrated in a very interesting fashion with flashes back and forth in the life of Charles.   It is a very nonlinear story which because of this bold treatment by Shire strongly stays with us.   Just as the consciousness of Charles was fragmented by his experiences so our experience of the story requires a reconstructive process for it to be understood.    What seems like vicious story of hatred toward his mother  builds slowly to a profound experience of the cathartic power of love and compassion.   


The language in the book goes from lyrical passages you will read over and over for their sheer beauty to sections that are quite jarring in their depictions of the cruelty and hatred in the world of Charles and his family.     


This is an intense deeply felt very emotional honest book.   At times Charles hatred for his mother is not easy to take  but for sure it is real.


"I stand at  at the foot of my mother's bed as she lay dying.   I have no remorse;   it's all I can do not to hurry death with my own hands".


As I read this amazing book, I was reminded of two literary items from my recent past.    I somehow was brought to mind Katherine Mansfield who was sent by her mother to be treated for her sexual interest in women to "Health Spas" who procedures included being sprayed with high pressure hoses.   I also recalled Anton Chekhov's story of life in a Czarist era mental hospital, "Ward Six".    


The author donates 50 percent of the sales of this book to GLBT youth charities.   


There is more information on the author's web page.


There is a well done book trailer here.

Reading The Value of Rain was a very intense experience for me.   It is not just a book about growing up gay in America in the 1970s,  anyone who grew up feeling different can directly relate to the story, no matter what your sexual orientation may be.   Many of those of us deeply into the reading life can relate very much to this.   If you do not know what this means, then consider yourself lucky.

The Value of Rain is set in America but the discrimination talked about in the book is world wide.  

I salute Shire for his  wonderful first novel and I look forward to reading more  by him in the future.

Mel u

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1907)
The Great Tradition, by F. R. Leavis,  chapter IV, "Joseph Conrad", 1948, 54 pages)

Conrad at age six

Joseph Conrad is considered by many one of the greatest of all English Language novelists.   (1857 to 1924, He was born in Poland but is an English language  author-there is additional background on him in my three prior posts on him).   Since I began my blog in July 2009 I have posted on two of his short stories, "Lagoon", "Secret Sharer"  and his often very controversial work, The Heart of Darkness.   


I recently obtained a copy of The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis (Cambridge-1895 to 1978).   Leavis was born in Cambridge, went to school there and then became a professor and never  left, other than the period he served as an ambulance driver during WWI.  He was subjected to a poison gas attack and never fully recovered.   He married one of his students, Queen Roth, who was also a well known writer of literary criticism.     In addition to the introduction there are chapters on George Elliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.   I wanted to read the work of Leavis so I could have an idea what was taught in English Literature classes at Cambridge in the much of the first half of the 20th century.   Leavis says Conrad is at his best is one of the greatest novelists.  He says Conrad's greatness primarily  rests on Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo (this is his choice for Conrad's master work),  Shadowline, and Typhoon.   He explicitly rules  Lord Jim out of this list.  He devotes twenty pages to Secret Agent,  which he totally loves.   


The Secret Agent is set in London in 1886.    The central character is Mr. Verloc who lives with his wife Winnie, his mother in law, and his brother-in-law, Stevie.   Stevie is mentally disabled (possibly he has autism) and he needs the support of his Mr.  Verloc to live.   The marriage of the Verlocs is brilliantly portrayed and we see the love Winnie has for Stevie pushed her to marry Mr. Verloc who she knew would provide for Stevie.   One of the things I think Conrad is really brilliant at is letting us see how limited perceptions of other people can shape and limit  our world.    


Mr. Verloc (the physical description of him is simply brilliant) owns and  runs a shop where he sells odds and ends and pornography.   His real business is his work as a spy, a terrorist and an agent provocateur.   He is in theory an Anarchist but really he is just a married man with a job, a wife, and mother-in-law and a brother-in-law depending on him.  One of the other characters jokes that it is a contradiction in terms for an Anarchist to be married.   


Leavis says the opening chapter of Secret Agent, set in a foreign embassy in London,  is one of the best done first chapters in the English novel.    Mr. Verloc is getting his instructions from a sinister personage in the embassy.   We do not learn for sure whose embassy it is but we think it is the Russian embassy.   His employer is not following Czarist policy but the agenda of his organization.   The conversations between Mr Verloc and the man from the embassy are just marvelous.   Each one looks down on the other and each fails to see the contradictions in their own lives.


I think one of the best parts of the book is in Conrad's depiction of the marriage of the Verloc's and of the character of the wife and her devotion to her handicapped brother and her mother.  It is one of the great ironies of literature that Mr. Verloc can see through centuries of hypocrisy and cant in society but he does not understand the foundation of his own marriage to a woman he loves very much.   


The Secret Agent is very much a book for the 21th century.   Make a few changes in the players and it could be about the terrorists that dominate our headlines and much of the political thinking of the world's leaders.   


Almost all of Conrad's fiction can be found at Manybook, a great source for free books in most formats including Kindles.   


My next Conrad will be his short story "Amy Foster".   I have placed all of works Leavis recommended as the best of Conrad on my TBR list, hopefully I will get to some of  them in 2012.   


Conrad is, to me, a writer to slow down for, something not always easy for me!    Conrad can see into darker places than most other writers.   I think most people who give Conrad a fair chance will learn somethings about themselves from reading his work.   


There are a lot of negative tending posts and comments on Conrad in the book blog world.   He is not a happy let us jump up and down and clap for joy at the world kind of writer.   Some people complain that there is no one "likable" in his work.  There is really no one we can be in true sympathy with in The Secret Agent, maybe some will feel sympathy for Winnie but that is a reach considering what she ends up doing.      


Do you have a favorite Conrad?   Did you try him and hate him and why?


Mel u

"Seven Lives to Repay Our Country" by Edward Carpenter

"Seven Lives to Repay Our Country" by Edward Carpenter (2011, 7 pages)

Edward Carpenter in "Seven Lives to Repay Our Country" has written a very unique totally absorbing short story told from seven different points of view.      The setting is Saipan Island in the Pacific Ocean.   The characters are seven Japanese soldiers.  The time is July, 1944.

Saipan Island was one of the major "Island Hopping" battlegrounds of World War II.   The Japanese considered it one of the last islands to be defended before the allies actually invaded their homeland so they gave an order to defend it to the last man.   The large Japanese civilian population was told the Americans would kill everyone on the island if they captured it.   The Japanese general in charge of the island,  gave an order to defend the island down to "the last man".


"Seven Lives to Repay Our Country" takes us beyond the stereotypes that portray the Japanese soldier as a fanatic who only wishes to die for his beloved Emperor.   It is not easy to see the humanity in your enemies and Carpenter's wonderful story helps us do that.   I do not want to spoil the plot but it is about seven Japanese soldiers who have been basically told they are to die in a futile defense of the island.   Some of the men do glory in this, some are afraid of their officers and keep silent but some see it as crazy.  (The Japanese, based on my understanding,  quickly assigned the blame for their involvement in WWII on their military, after they were defeated).     We listen in as the soldiers talk about their fate among themselves, without their officers around.   


I found this a very well done story and in just a few pages Carpenter did a very good job individuating the soldiers.   I loved the ending but I will let you discover it for your self.


You can buy it on  Amazon 

There is also a very good book trailer here.

Edward Carpenter is a Major in the United States Marines.   He recently spent a year in an exchange program with the Indonesian Navy and is now based in South East Asia.   His formal education is in engineering and international affairs.   He has a passion for writing and reading.  


"Seven Lives to Repay Our Country" is his first published work. I was honored to receive a complementary copy  and look forward to reading his next story, which will be set during WWI.      


The Reading Life Guide to Japanese WWII Literature


Mel u

Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones-Win A Copy of this great biography

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Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones (2010, 524 pages)




On The Occasion of the Publication of the Paperback Edition-

The Reading Life Katherine Mansfield Project

Katherine Mansfield:   A Getting Start Guide

Read to the end of the post for information on the author sponsored international  give-a-way  contest  

This post is a revised and rethought post of one I did in December of 2010.     I am occasioned to redo this post by the news that a paperback edition of Katherine Mansfield:   The Story Teller by Katherine Jones has just been published and is available on Amazon and elsewhere.

In the year since I did this post, I have gotten more and more into short stories, a form I once foolishly scorned.   I feel secure now in saying Mansfield is among the top ten for sure and maybe top three short story writers of all time.   Chekhov is the consensus best and when at the top of his form Guy de Maupassant is my and most people's second place choice.   Maybe Mansfield belongs in second place but personally I would put her third.   As a quick note, some of de Maupassant's stories were just quickly written by a formula stories, all of Mansfield's are carefully crafted.     Maybe as I read more Raymond Carver, he will probably rise up in my rankings.   There is also always James Joyce looking down from Mount Parnassus and smiling.   Among Americans, the South has it covered with Flannery O'Connor  and Eudora Welty, among others.    R. K. Narayan is also a genius at the format and Virginia Woolf's best stories are marvels.   There are lots of writers who wrote a few great short stories, not so many who wrote as many as Mansfield did in her way too short life.

From the fact that I have posts on 85 of Mansfield's stories on my blog and several secondary books (all very much worth reading) I know based on my blog stats that the stories of Mansfield are being taught at universities and collages all over the world.   Her work seems very popular in Korea and Moscow, for example and I have people from all over India reading posts on her stories.   The most read of my posts on Mansfield is on "Miss Brill".

I feel very privileged to have been given the is opportunity to read shortly after its publication what I am sure will be the definitive biography of Katherine Mansfield,  Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones.    There have been four other major biographies of Katherine Mansfield (the last one was Kathleen Mansfield:   A Secret Life by Claire Tomalin published in 1989.)     Only Kathleen Jones has had full access to the vast correspondence that has been published  since 1989 as well as the full notebooks of Katherine Mansfield.

  Kathleen Jones spent more than ten years working on Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller during which she spent a great deal of time in New Zealand studying archives there and meeting with people who had actually known Katherine Mansfield or her family.     She traveled extensively in England and France visiting the places where Mansfield lived out her life.    She has also written highly regarded biographies of Margaret Cavendish, The Duchess of Newcastle (A Glorious Fame),   Christina Rosetti (Learning Not to Be First); and an account of the lives of women who lived with the English Lake Country Poets (Passionate Sisterhood)..    More information on the very interesting background and career of Katherine Jones can be found at her web page.)

My history with Mansfield began in May of 2010 when I read her story "Miss Brill" when it was selected as the classic short story of the day on  a web page I follow.    I confess I had never heard of Katherine Mansfield prior to that day.    I was  very taken by  "Miss Brill".    I thought it was a brilliantly illuminating look into a sad and lonely life.    I did a bit of research and read a few more of her stories.     I like to know something of the lives and import of the writers that matter to me and I soon discovered many consider Katherine Mansfield the best ever female writer of short stories.     She is considered to have radically altered the nature of the short story.    I then decided I wanted to read and post on each of her 85 or so short stories individually.   As I posted on the stories I tried to gradually learn something about Mansfield and her life and background.     Virginia Woolf famously said of Mansfield that she was the only writer that ever made her jealous.    Mansfield has clear ties to Joyce and Woolf but unlike them she is also a writer for lonely people who never quite fit in anywhere, for people who retreat into visions of beauty,  for those happy to sit for hours alone in a cafe watching people walk by with no hope of understanding them.        I think Woolf was also a bit afraid Mansfield saw into the roots of her madness.   Anyway, I thought I should explain a bit why I am interested in Mansfield.   I will talk more on it when I shortly post my The Reading Life Guide to getting into Katherine Mansfield.

When I first received my copy of Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller I was very impressed by the very high production values of the book (published by Penguin/Viking).    It includes a lot of wonderful photographs of Mansfield, her parents and siblings, her husband John Middleton Murry, and others that were close to Mansfield.  

One of the dominant themes of Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller is the acknowledgement of the very deep   impact of the beauty of New Zealand on Mansfield's  mind and sensibility.   As I read Mansfield's stories   I tried to get to know at least a little the person behind them, to see beyond the mask.   I saw a woman caught up in an ugly time in England and France.     I saw a woman used to being taken care of (her father was the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand) reduced to trying on occasion to figure out how to pay for her meals.    I also saw a woman with a very powerful sensuous nature.    She liked beautiful exotic to her women and handsome near fey young men.    Mansfield is considered to have had affairs and brief encounters with both men and women.    As she lived in the days before people disclosed their full sex lives in public on talk shows, the Internet, and in tabloids and  in tell it all autobiographies we have no precise knowledge of her exact sexual preferences and proclivities.   We do know she had long term relationships with other women that look like romances or crushes.

Jones gives us beautiful descriptions of the natural beauty of New Zealand.    Unlike any other writer I am aware of, Jones talks about the influence of the Maoris on Mansfield.    Mansfield had a relationship with a Maori princess that many felt was a romantic one.    We do not know if this was simply a school girl crush or if it was an intimate relationship.     I confess I did not know much concerning the culture of the Maoris in early 20 century New Zealand and was a bit surprised to learn that one of the cousins of Mansfield's  father  married a rich Maori woman.   Jones writes in a very interesting way about the colonial roots of Mansfield.   (I think the normal uninformed take on the Maori is that they are similar to the Aborigines of Australia.)     She made me see what a backwater New Zealand must have seemed like to people in London and Paris and how much Mansfield felt initially liberated when she moved to London.  The commute took around six weeks.     Later Jones made us see how Mansfield often seemed to long to return to New Zealand.  

Jones gives us a good look at the day- to- day struggles of Mansfield to feed and house herself.   Mansfield got a  modest allowance from her father that she could have lived on if she lived very modestly.   Jones tells us in a very clear fashion of all the various men and women with  whom Mansfield was linked with romantically.   Jones spends a lot of time talking about D. H. Lawrence's and Frieda Lawrence's relationship to Mansfield and her husband.   Jones also helped us understand  Mansfield's relationship with Virginia Woolf but does not exaggerate it.    The relationship was close but there was no real intimacy and their times together were more like meetings than two friends spending time together.    We learn a bit about various Bloomsbury figures (Mansfield was not for a number of reasons a member of the Bloomsbury set.   My guess is she would have scared most of them!).     The general atmosphere of the set Mansfield moved in can be described as erotically charged.     Mansfield was attracted to guru - like men ranging from her second husband John Middleton Murry to D. H. Lawrence.     Mansfield went through a "Russian phase" also.   Jones deals with the issue of the claim that Mansfield plagiarized a Chekhov story.     Basically Jones says the whole matter is much ado about nothing and I agree completely.

Jones goes into enough details about the terrible effects of tuberculous on Mansfield so that we understand it.   We see how an effort to cure it while at the same time ignoring it dominated the last few years of Mansfield's  short life.

Jones also spend a lot of time helping us understand the role of Ida Baker in Mansfield's life.    I would say I still do not quite understand fully the relationship of Baker and Mansfield but I understand a good bit more than I did before I read Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller.    This relationship shows us an ugly side of  Mansfield where she would use Ida when she needed her and push her away when she did not.


Jones takes two risks in Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller.   One of the risks is a stylistic one.   Most of the book is written in the present tense as if it were happening now.   Some reviewers of the book have not liked this.    To me it is brilliant touch on the part of Jones to let us live in the present with Mansfield, not see her as remote long, dead woman from an era we can barely relate to.    Jones brought Mansfield very much to life for me.     Many of the backgrounds and autobiographical nature of the most important stories are  explicated in a very illuminating fashion by Jones.  

The second risk is her treatment of the life of John Middleton Murry (1889 to 1957) who lived on long after Mansfield died.   Mansfield and Murry had an odd at times difficult relationship.   Mansfield was not nearly as good a husband as Leonard Woolf.    I think Jones has seen that one of the keys to understanding Mansfield may be in trying to understand why Murry meant so much to her.   Jones deals in sort of interlude chapters in Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller with each of Murry's  three post Mansfield marriages.   One of the wives looked very much like Katherine and I admit I got chills when that wife, Violet,   was happy to learn that she had Tuberculous just like Katherine Mansfield did.    Each of the three other women seemed to embody a part of the full psyche of Mansfield.    We can decide for ourselves how we feel about the way Murry handled the literary estate of Mansfield and the wealth it brought him.

Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller will be the definitive  Mansfield biography for a long time, I think.    Jones knows Mansfield well and has read deeply and widely in her work and era.   Katherine Mansfield:  The Story Teller is not just about Mansfield.   It has a lot   to teach us of the historical period it deals with and the  diverse set literary figures  in Mansfield's world.   It tells us a lot about the state of relations between the sexes in the period.   We get  look at life in Edwardian England from the ground up through the eyes of an outsider who never really fit in anywhere.  Jones also lets us understand a lot about how the creative process works by letting us see the struggles of Mansfield.

Added notes-there are some very interesting things one could say about Mansfield's treatment of Germans, her train rides and boat trips, her fondness for sidewalk cafes, her Russian phase, and much more.   At first I thought her treatment of Germans was perhaps just a very understandable prejudice of the times but I think her stories say a lot about how much freer English women were than German women.

There are somethings I wish I knew more about.   I confess I would like to know the details about the cure programs that Mansfield's mother sent her to in German "Spas" to be treated for her sexual interest in women. Not to be too Freudian but I have heard that it involved being sprayed by high pressure hoses!   I would like to know if she did in fact ever have what might be called sex with Ida Baker and I would like to know more about the relationship of the Mansfields to the Maori.   How did her cousin come to marry a Maori Princess?    Were her sisters able to have long term satisfying relationships with men?    It seems Mansfield never met Ford Madox Ford which seems odd, I would like to be sure this is true.   I wonder what life was like aboard the ships on the six week trip from New Zealand to England.     There are other open questions on the private life of Mansfield.   How many hours a day did she write?   What did she have for breakfast?   Did she read Gogol?   What short stories writers did she like most, besides Chekhov.  

One great thing about the Internet is almost all of her stories but a few very early ones can be read online  (there are links to the stories in my posts on them).

The author has kindly authorized me to offer an Christmas gift to a reader-a free copy of her wonderful biography.   If you are interested in winning the book, please fill out the form below.    You must complete the form by December 10, 2011 to be eligible.  Ms Jones will mail the book to you direct so if you win you will be contacted  by E Mail and your address will be requested.




Mel u

December Reading and Blogging Plans and a Look Back at November

November Blog Notes

My blog notes are mostly something I can use to look back on a judge the progress and regress of my blog.   My pages views  were up 325 percent over November 2011 and my visits are up 322 percent.   I ended November with 617 GFC followers and 1445 twitter followers.    The top city of residence for blog users is New Delhi, then London, then Mumbai followed by New York City.   The top American state for visitors continues as always to be California.   Here in the Philippines the most frequent city of residence is Makati followed closely by Quezon City.   India has now for the first month pushed out the Philippines as the second most likely country of residence for a blog visitors, behind the United States.    

November Reading Notes

There was really no huge dominating works in November.   The "biggest" book I read that has been on my TBR list for decades was Dracula by Bram Stoker.   Short stories are becoming an ever increasing part of my reading life and my blog.  I see this as a permanent trend.

December Blog Plans

As of now I have no big special blog plans for December.   The book blog world kind of slows down in December, it seems.   I will probably participate in an event or two and am open to new ideas as they pop up.

December Reading Plans

Top Priority December Reads

1.   1Q84 by Haruki Murakmi -34 percent through it-awesome

2.  Secret Sharer Joseph Conrad-80 percent done

3.   A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens-getting an early start on Dickens 200 in 2012-

4.   King, Kaiser, Czar-Three Cousins by Catrine Clay-history

5.   The Moor's Last Stand by Salman Rushdie-a hold over from October

6.   The Glass Palace by Amtiv Ghosh-also October book

7.   The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe

8.   Short Stories-continue on 

The Ruffington Boussweau Project

Mercalaliota Gaelwad

I also hope to read and post on at least  two more travel books by Ruffington Boussweau, starting with his very controversial account of his trip to Japan just before the Russian-Japanese war.    I also may have an interview with Ms Mercalalitoa Gaelwad, director of the Sayajira Gaelwad Institute of Ruffington Boussweau Studies planned in which she will explain how she developed her interest in Boussweau and give us some details on her wonderful plans to publish a 25 volume joint English and Bengali edition  of Ruffy's work.   Her goal is to place a full edition in every school in her native Bangladesh.   Her great grandfather was a Maharaja of one of the richest Princely States in Bengal and she wants to use a small portion of the great wealth of her family to give something back to the people of the world.   I am very grateful to her for having a complete set of Ruffy's 25 books sent to me.  In the interests of full disclosure, The Reading Life is now under the very kind sponsorship of The Institute and the personal patronage of Ms Gaelwad.   

Thanks

I offer my great thanks to my quite brilliant cousin S for her wonderful help in editing suggestions.  

I also am and will always be very grateful for those who take the trouble to comment on my blog.    

Mel u