"The Sex Lives of African Girls" by Taiye Selasi (2012)

I first became aware of Taiye Selasi when Judith Mok mentioned her in a Q and A Session as someone she was currently reading.  I was very happy to find that her very first work of fiction, "The Sex Lives of African Girls" was included in a book I have, The Best American Short Stories 2012.  (It was first published in Granta in 2011.)

"The Sex Life of African Girls" by Taiye Selasi is set in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, in the grand home of a very rich man, the uncle of the central character.  The opening sentence of the story is "The sex lives of African girls begin, inevitably, with Uncle".  This is a very sensuously rich story, one can feel the heat, the rain, taste the fruit and visualize the women and men in the story.  I hate to tell to much about this work as it is beautiful and at the same time a heartbreaking tale of cruelty and the power of the rich in a very poor place.

The story opens on a party.  The central character lives with her Aunt and Uncle.  We get a vivid picture of life at the house, we feel the many class markers prevalent in the society.  There is a heavy rain for a few minutes.  The rich African women are like "Japanese giesha in wax-batik geles, their skin bleached too light. They are strange to you, strange to the landscape of the dark, with the same polished skill-set of rich women worldwide:  how to smile with full lips while the eyes remain empty;  how to hate with indifference; how to love without heat".  

As the story goes on we learn more about the central figure, how she came to live at her uncle's house, what goes behind closed doors or sometimes in rooms where the door should have been closed but was left open.    We how people are exploited, why the poor sometimes hate the poor more than the rich.   It is very much about the loss of innocence without being at all cliched.   

There is really a lot in this story.  I totally enjoyed reading it

You can learn more about the author's work on her webpage

Mel u

A Guest Post by Veronica Li

Veronica Li, author of a wonderful book, Across the Four Seas:  A Chinese Woman's Search for Home, in honor of Mother's Day is making her book free as a Kindle edition.   I loved this book.  Here is part of what I said about it.

Journey Across the Four Seas - A Chinese Woman's Search for Home by Veronica Li (2007, 298 pages)

Journey Across the Four Seas - A Chinese Woman's Search for Home by Veronica Li is a wonderfully done look at the life of the author's mother, Flora Li.   The story opens a few weeks before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and declare war on the USA and on England.    Flora Li was living in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong (1941) when war broke out and there were immediate rumors of a Japanese invasion of Hong Kong.    The citizens knew of the horrible way the Japanese had treated the citizens of Nanking,  China killing 100,000s of thousands of unarmed soldiers and civilians.   They also made rape a terror tactic of the war.   They knew Hong Kong had no army ready to defend it and they would be captured. 

Veronica Li does a wonderful job of recreating the atmosphere of Hong Kong in 1941.   Her mother was a student at Hong Kong University and did not really have a care in the world.    Flora Li had light skin, a very attractive feature, and was considered quite pretty.    Once this was a great source of joy and pride to her family.   Now her female relatives rub soy sauce all over her face and arms to make her appear darker and ugly in the hopes she could avoid being raped or sent to a Japanese  Army brothel.    In time she realizes she needs to escape Hong Kong for the parts of China that are not controlled by the Japanese.     As the story progresses I saw how much connections, family first then school and regional ties determined to a large extent who survived and who did not, who prospered, and who married who.

Here is her very generous offer to the readers of The Reading Life

FREE MOTHER’S DAY READ: A Mother’s Memoir

Journey across the Four Seas: A Chinese Woman’s Search for Home by Veronica Li

(Free on Kindle May 11 and 12 http://tinyurl.com/43ycrkj)

 

Journey across the Four Seas is a true story of my mother’s life.  While caring for her in her last years, I recorded her life stories and wove them into a memoir.  It was my way of thanking her for all that she’d done for me.  The book is about her struggle to get an education for herself, and later for her children.  She believed that education was a means to a quality life.

 

My mother, Flora, was born of a poor family in Hong Kong in 1918.  In spite of being told, “Girls don’t go to school,” she fought her way through the education system and became one of the few women to enter the prestigious Hong Kong University.  When the Japanese invaded, she fled to unoccupied China, where she met her future husband, the son of China’s finance minister.  She thought she had found the ideal husband, but soon discovered that he suffered from emotional disorders caused by family conflicts and the wars he had grown up in.  Whenever he had a breakdown, Flora would move the family to another city, from Shanghai to Hong Kong to Bangkok to Taipei and finally across the ocean to the U.S.  Meanwhile, she gave birth to five children in different places.

 

Throughout her migrations, Flora kept her sight on one goal—providing her children with the best possible education.  For the sake of their education, she was willing to uproot herself and bring the family to the U.S.  Because of her courage, my siblings and I got a good college education and are living out the American dream.

End of Guest Post

My Post on Journey Across the Four Seas: A Chinese Woman's Search for Home by Veronica Li

I am very honored to be able to offer this book to my readers.

Mel u

"The Flowering" and "The Wife of Bath" by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

My prior posts on Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

I was very lucky to find used copies of two short story collections by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, one of the consensus contemporary master of the Irish short story.  Many of her stories have echoes of folk and fairy tales and medieval literature.   For a while I will have less

blogging time than normal so I will be keeping my posts brief.  Today's post is really just a reading journal entry.  Both of today's stories can be found in Midwife to the Fairies, her 2003 collection.

"The Flowering" is wonderful multi-layered story.   It begins with a woman wishing she could understand her roots, her deep in the past ancestry.  She wants to understand how people from her long buried past lived their lives, what they felt and dreamed.   She learns what her ancestors endured during the Irish famine years of the middle 19th century, reduced to surviving on seaweed and barnacles.  In a wonderful segment of the story that I really liked we learn about  young girl who becomes a lace maker and a dress maker, this is her passion and flowering.  This story I really liked.

Ni Dhuibhne is a Chaucer scholar. "The Wife of Bath"  is a story about a modern Irish woman who is retelling he life story as if she is the wife of bath, relaying her many relationships.   The story well adapts older models of narration in which the lives of ordinary people were treated as comic farces.   

Do you have a favorite short story by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne?

Mel u

" 'Wuff, Wuff, Wuff' For de Valera by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne (2003, 9 pages from Midwife to the Fairies)

My prior posts on Eilis Ni Dhuibhne



I recently was lucky enough to acquire used copies of short story collections by one of Ireland's leading contemporary writers, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne.  I have previously posted on two of her novels and several of her short stories.   I read the lead story in Midwife to the Faires last night, "Wuff, Wuff, Wuff for de Valera" last night and I liked it a lot.   I have already read and posted on the title story, so besides this story there are ten more I have not yet read.  I will read them all soon and post on more them I am sure.  My blogging time will be short for the next three weeks so my posts will be shorter than normal for a while.  

The story is about the lives and interactions of two sisters, twins.  We take them from childhood well into middle age.  It is narrated in the first person by one of the sisters who is harshly critical of  her sibling.   She thinks her sister  would still be decent looking if she lost some weight, ponders why she never advanced at work, why she has had troubles in her relationships.   We learn something very sad about the sister and we do see how an unmarried pregnant woman who does not want a baby was treated in Ireland.  We see the sister who narrates is in bad faith and ultimately is quite selfish.

There is much in this story and I look forward to reading another thirty of so short stories by the author.

Mel u

"Mel, the shorter your posts are
the better"  Carmilla

A Pagan Place by Edna O'Brien (2004, 240 pages)

My Prior Posts on Edna O'Brien


A Pagan Place by Edna O'Brien is a savagely beautiful novel that seems to me to take us deeply into the contradictory depths of Irish culture.   It speaks to me  from an ancient sensibility I cannot really articulate.   Some say it is kind of a female Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man.  All I can say for that now is maybe.    There is great pain in this story, a pain we cannot really explain but which we can deeply feel.   This is a very Irish novel.   My blogging time will  be limited for the next three weeks so my posts will be shorter than normal.  I will simply say I loved this book.  It is one of the few 21th century books I am aware of which matches some how the beauty, warmth and coldness of the Irish country side.  There is a deep love and perhaps a deeper darker hate for Ireland in this wonderful book.

Quick note, Irish Short Story Week is over.  My interest in Irish literature is becoming stronger with every new great writer and work I discover.   It is permanent and is one of the core focuses of The Reading Life.  

Mel u

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1982, 682 pages)

I try to organize my reading around projects.  One of my 2013 projects was to read The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.  Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, USA in 1909 and died their in 2001.  She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter.   Welty never married or had any children.    She did travel extensively in the USA and Europe.   When asked in an interview who the writers who had most influenced her were she mentioned in order Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.    Welty was a very accomplished photographer and taught college classes in creative writing.     She was a friend of William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.  She was a close friend of Elizabeth Bowen and stayed at her castle in Ireland.  

I am very glad I read this collection.  I read the Kindle edition which I found perfectly done.  These stories, with a few exceptions, are set in the world in which Welty grew up and spent much of her life, rural Mississippi.  The stories take place in a time when race was of paramount concern, many of the stories do reflect the speech of the times and use racially abusive expressions.  This simply true to life.  Some might see her as a kind of southern Gothic writer focusing on out of place people and that is not wrong.  If you were enrolled in a class in short stories of the American South, she would be assigned along with fellow Mississippi residents, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.   Of course I liked some of the stories more than others.  Among my favorite are "The Petrified Man", "Lilly Daw and the Three Sisters", "The Hitch  Hikers" and a wonderful set on a train in England taking people to a boat that will take them to Ireland story, "The Bride of Innisfallen".   Some may find the use of southern dialect tiresome but from Welty it is the real stuff.  The stories are very set in time and place, a time that is over and a place unfamiliar to most people.   These are set in small town stories.  I think Elizabeth Bowen said Welty's stories reminded her a lot of life in Ireland.  

Welty's standing is below that of another writer from the American South, Flannery O'Connor.  In the seventy or so Q and A Sessions I have done with Irish writers I asked every one to name some of their favorite short story writers, many mentioned O'Connor but no one mentioned Welty.  Maybe her stories are to set in a place, maybe teachers will not assign her work because of the racial terms the characters use.  

I am very glad I read this collection.  It took me several months of on and off reading to finish it but it was a very rewarding read for me.  

Mel u

Mark a Murphy and Noral Hollin Murphy-Two Flash Fiction Works

Today I am honored to share with my readers two fascinating flash fiction works. One by Mark A. Murphy and one by his wife Nora Hollin Murphy.

I hope to be able to do a Q and A session with Mark Murphy later in the year.

Broth of these stories are protected under international copyright laws and cannot be published or posted online without the permission of the authors.

Mark A. Murphy

---

Mark A. Murphy was born in 1969. He studied philosophy (BA) and poetry (MA) at University. His first full length collection, Night-watch Man & Muse will be published by Salmon Poetry in early 2012. Mark’s poems have been published by Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Scotland, The Warwick Review(UK), Istanbul Literature Review (Turkey), The Paris Atlantic Journal (France), The American Dissident (US), The Tampa Review (US), Left Curve (US) and The Stinging Fly (Ireland). He lives in Huddersfield in the UK.

In His Time Of Dying

by Mark A Murphy

Penniless as always and now intoxicated, his body a dull ache in someone else’s headache, drunk with pain and worry and regret, drunk with love and even drunk with lust, the injured man considered his position.  The oval of faces that loomed above him looked ugly and remote like unwanted guests at a birthday party. Clumsily, they pressed forward into an ever tighter ball that blotted out the sky.

‘All that humanity,' he thought, 'and yet no cement for the human bond.’   

Curious at the sight of the crooked man, they crowded closer to pinpoint the spot. Unable to move he imagined himself a  latter day saint or saviour among men. No one would deny him that now. He wondered what was certain. Was it certain that his wife had left only two nights before, or was he the one who’d been asked to leave and in a blind rage done the leaving? The semantics weighed on his mind.

'To depart. To disappear. To quit.'

So much tautology. He couldn’t make up his mind. Was it certain that he was bleeding, or even injured at all, or was it just the sensation of rain soaking his clothes?

‘At last’ he thought, ‘this is the recognition I deserve.’

How purposeful it all seemed, as if that moment in the rain was meant to happen, the whole wretched world watched and cared what happened to him now. And with that he closed his eyes and lost consciousness.

Nora Hollin Murphy



Nora Hollin Murphy is a poet and song-writer currently residing in Austin, TX. US

Textile Mill Tower Clock

It has stopped: 5:31 to be exact. It stopped long ago before all that now crawl, walk, fly or moan were ever to hear the last bell of her hours. One minute past her final chime, the minutes fell still in the now timeless town as a man in worn trousers walked past. Looking up at the frozen white face, he pulled out his pocket-watch, looked up again and turned back his time with a simple anti-clockwise twist of his finger and thumb before casually carrying on. Babies were to be born that day and  nestlings to fall. Windows, hearts and solemn vows  were  to break at 5:31 that day as on all days.

As her time held immovable, all her other hours and minutes slowly became but pleasant decorations, the visual symbol of a beginning winding toward another beginning. She herself was mute, her clever gears having forever ceased their regime of catching and releasing seconds, although an audible record keeping of seconds continued in the rhythmic foot-falls of lovers secretly sheltering in the thorny moonlit brambles that wildly fortressed her brick tower.

The man died after living beneath just one more grey and starless sky. The clock dutifully recorded the hour of his demise: 5:31 - though his watch, hidden on his person like a small meaningless heart encased in gold recorded it to be 8 o' clock upon the ledgers of irrelevance, whilst eternity, exempt from time and choice, continued lumbering onwards.

End

My thanks to Mark and Hollis Murphy for letting me share these works with my readers.

Mel u