The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in 1967. She is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama.   She has a PhD in Renaissance Studies.   

 

She is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies(1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; The Namesake (2003), adapted into the popular film of the same name; Unaccustomed Earth (2008); and The Lowland (2013), longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.  The Lowland has also been long listed for the National Book Award.  In 2008 the judges for the Frank O'Connor international Prize declared Unaccustomed Earth the winner, dispersing with a short list, saying that her collection was overwhelmingly the best.  

There is additional background information on her in my prior posts.  I have read both of her short story collections.

The Lowland is a very good novel, fully worthy of both a Booker Prize and a National Book Award.  Like much of her prior work, the central characters are highly educated Bengali immigrants to the USA, in this case Rhode Island.  There are already numerous blog posts and reviews detailing the plot so I will not.   The novel covers sixty years or so in the lives of its central characters.   The characters are brilliantly developed.  It is about the power and pain of families, about immigration, about the love between brothers, about the impact of mothers, about trying to preserve your culture against the power of America.  There is a lot to be learned about Indian politics from this novel.  

I loved it when the novel moved briefly to Ireland.  The Lowland is a step up from her powerful short stories, which is saying a great deal.   The prose is exquisite.  

I think people will be reading The Lowland for many years to come.  I hope to read her first novel, The Namesake soon.  

"Drifting" by Horacio Quiroga (1912).

The First South American Master of the Short Story- The Edgar Allan Poe of the Amazon Basin 

Horacio Quiroga (1878 to 1937-Salto Uruguay) is considered the first modern South American short story writer.    He called Edgar Allen Poe his greatest teacher (and he lead a life at least as tragic as Poe's).    He has been called "The Edgar Allen Poe of the Amazon" as he is most famous for his horror stories set in the jungles of the Amazon.   His stories are about people at the end of their rope, people driven mad by the isolation of the jungle,  the borders between hallucinations and reality and above all, death.   

Quiroga's father accidentally shot himself  before he was three months old.   Quiroga accidentally killed his best friend while cleaning a gun.    His best friend, also an author, shot himself after a bad review.   He had several very doomed from the start love affairs and marriages    When he was 22 his step father shot himself.   

At about twenty two Quiroga  discovered Edgar Allen Poe and knew he must become  a short story writer.   He also wrote several novels but his 200 or so short stories are his legacy to the world.   At about this same time he went along as official photographer on a trip with the famous Argentine poet, Leopoldo  Lugones, to  visit Jesuit missions in the Amazon region.    Quiroga fell in love with the jungle areas of the Amazon.   He was enthralled by the lush danger, the feeling of unlimited fecundity, the strangeness to him of the native people, and one must admit the cheapness with which land could then be bought there.   He set up a farm there and did many experimental things no one else had tried before.   Most of them were failures (I sense he was best at starting things!) but they show he had a great practical intelligence not just literary.   (There is a very interesting article on him HERE that details his numerous romances.   

Quiroga is as death obsessed a writer as you are likely to find.  Roberto Bolano greatly admired his work.  "Drifting" is a painfully vivid account of what it was like to die from snake bite in the Amazon basin in 1910, hours from any medical care.  Quiroga's description of the impact of the bite is really brilliant.  It hurt to see the victim's leg swell up to double size.   The man perceived his only hope for surviving was by taking a five hour canoe ride to the nearest bigger town where medical help is available and where he has a friend.  The beauty of the river is almost that of an hallucination.  We see the man become increasingly unable to tell reality from his snake vermin induced perceptions.  The riverine journey becomes a passage to another world.   I don't know what dying from a snake bite feels like but now I can imagine it.

This story was translated by Margaret Pedar.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

Thomas Hardy is one of the highest regarded late Victorian writers.  His productive years extended well beyond the reign of Victoria.   Most of his fiction is set in an imaginary county in England he created.  I have previously posted on his The Return of the Native and some of his short stories.  

Jude the Obscure is considered by many to be Hardy's best novel.  I will say it is a very sad book which many will find depressing.   It seems to present a vision of a world not worth living in.   The novel is in many ways about aspects of the reading life.  Jude, born into a lower class family and a stone worker by trade, desperately wanted to go to college at Christchurch (said to be Cambridge).   He learns Greek and Latin and reads deeply in the classics. He educated himself to a very high level.  Part of my pondering in reading the novel was whether or not his very real depth of reading in fact only intensified his misery.  It seems to me it did.   He loved his books and sacrificed to purchase them.   We can see he was, he acknowledges this, that he lets his desire to have sex  helped to ruin him.   Neither of the two women he loved respected or understood his love of the reading life.   He read in near complete isolation and had no one to share his passion.  I can relate.  

There are lots of things in the novel about the nature of marriage and the hypocrisy of sexual and social  standards. There are numerous narrational asides of deep insight.  The characters are very subtly drawn.  Tragic events occur, deeply horrible things.  The close of the novel is shocking.  

Jude the Obscure is a canon status work, high art.  It does, to repeat my warning, have the power to depress.  Hardy saw a bleak world and he depicted it masterfully.  I will next read, once I recover from this one, his The Mayor of Casterbridge.   

"Bobcat" by Rebecca Lee. (From Bobcat and Other Stories, 2012)

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.

"Bobcat" is the title story in Rebecca Lee's highly regarded short story collection, Bobcat and Other Stories.  I have previously posted on her very good short story, "On the Shores of the Vistula", from the collection.  Both of these stories center on very educated, cultivated people with academic backgrounds. 

"Bobcat" is set at the house party of affluent cultured Manhattan couple.  The wife is an attorney.  Her biggest case now involves a Hmong tribal man living in New York City.  His tradition rejects modern medicine as witchcraft.   He refused to allow his critically ill young daughter to receive Western medical care and she died as a result.  She and her partner are trying to keep him out of prison.  

The story deals a lot with how people try to project themselves versus how we think they do.  It also makes a lot of subtle points about relationships.  Three of the people at the party have written books, one about a bobcat attack.   It was a lot of fun to read about the pre-party preparations and the food sounds great. I liked this story a lot.  I admit I liked "On the Shores of the Vistula" a little bit more.

"Your Duck is My Duck" by Deborah Eisenberg (from 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories)

Author Bio 

Over the past three decades, Deborah Eisenberg has produced four short-story collections:Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). She has also written a play,Pastorale (1982), a monograph on the artist Jennifer Bartlett (1994), and criticism, much of it for The New York Review of Books. Her preeminence as a short-story writer has been recognized by countless critics and a host of awards, including a DAAD residency, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, many O. Henry prizes, the pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a MacArthur “genius grant.”

The yearly anthology of the O. Henry Prize Stories is one of the most important short story collections of the year.  The requirement for consideration is that your work must have been published in an American or Canadian publication.  I really like the way the collections are done and the secondary articles in which the judges talk about their favorite short stories.  

"My Duck is Your Duck" by Deborah Eisenberg is the lead story in the collection.  It was my first exposure to her work and I will, hopefully be reading more of her work soon. The central character, a woman, is a struggling painter.  She tells the story and she is interesting, perceptive,and intelligent.  I don't want to tell much of the plot.  She is invited to come stay at the island retreat of a hyper-wealthy family that admires her work.  Everything about the story is intriguing.  It is about a lot of things.  The nature of art, the exploitive nature of the rich, the decay of many local cultures caused by intrusions, big business and much more.  There is a puppet show master also staying there 

"The Salary Man" by Krys Lee (from Drifting House, 2012)

Krys Lee is a new to be writer that I am thrilled to have found.   Most of her stories focus on residents of North or South Korea or immigrants to the USA.   The stories I have so far posted on deal with the mind numbing hardship of life in North Korea and the struggles to survive of those in the South or in the USA.    Older immigrants stay totally in the boundaries of Korean communities.  

"The Salary Man" shows in a painfully real and vivid fashion what happened to 1000s of people who thought they had life time employment locked in when the South Korean economy collapsed in the mid  1990s.   At one time if you got a job at a major Korean corporation you were almost guaranteed life time employment.   Managers were revered, at least to their face, and corporations were paternalistic.  In bailing out the Korean economy, the International Monetary Fund put such strict requirements on the government that businesses were forced to lay off large numbers of workers.  Many workers, including the central figure in this story was so shamed they waited long periods before telling their families, often getting dressed for work and then sitting in the park all day.  We witness the terrible decline and hardship of the salary man.  He sends his wife and kids to live with her parents, saying once he is back working he will set up a home for them again.    His life becomes worse and worse every day.  Soon he is among many 1000s of homeless ex-salary men.  His wife divorces him.  He learns to survive on the street though his mental state degenerates sadly. ,

I hope to read a lot more of the work of Krys Lee.  

Krys Lee was born in Seoul in The Republic of Korea and raised in England and the United States.  Her debut collection of short storiesDrifting House (2012) is drawing great praise from all over the world, with the exception of North Korea where I suspect being caught with a copy would get you in very serious trouble

"Sunstroke" by Horacio Quiroga (1908).

The First South American Master of the Short Story- The Edgar Allan Poe of the Amazon Basin 

Horacio Quiroga (1878 to 1937-Salto Uruguay) is considered the first modern South American short story writer.    He called Edgar Allen Poe his greatest teacher (and he lead a life at least as tragic as Poe's).    He has been called "The Edgar Allen Poe of the Amazon" as he is most famous for his horror stories set in the jungles of the Amazon.   His stories are about people at the end of their rope, people driven mad by the isolation of the jungle,  the borders between hallucinations and reality and above all, death.   

Quiroga's father accidentally shot himself  before he was three months old.   Quiroga accidentally killed his best friend while cleaning a gun.    His best friend, also an author, shot himself after a bad review.   He had several very doomed from the start love affairs and marriages    When he was 22 his step father shot himself.   

At about twenty two Quiroga  discovered Edgar Allen Poe and knew he must become  a short story writer.   He also wrote several novels but his 200 or so short stories are his legacy to the world.   At about this same time he went along as official photographer on a trip with the famous Argentine poet, Leopoldo  Lugones, to  visit Jesuit missions in the Amazon region.    Quiroga fell in love with the jungle areas of the Amazon.   He was enthralled by the lush danger, the feeling of unlimited fecundity, the strangeness to him of the native people, and one must admit the cheapness with which land could then be bought there.   He set up a farm there and did many experimental things no one else had tried before.   Most of them were failures (I sense he was best at starting things!) but they show he had a great practical intelligence not just literary.   (There is a very interesting article on him HERE that details his numerous romances.   

Yesterday I acquired a collection of short stories by Horacio Quiroga.  He was one of Roberto Bolano's favorite writers.   I have read and posted prior today on seven of his stories.   His best known stories are "The Decapitated Chicken" and "The Feather Pillow".  Like these two stories "Sunstroke" deals with death, making use of belief's about death of people of Uruguay.  There are interesting similarities between some of the views of Irish country people in the same period.  

Quiroga wrote a lot of children's stories.  The protagonists of this story are a group of dogs who all belong to the local patron.  They talk to each other.  They know they have a good master and a better life than most of the dogs in the area.  He does not beat them and they are well fed.  One morning one of the dogs see death approaching their master.  All of the dogs fear his passing will mean the end of their comfortable existence.  It was a lot of fun to listen to the dogs talk and running the field with the pack.  Death does not seem to come back and the dogs hope it was all a false alarm.

Quiroga masterfully describes the countryside, plantation life, the world of the dogs, and their relationship to each other and the patron.  The story does not end happily, few of his seem to have one.  The story was translated by Margaret Paden.