Reading by the Road in Candelaria (June 12 to June 15, 2015) A Post in Honor of Bonny Norte

Last week my wife's youngest brother, age 43, Bonny Norte, tragically  passed away.  The ancestral home of the family is in Candelaria in Northern Zambales, a town of about five thousand.  Bonny was a teacher, a father and husband and a dedicated family member. Bonny was a calm, gentle person  who loved being with his family above all else.   My wife, me and three daughters and a niece and nephew all traveled up from Manila to Candelaria.  Manila is the epitome of a S. E. Asian Mega City, Candelaria is a very relaxed place where it is a pleasure just to breath.  Sitting out in the veranda of the main house on the family property, I almost feel like I could be back 100 years in time, if I let my mind run free I can imagine watching the Spainish first arrive.

I find being there very conductive to deep and extended reading.  You can see the white carabao pulling a cart on the highway in front of the family property.  I had just read E. F. Forster's wonderful story about the reading life, "The Celestial Omnibus" and I wondered if the carabao could really be pulling the celestial omnibus through Zambales.  

While in Candelaria I completed Elizabeth Taylor's excellent 1947 novel, A View from the Harbour, read in Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe's most recently translated novel and read about a third of a book on my life time must read list, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  I also read and reread a number of short stories, some by favorite authors I knew I could count on for quality art and some by writers totally new to me.  I will list them with sometimes a comment.  

The German Pension by Katherine Mansfield.  I read and posted on all these stories about five years ago.  The stories were among her first published works, she was to later call them immature, are interconnected works set in an elite German boarding house where people go to take water cures in hot springs for various illnesses.  I wanted to see if I would like her work now after five years of reading short stories as I did years ago.  I found I liked them much more.  The characterizations are very subtle and the wit so dry.  Set just before W W I the houmourous jibes between the Germans and the English woman narrating the stories take on a dark under tone.  The stories are really funny at times, at times very sad.  The stories have lots of subtle class markers.  I reread about half the stories and will reread the rest again soon.

I also read or reread six  short stories by a contemporary writer I have admired for a long time, Ethel Rohan, all from her newest collection Goodnight Nobody.  Rohan writers about death and pain in a very illuminating fashion.  Her stories are a pure joy to read and I am greatly looking forward to her first novel.  The Irish know Death.

"The Celestial Omnibus" by E. M. Forster (1911) belongs on your must read list.  It is brief but may keep you pondering for a long time.

"Slight Rebellion off Madison" was my first  J. D. Salinger short story.  I liked it a lot.

Robert Walser is on my list of holy writers.  I read the very prototypical Walser story "Heblinger's Story".

"His Mother" by Mavis Gallant, anyone who has read Mavis loves her work and so do I.

"The Silk Hankerchef" by Sait Faish Abasiyanh, Turkey's highest regarded short story writer.  My first of his work.  I was given a while ago an anthology of his stories and will soon read more, I hope.

"Barren" by Saadat Hasan Manto.  Literary works about the dark side of the Indian mega city are very trendy now, Manto was there first.

"The Way Things are Going" by Lynn Freed.  First read a Freed story in 2011, glad to have read a second.

"High Belt Over Coat" by Mikhail Shishkin (2012, Russia).  I liked this story and maybe I will overcome my aversion to post- Romanov Russian fiction one day, though I do like Gorky a lot. 

"The Semlplica Girl Diaries" by Geroge Saunders.  My second of his works, a strange very interesting quite creative story. 

Bonny, we all miss you.  See you again.

Mel u

"Will You Be Quiet, Please" by Raymond Carver (1967, reprinted in 100 Years of the Best of American Short Stories)

Raymond Carver (1938 to 1988) is considered one of the masters of the minimalist short stories, a genius at getting as much as you can out of as few words as possible.   I have only read a few of his short stories because of a limiting prejudice.  Much of his work seems devoted to stories about people who lead alcohol centered lives.  I do not find much sympathy with the problems brought on by this and maybe this is why I have not yet got into Carver extensively.   

"Will You Be Quiet, Please", published in the 1967 Best American Short Stories Anthology, is a brilliant portrait of a sad marriage, where a mistake made years ago ruined everything but the partners cannot really just walk away or forget what happened.  Alcohol is an important part of their coping mechanism.

About two years ago the wife had a one night relationship with an acquaintance of the husband.  When he came to realize what happened, the man hit his wife in the mouth, blooding her and knocking her to the ground.  Years go by and the husband cannot forgive or let it go.  (As a husband, I could not either.). He keeps quizzing his wife about why she cheated on him.  It seems she just got carried away in a moment.  After one very gut wringing quarrel he storms out of the house and ends up in a tavern.  He cannot help but think over and over on the infidelity of his wife, he cannot get the image of his wife having sex with another man out of his mind.

The story is divided into three sections.  In one interesting incident, he is hit in the mouth and robbed by a black man (then called a "negro") who knocks him down just as he did his wife.  

I admired the very real technical mastery of this story.  Carver truly made me feel the pain in this marriage but also the deep love from which a terrible hurt is born. One day I hope to read the full body of Carver's short stories.  They are just in fact being published as Kindle editions.  

Do you have any favorite Carver stories?

The story is included in the collection above.  I was given a copy of this very well done anthology. 

Mel u

"A Man Like Him" by Yiyun Li (A Short Story by the Winner of the 2005 Frank O'Connor Prize, from Golden Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories)

My Posts on  Yiyun Li

I was very happy to find included in a D R C, New American Short Stories, I was recently given a story by one of my favorite writers, Yiyun Li.  I have previously read both of her novels and several of her wonderful short stories.  

"A Man Like Him", set in Maoist era China, centers on a forty six year old male teacher, never married, who lives with his very elderly mother, caring for her.  Twenty five years ago his father was a high level professor of philosophy.  For expressing criticism of the government, he was reassigned as a trash collector for some twenty years.   He lives in an environment in which you have to be very careful who you trust.  Long ago the teacher was accused of looking in a sexual way at his young female students.

The beauty of the story is in the great sadness conveyed in the subdued prose of Li, in the relationships stifled by the miasma of distrust.

I have a few more stories by Yiyun Li in anthologies I have been given and hope to read them soon.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Kinder Than Solitude. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the Guardian First Book Award, among others. Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five, and The New Yorker named her one of twenty American writers under forty to watch. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis.

Mel u

The Last Leopard A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi dí Lampedosa by David Gilmour (1988)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to read this book

My Posts on Giuseppe Tomasi dí Lampedosa

Giuseppe Tomasi dí Lampedosa (1896 to 1957, Sicily) is the author of what many consider the greatest of all Italian novels, The Leopard.  Set in Sicily in the 19th century, it focuses on a nobleman who see his way of life being destroyed by social changes, historical forces he cannot control.  It focuses on the decline of a decadent aristocracy.  

I am very fond of biographies of authors and this is up there with the best of them.  Lampedosa was a minor nobleman from a family of ancient lineage.  For generations the Lampedosa's lived upon the rents from their properties.  Gilmour does a marvelous job of letting us see how the family background shaped the mind set of Lampedoda.  I don't quite know how to talk about this book but I loved it, especially the extensive details given about the reading life of Lampedosa, who loved nothing more than reading.   He treasured physical books, he kept a copy of his favorite book, The Pickwick Papers by his bed and carried an edition of Shakespeare with him when ever he traveled.  He loved being in his library above all.  Lampedosa was an inward directed man.  He married a Ukrainian psychoanalysis with  whom he had a sometimes long distance relationship.  He was a man of very deep culture, erudition and historically very learned. Gilmour says he looked like and acted like an old man by the time he was fifty, perhaps weighed down the decline of his beloved Sicily.  After World War Two Lampedosa felt obligated to help with the post war rebuilding of the island and took an administrative job with the Italian Red Cross.  He soon became Red Cross director for Sicily and was subsequently asked to resign when too many complaints were raised about how things were going.  I got the feeling it was not really Lampedosa's fault, it was just not a job for him.  A lot of space is devoted to the composition of his only novel, The Leopard and his inability to get it published.  After posthumous publication, it went on to become one of the bestselling and highest regarded Italian novels of all time.

David Gilmour’s books include award-winning biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. He is also the author of The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj and of several books on Spain and the Middle East. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, he is a contributor to the Spectator and the New York Review of Books. He is currently writing a book on Giuseppe Verdi and the unification of Italy. The Last Leopard won the Marsh Biography Award in 1989.

I would certainly want to read more by Gilmour.  

I will reread The Leopard soon and will be helped by the insights of Gilmour.

Mel u

"A Permanent Member of the Family" by Russell Banks (2013, included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015)

I was recently very kindly given a D R C of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 edited by Laura Furman.  This almost 100 year old series of books draws from short stories published in Canadian and American journals.  Inclusion is a great honor.  This year's edition looks great with a very multicultural author base.  

"A Permanent Member of the Family" by Russell Banks is my introduction to his work.  I really liked this story centering around an older man's memories of a critical incident of thirty five years ago in the family history.  The parents are divorcing, amiably as can be possible.  They have three daughters and the man has a daughter from a prior relationship.  They have lived in a big house bought with her parents money.  He moves out and gets a small place not to far away.  He is a college professor.  They get joint custody of the girls, they stay with him half the time.  No real issues over this.  The issues come from who gets the family elderly family dog.

Banks does a wonderful job with all of the relationships and with the telling of the story.  I will leave much of the plot unspoiled.  

Russell Banks was born in Massachusetts. He is the author of eighteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Lost Memory of Skin, as well as six short-story collections. Banks is a member of the American Academy of Arts.

Mel u

Catherine de' Medici by Honore de Balzac (1846, A Novel, A Component of the Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

65 of 91

Stefan Zweig and Eric Auerbach both felt that Balzac's work on the aristocrats of France was secondary to his work on ordinary contemporary people.  Balzac nearly worshipped the nobility and this shows in his work.   Catherine de' Medici was first published in three parts and published as a whole in 1846.  It is considered very much modeled on the work of Sir Walter Scott.

Catherine de' Medici lived from 1519 to 1589.  As the wife of King Henry II she was queen of France from 1547 to 1555.  The novel is close to a biography in format.  

Over all I see no reason for most to read this book.  

Ambrosia Boussweau 

"The Prospectors" by Karen Russell (June 8, 2015, in The New Yorker)

Prior to reading "The Prospectors" I have read and posted on four delightful short stories by Karen Russell and her novella Sleep Donation.  I was very happy to learn the current issue of The New Yorker has a new story by Russell.  My main purpose today is to let my readers know of the opportunity to read a Karen Russell short story for free and to keep a reading journal for it.


The story is set in 1931, the terrible economic down turn known as the depression has  just begun. Our central characters are two young women from Florida.  One is from a prosperous hotel owning family and one used to be a maid the hotel.   They decided they might find better times in Oregon and moved there.  They make a living by stealing things from the houses and parties their good looks gets them invited to.  They are also border line prostitutes at times.  It is kind of an adventure and the girls are very bonded to each other.  The big thing in the town they are staying at is the construction of a new giant ski resort.  The government has programs to give jobs to all kind of workers.  The big day comes for the opening night party at the new ski.  Every big whig in the state will be there and the girl figure it could be a great opportunity for them.

They get on the ski ramp to the hotel, or do they?  Now things take a turn for the very strange.

I greatly enjoyed this story.

My Prior Posts on Karen Russell


Read the story here

Mel u