"The Chosen Husband" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker, April 15, 1985

"The Chosen Husband" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker, April 15, 1985A

Included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Buried in Print is doing a full read through of the short stories of Mavis Gallant,one of the masters of the form.  She began in March 2017 and anticipates finishing in the fall.  I have access to about half of her stories and have been following along as I can since March 25, 2007, starting with "The Other Paris".  The full schedule is on her blog and all are invited to join the project.

In the opening sentences of "The Chosen Husband" with her characteristic style Gallant lays out the family history in just a few sentences.

"IN 1949, A year that contained no other news of value, Mme. Carette came into a legacy of eighteen thousand dollars from a brother-in-law who had done well in Fall River. She had suspected him of being a Freemason, as well as of other offenses, none of them trifling, and so she did not make a show of bringing out his photograph; instead, she asked her daughters, Berthe and Marie, to mention him in their prayers.  They may have, for a while. The girls were twenty-two and twenty, and Berthe, the elder, hardly prayed at all. The first thing that Mme. Carette did was to acquire a better address. Until now she had kept the Montreal habit of changing her rented quarters every few seasons, a conversation with a landlord serving as warranty, rent paid in cash. This time she was summoned by appointment to a rental agency to sign a two-year lease. She had taken the first floor of a stone house around the corner from the church of Saint Louis de France. This was her old parish (she held to the network of streets near Parc Lafontaine) but a glorious strand of it, Rue Saint-Hubert."

We learn they are French Canadians.  ($18,000 in 1949 is roughly equal to $190,000 today). We learn there are two daughters in the family and they are Catholics.  We learn she elevated her social standing.  She becomes preoccupied with the upkeep of the Parrish church.

We soon learn she has been a widow a good while, like a number of people we meet in Gallant's stories, she seems intentionally to be old before her time, seeking an essence, a protective cover, in premature old age.

Both of the daughters are single.  The older one has an office job. One has a relationship of some sort with a man of Greek ancestry.  He fails Mme. Carette's son in law test on several grounds, not a Catholic, but at least Christian, too dark, and does not speak French.  The other daughter also has a suitor.  He comes to dinner on a regular basis.  There is no sex in either relationship.  

Gallant takes us slowly, you have to work her stories, into the characters of the daughter, the suitors and the mother.  We come to 

 see how Mme. Corette misses her husband.

"In quiet moments, Mme Carette imagines her funeral. She is forty-five years old and “death had been her small talk”. She still feels “cruelly the want of a husband, someone – not a daughter – to help her up the steps of a streetcar, read La Presse and tell her what was in it, lay down the law to Berthe”.

Such beautiful lines!

I was caught by surprise when international affairs resulted in a marriage.

Mel u

An Exchange of Letters Between America and the Old Country - A Short Story by Sholem Aleichem (Story probably written 1910) Translated by Curt Leviant from Yiddish

An Exchange of Letters Between America and the Old Country - A Short Story by Sholem Aleichem (Story probably written 1910)

Translated by Curt Leviant from Yiddish

You can read the story here.

Published Summer 2019 in Pakn Treger, The Magazine of the Yiddish Book Center

Sholem Aleichem

1859 Born in The Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire

1916 Dies in New York City, then part of The U.S.A.  His funeral is attended by 250,000

To most people, certainly me a few years ago, Yiddish writers were divided into two categories, Sholom Aleichem and a bunch of authors I have never heard about that I would never have read were it not for Yale University Press giving me a full set of The Yale Yiddish Library.  These nine volumes, introduced by top authorities in Yiddish Studies, include some of the great classics.

Among the works were two totally marvelous novels  by Sholom Aleichem.  All of the works were pre-Holocaust, written in Eastern Europe and Russia.  All were by men.  As Yiddish speakers left Europe, mostly to NYC then Toronto and Montréal women writers like Blume Lempel and Chava Rosenfarb began publishing in Yiddish.  I have talked a bit about the history of Yiddish Literature (running from around 1875 to maybe 2004 with the passing of the last of the emigrated writers) in prior posts.  My perception is most seriously into Yiddish Literature, a huge treasure trove of Short Stories, are “heritage readers” seeking ties with the world of their ancestors in Eastern Europe.  Behind it is also a powerful message to those who would destroy Jewish Culture, you lose, we win.  I read in this area because it is an incredibly wonderful literature.  The stories range from heart breaking to funnier than a Mel Brooks movie.  Yiddish scholarship has very strong support and thanks to the internet, and maybe especially The Yiddish Book Center, interest is rapidly growing.  YouTube has lots of good videos and readings of stories.

Anyway Sholom Aleichem is by far now most known Yiddish writer.  He is most famous from the movie Fiddler on the Roof based on his Tevye Cycle, centering on a Russian dairyman and his relationship with his daughters.  

Letters between America and "back home" were a very important part of  the emotional support systems for Yiddish speaking immigrants to America.  Of course most immigrants paint a glowing picture of America.

The story is told through two letters, one sent from New York City by Jacob (formerly Yenkl, the Americanizing of his name is a very big matter) to his close friend Yisrulik back in the "old country" and his friend's answer. His friend lives in Russia.. The time period of the letters is in 1905.  Sholem Achleim's first readers would have known this from the events described by Yisrulik.  (In his very well done introduction Curt Leviant provides us with the background we need.)

Here is the start of the letter from America, notice the American slang expressions such as "blue funk" and "eating our hearts out".   "Mr. Krushevan, that damned anti-Semite and president of the Fourth Duma" referred to was a journalist responsible for widely circulating the codicils of the elders of Zion and inciting anti - Jewish violence.  He was not in fact ever executed.

"To my dear friend Yisrulik, may you and your wife and children be inscribed for a year of health and happiness, and may God’s blessings come upon all Israel, amen.

We’ve been worried stiff because you haven’t written us any letters. We’ve been walking around in a blue funk ever since that period of revolution, constitution, and pogroms began back home in the old country. We’re literally eating our hearts out. If the papers here in America aren’t bluffing, then those revolutionaries have probably made mincemeat of half the world already.

Every day we get wind of another sensational event. Last night I read a cable that they strung up Mr. Krushevan, that damned anti-Semite and president of the Fourth Duma. Let me know if that isn’t a lot of hot air. And write me about your business. Are you still working for someone or are you on your own? And how’s Khane-Rikl? What’s Hershel doing? And how is my cousin Lipa? And how about Yosl, Henikh’s boy! And Bentsi and Rokhl? Zlatke? Motl? And the rest of the tailors? Are you thinking of coming to America? Fill me in on all the details in your next letter.

Of course he relays the news of his family:

"The only thing we miss is . . . home. We’re homesick something awful. My wife, Jennie (we don’t call her Blume anymore), doesn’t leave me alone for a minute. She keeps nagging me to take a trip back to Russia and visit our beloved, dear ones in the cemetery. You’d never recognize Jennie. She’s a regular lady, rigged out in hat, gloves, and all the trimmings. I’m en­closing a snapshot of her and the rest of the family. What do you say to my oldest boy? That’s Motl. Now he’s called Mike. He’s an “alrightnik.” He works in a factory and earns ten, twelve dollars a week. If only he wouldn’t gamble, he’d be a topnotch alrightnik.

My other boy, Jack, used to work in a factory too. He managed to pick up a bit of English and is now a bookkeeper in a barbershop. My third rascal, Benjamin, is a barroom waiter. He doesn’t get wages, but he brings home between six and eight dollars a week in tips. My fourth boy, the one in the picture wearing a cap, is a loafer. He doesn’t want to go to school but hangs around outside on the street day and night playing ball.

The girls are okay too. They work in shops and have some cash in the bank. The only trouble is that I see neither hide nor hair of them. They step out whenever they like, go wherever they like, and with whomever they like.

America’s a free country. You’re perfectly free to keep opinions to yourself. You can’t even tell your own daughter who to marry".

The letter from the old country is written in a classic fashion readers  of Sholem Aleichem will recognize.  Start with humour, then relay in a matter of fact way some terrible events, deaths, murders in pograms and then close with humour.

His friend says America sounds like a place he wants nothing to do with.

"An Exchange of Letters Between America and the Old Country" is a miniature master work, readable in under five minutes.  It would make a good first work by Sholem Aleichem.

Mel u

The Captive Neice - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1969

The Captive Neice - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

This story is included in two collections, In Transit and The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. 

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

I am reading along as best I can, having access to only about half of her stories, with Buried in Print on their read through of the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.  

"The Captive Neice" has two central characters, a woman, guessing in her early twenties and a man, her loved and maybe can be seen as her captor, thirty nine years old.  For sure you will find him very annoying.  At first he keeps calling himself an old man then it is revealed he is just thirty nine.  The woman was raised by her aunt, her parents having passed.  The live together in a low rent hotel.  He stays in an reads and smoked cigarettes, the room reeks of them but it is too cold to open the window.

We are left to our imagination in deciding how their relationship began, where their money comes from and 

perhaps most of all, why the woman does not just move on.  She is 

pursuing a job in the theater.  The man seems to know the exalted man for whom she is auditioning.  They have words over this.

This is another story about a relationship that on the face of it makes little sense.  We are left to ponder the couple's 

past and future.

“Love, Nude” - A Short Story by Elaine Chiew from her Debut Collection, The Heartsick Diaspora- 2020

• “A perfect book for a lockdown” - Olivia 

“Love, Nude” - A Short Story by Elaine Chiew from her Debut Collection, The Heartsick Diaspora- 2020

Olivia is very right, The Heartsick Diaspora is perfect literary company for those of us under lockdown.  There are 14 absorbing stories in the collection, read one a day and you will be done with two weeks of lockdown.

Teck Hin is an aspiring Singapore based artist.  To the chagrin of his  mother he dropped out of law school to study art.  (There are lots of references to artists and artistic movements in Singapore in “Love, Nude”.  Googling them all, looking at examples of paintings added a lot to my enjoyment of the story. If you are not familiar with post World War Two Singaporean art I highly recommend you do this.  Below is a small sample of the work of this period.

Besides Teck Hin, there is a second paramount character, Yee Lan. Yee Lan is 16, the daughter of a very close family friend.  The year is 1961.  Politically Singapore is sort of finding its direction as an independent entity.  Yee Lan has a serious crush on Teck Hin, he wants to do a nude painting of her but is not sure how to approach her.  To complicate matters, her mother sees him as the perfect future son-in-law.  She is almost a second mother to him and he worries about her reaction if she learns he painted her daughter nude.  It might obligate him to marry her. He becomes Yee’s art tutor and thus has a legitimate reason for being alone with her in her room.

There are strong erotic undertones in the story.  Marvelous descriptions are given of his work as an art student, in various styles.  

I don’t want to reveal how this works out for Teck and Yee.  The closing third of the story are just a joy to read. The account of the nude body of 16 year old Yee brings to mind the tradition of nude paintings of young women and the often sexually charged relationships involved.

There is one more story for which I still have the pleasure of reading coming in The Heartsick Diaspora.  I think I will save it for May.

Elaine is a writer and a visual arts researcher, and editor of Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World (New Internationalist, 2015).

Twice winner of the Bridport Short Story Competition, she has published numerous stories in anthologies in the UK, US and Singapore.

Originally from Malaysia, Chiew graduated from Stanford Law School and worked as a corporate securities lawyer in New York and Hong Kong before studying for an MA in Asian Art History at Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore, a degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London.

Elaine lives in Singapore and her book, The Heartsick Diaspora, and other stories, was published by Myriad in 2020 as well  by Penquin Books.

“Today, You’re A Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, 2018

“Today, You’re A Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, 2018

Initially published in The Rhumpus, June 27, 2018

Lead Story in the Pen America Best Debut Short Stories, 2019

Winner of the Pen/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Short Story Writers, 2019

I recently acquired a perfect book for those interested in the state of the short story in the USA, Pen America Best Debut Short Stories, 2019.  The stories were selected by a distinguished group of accomplished short story writers.  Today’s story “Today, You’re A Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, 2018 was considered the best story.

The story is told in the second person. Set in South Carolina, twice a day a woman, in her early twenties, walks past a flag pole supporting a Confederate flag.  

“YOU WALK BY the flag twice every day. Once on your way to work and once on your way back home. You’ve only recently noticed that it affects your mood. It can be perfectly sunny, just the right amount of breeze to cool your skin and not to sweat out your edges. But there it is. The worst part is, it looks majestic, crinkled in the wind.”..

the blue X on the red background. A color combination that says, “Fuck you and your eyes.” It rebels against the idea of pleasurable aesthetics. You’ve noticed that after seeing the flag, you’re irritable and easily annoyed by strangers on the bus. A blond child incessantly telling knock-knock jokes to her mother—something you would usually laugh about—is just another example of how frustrating the world can be. You keep your grumpy thoughts to yourself.”.

When she gets to work her manager calls her “articulate”, as if her ability to speak well was a surprise in an African American.  She has recently moved to South Carolina.  At a fair, boys are running around:

““When I get you,” the boy with the wet shirt huffs, “Imma beat you like Emmett Till!” He’s still smiling while he runs. You stop abruptly, and one of the boys has to brake with his heels to avoid colliding into you. It doesn’t seem fair to blame Lil Wayne and his lyrics. Do they know who Emmett Till was? Do they have an image of his battered face, his features beaten into smudges? Or is he just another mythical childhood threat, a boogieman, Bloody Mary?”

Everywhere she is confronted by affronts to her history, by people who probably don’t understand why a Confederate flag is not a harmless celebration of mythical days of past glory but a reminder of pure evil.

The narration reveals she still has a hang up ⎌on a man who has moved on, to make it worse to a lighter skin woman.  She also maybe an alcoholic. For sure she and her mother, who wants her to go to medical school, have issues.  Jade does a marvelous job of setting out her relationship with her mother and her ex-boyfriend.

One day she does something seemingly out of character that lands her on television being interviewed as if she were a “Black Revolutionary”.  I don’t want to tell more of the plot.

The story is insightful and actually a lot of fun to read.  The characters are completely real.  Telling the story in the second person added interest to the story for me.

I look forward to reading more stories by Jada Jones.

Jade Jones was born and raised in Southern New Jersey. A former Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, she is a graduate of Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She is a Lecturer in Writing Arts at Rowan University, where she teaches first year writing and creative writing and serves as the Managing Editor of Glassworks.

A winner of the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, her work has appeared or is forthcoming on The Rumpus and Catapult.

You can find her on Twitter at @jadereginajones and on Instagram at @jaderjones.

From jaderjones.com

Mel u

 

"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018

C

"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018

• 
  

You can read today's story here.

A Lockdown Read

In the nearly eleven years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar.  So far I  have posted on five  of her marvelous very creative stories, all deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries.  

I have  recently  reread The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye.  He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In today's story and others of her work  I read prior to today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetorical structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives.  She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality. 

"Jagatishwaran" is narrated by the only unsuccessful child in a large Bombay family, the youngest, a boy. His siblings all have highly professional jobs.  He is fancies himself a painter, working on a mural based on classical Hindu mythology.  He lives at home and is a great disappointment to his father.  His father is very verbally abusive to him.  He suffers from various delusional mental disorders.

His sister, a physician, is at home on her annual visit from America, along with her adolescent daughter and younger son, bringing lots of gifts. Of course her presence only makes him stand out more as a burden on the family. We learn a good bit about how the family, affluent with servants functions.  Foodies will savour the descriptions of the meals.

Jagatishwaran is a regular patron of prostitutes.  It seems he feels more comfortable at the home of the women he regularly 

sees than his own family.  

The family dynamics are masterfully depicted.  Jagatishwaran establishes a bond with his neice and she confides in him.

I give my total endorsement to all lovers of the short story to White Elephants Dancing.

https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/

Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2,and featured on the Other Storiespodcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.She is a practicing physician.

"Biophile" - A Short Story by Ruby Cowling from her collection This Paradise, 2019

https://www.thewhitereview.org/fiction/biophile/

"Biophile" - A Short Story by Ruby Cowling from her collection This Paradise, 2019

Initially published in The White Review, April 2014

Website of Ruby Cowling

You may read the story here

A Lock Down Series Work.

This is my first venture into the marvelous creative challenging work of Ruby Cowl. I am very glad to have started what I hope will be an enduring connection with The Reading Life.

"Biophile" is an intriguing and complex story that will reward all lovers of the short story.

The  story narrated by a female game designer.  Many of us under lock down are spending a lot of time on our favorite computer games.  The narrator's company, Funsoft, designs very intricate role playing games based on literary classics.  She is currently working on a game based loosely on Wuthering Heights.  This is a very competitive business, game players are fickle. The job of the designer is to addict the player.

"Funsoft’s internal slogan was simple: Keep Players Playing. Which meant: get people addicted. Seduce them, blanket them with snuggly narcotic sensations. Get them to bury themselves in your two bright dimensions of zipping video candy. The lits brought some estate-reputation issues, and Plan B on Wuthering Heights meant a total remodel, fraught with the pangs of artistic compromise – Blustering Crags, we’d call it, with new character names, visuals nudged just far enough away from the originals to keep the estate lawyers at bay."

The narrator has a complicated personal life, sometimes she entangles the elements in the game into her internal monologues about her family life.  A dominant theme of her fantasies and from the game in development is the interface of players in the game with the dense Forrest areas of the area.

She seems to be  increasingly drawn into the game:

"—The soil is an illusion. Not matter, but a dream. In this way mountains can be moved. See, Harmony? You can move a mountain. Shitshitshit I am under a mountain No. Calm. Breathe. Don’t be sick. Breathe just a bit. It’s all I need. I chose this. I am all-powerful. I am the universe. I could do a game based on the gods. A game based on consciousness itself. No, forget the games. Fuck them. I wriggle a finger and feel the earth settle tighter around my hand. I veer from stabs of hope to the soft murmurs of submission, the hope worse than the fear. Then no, no, yes, this is it, here it comes, the eruption— Dinner over, everyone else elsewhere."

Cowling does a marvelous job showing us the narrators romantic involvements, her family complications and much more.

Ruby Cowling was born in Bradford and now lives in London. This Paradise is her first book. Her stories have won The White Review Prize (2014) and the London Short Story Prize (2014) among others and been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Lighthouse, The Letters Page, Unthology, and The Lonely Crowd. . 

Print Media Praise

 

‘Admirably ambitious in scope, Ruby Cowling explores big themes – climate change and natural disaster, technology and survival – using strange and sometimes fantastical imagery to trace the obscure edges of human experience.’ Alice Ash, Times Literary Supplement

 

‘The most original short stories I’ve read in a long time … current, entertaining, and relevant. Highly recommended.’ Jimena Gorraez, Litro

 

‘The range of Cowling’s style and subject matter is impressive … This Paradise is a beautiful and highly original collection.’ The Spectator

 

‘Ruby Cowling offers a call-to-arms, an urgent encouragement to breathe complexity back into a human experience made simple. We will be recorded, we will be flattened and reduced. But we can record too.’ Jon Doyle, Review 31

 

‘Most stories have their ‘home’ audience. But when fiction crosses that inner ring, and survives to tell its tale, well – that’s art. And This Paradise achieves that handsomely.’

Tamim Sadikali, Open Pen

I read this story twice, I thing I will return to it once the lock down period ends.

I look forward to reading the other nine stories in This Paradise

Mel