Recensioni
The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories,… di Joyce Carol Oates
"Going to Meet the Man," James Baldwin
"Greasy Lake," T. Coraghessan Boyle
"The Adulterous Woman," Albert Camus
"Order of Insects," William Gass
"The Mother," Natalia Ginsburg
"The Habit of Loving," Doris Lessing
"The Last Mohican," Bernard Malamud
"Patriotism," Yukio Mishima
"Talpa," Juan Rulfo
AND here's some meaningful quotes I liked:
From "Everything," Ingeborg Bachmann:
"I once read in a book the sentence: 'it is not heaven's way to raise its head.' It would be a good thing if everyone knew of this sentence that speaks of the hardness of heaven. Oh no, it really isn't heaven's way to look down, to give signs to the bewildered people below it. At least not where such a somber drama takes place in which it too, this fabricated 'above,' plays a part."
From "Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale," by Wolfgang Hildesheimer:
"I might mention here that I did not arrive at the decision I made during the next year because I wanted to appear eccentric or unique in the eyes of others. It was more my growing awareness that I couldn't select a conventional, bourgeois profession without in some way interfering with other people's lives. The career of a bureaucrat seemed particularly immoral to me, but I rejected other, more accepted humanitarian careers as well. To me, the work of a doctor who could save human life through his interference was highly suspect, because it might be that the person he saved was an out-and-out scoundrel whose life hundreds of oppressed people fervently wished would end."
From "A Friend and Protector," by Peter Taylor:
"That was the end of it for Jesse. And this is where I would like to leave off. It is the next part that is hardest for me to tell. But the whole truth is that my aunt did more than just show herself to Jesse through the glass door. While she remained there her behavior was such that it made me understand for the first time that this was not merely the story of that purplish black, kinky headed Jesse's ruined life. It is the story of my aunt's pathetically Unruined life, and my uncle's too, and even my own. I mean to say that at this moment I understood that Jesse's outside activities had been not only his, but ours too. My Uncle Andrew, with his double standard or triple standard - whichever it was - had most certainly forced Jesse's destruction upon him, and Aunt Margaret had made the complete destruction possible and desirable to him with her censorious words and looks. But they did it because they had to, because they were so dissatisfied with the pale unruin of their own lives. They did it because something would not let them ruin their own lives as they wanted and felt a need to do – as I have often felt a need to do, myself. As who does not sometimes feel a need to do? Without knowing it, I think, Aunt Margaret wanted to see Jesse as he was that morning. And it occurs to me now that dr. Morley understood this at the time."
- understated, almost too-readily diving into subaltern speak, but interesting macrostylistic points (ie the midpoint shift from the mallam to the mother, which was effective and broadening), even if the broader outlines of the plot contrivances are familiar (religio-medical shuckster/conman improvises in midst of plight and things work out differently than he'd planned). Also, nicely realist look at a set of deeply superstitious practices. That switch, nonetheless, also ruined it a bit for me--as we get the surprise of perspective shift and tonal shift, but lose connections to established arcs
"The Keeper of the Virgins," by Hanan al-Shaykh (1998): 7.5
- Reading predominantly genre stories has ill prepared me for the whiplash of a return to the stillness and impressionistic thinnness of a certain type of literary short story. In fact, it's something I wish some SF tales would take up (as, if I'm being honest, certain types of fantasy stories do actually at least try and replicate the tone here, as well as the subject matter too actually [think of all those Beneath Ceaseless Skies stories populated by penitents and monks and nuns and set in dusty convents and such]). Nonetheless, I was still pleasantly caught off guard by this pointed meditation of a story, in which a dwarf, intrigued by the life therein, visits a convent everyday, until finally being taken on inside, only to be, in turn, half devoted to the place and its inhabitants and half concerned about his increasing withdrawal from the world outside, especially after his own mother and brother recreate his own vigil outside the convent gates in order to get him to return. In fact, it was this last development, noted in the story's final paragraph, that moved this into the “solid” category for me. It wasn't so much as necessarily poignant, or even really earned [the minimum length required for any story to actually “earn” anything in the first place would be an interesting question to ponder], as a justification of the faith I'd put in the author to bring us, his audience, through this story cleanly, to make us reflect on a cycle, on the ambiguities of devotion and self-abnegation, and not simply sift through the story threads like an aimless, if pleasant, dream.
"Amor Divino," by Julia Alvarez (1997): 7
- Treacly muck, with some solid characterization and good writing, but that otherwise little examines or acknowledges the class implications of its characters and is, more distractingly, some Fiery Latina essentialism run amok.
- I’d be tempted to downplay the Apartheid angles here — to look past the petty, constant liberal racialism — if it wasn’t so cheaply invoked it as a bridge towards the story’s central emotional revelation. In many ways, we otherwise have a quintessential little piece of mid century bourgeois ennui here — replete with unexamined opulence and ambiguous infidelity and transposed only to South Africa and the female psyche. It’s a tightrope tone and theme to take up — you either succeed or die. Here, by the end, I think we’ve fallen off.
"I Look Out for Ed Wolfe," by Stanley Elkin (1962): 7.25
- well, genres might be elastic, but you do know when you've stepped in one from another, for sure, esp. when it's from a certain type of sci-fi to a certain type of mid century literary posturing, replete with a Bellow-esque mordant humor interspersing an otherwise straight wrenching narrative of personal delusion, degradation, and self-destruction. What is more, there's the very NY-liberal racialism (which might actually verge on racism here), in which "negros" are not only gawked at, but also introduced as sort of Big Point dei-ex-machinae in and of themselves, their very presence a crucible through which the Point of the story is thrown into sharpest relief, or, as the Most Apotheositically Other possible, the greatest possible mirror to reflect the truth of the decisions our protagonist is making - here, for convoluted, psychological, experiential reasons, the Orphan casting all away with no (visible) care for world or health or future. In that downward spiral, there's good stuff--most notably, the line about his confusion at having been given severance pay -- "he imagined a headline: Orphan Receives Check from Local Businessman".
"The Communist," by Richard Ford (1987): 8.25
- A quiet story, this one--of a taciturn 16 yr. old kid, his 31 yr. old mother, and her “communist” boyfriend, going to see and hunt some geese in Montana in 1961--the kind that say more, quite consciously, in their spaces and silences, than in their words. The prose was deep restraint and blunt pronouncement, which worked well here and didn't hide the characters so much as gesture at something ineffable in the scene, in them, and in their reactions to each other. About those silences, they're pregnant, and we can largely only guess, sometimes more confidently and sometimes less, about what they held. For example, that the boy will end up fighting in Vietnam--Glenn's allusions to it and his cryptic note that he has, since, seen grown men scared. And the small touches, given almost as an aside, but important to the whole thing: the death of the father, being from California, and how kind of dumb Glenn is too. Nonetheless, does this really add up to so much more than the sum of its duller points? Hard to tell how much is actually behind the curtain and how much is empty hand-waving.
"The Chosen Husband," by Mavis Gallant (1985): 8.75
- Again, maybe it’s the story or maybe it’s the sheer diversion of coming back to lit fic after so much short sff, but there’s something especially life-affirming in these small literary fictions. Something that reiterates the vitality and beauty of literature itself, rather than the vitality and beauty of imagination and expansion that the best sff fic can do. They’re different creatures as much as they’re the same. The piece: small-means widower in Montreal works to marry off her youngest to a bore, as her wiser, worldlier older daughter looks upon knowingly. That’s it. Yet, it’s filled with such precise analysis of place and the limits of social comprehension — but those enforced by others and ourselves — that so much is there. Grazia Merler observes in her book, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, that "Psychological character development is not the heart of Mavis Gallant’s stories, nor is plot. Specific situation development and reconstruction of the state of mind or of heart is, however, the main objective." There it is.
"The Mother," by Natalia Ginzburg (1961): 9.5
- A deep, smooth look at a sad life—told, I’d say, not dispassionately, not without judgment, but with acute awareness of the ways we do and do not love those we’re otherwise meant to. A “What Maisie Knew” but for a disintegrating life, rather than marriage. And, like MAISIE, it’s sensitivity works in the way it leaves us to fill in specific details. A great final line—one sentence, in which, after this close observation of a few months in these young boys lives, we move suddenly through the rest of their lives and see, in flash, how this Maternal Nothing works itself out.
"Order of Insects," by William Gass (1968): 9
- “The picture didn’t need to show me there were two, adult and nymph, for by that time I’d seen the bodies of both kind. Nymph. My god the words we use.” Gass is doing all but trying to hide his Point, and thank god for that, thank god for that in-obtuseness, that strange push to direct the story certainly and push towards that as best he can. And how it can. The story: a housewife finds, and becomes increasingly obsessed with (unconsciously [?] in tune with — see that wonderful drop that she lies in bed “shell-like”) some small dead insects she finds daily during her cleaning runs, and we gradually understand the ways in which her domestic boredom and confinement are driving her to instability. She yells at the kids and chafes at her husband and the only thing eventually real, eventually “ordered”are those dead bugs themselves (see the nice gaspy moment when we realize she's actually been picking them up now). “And then I want to cry, O husband, I am ill, for I have seen what I have seen.”
"The House Behind" by Lydia Davis (5 stars).
"The Twenty-seventh Man" by Nathan Englander (5 stars)
"The Night In Question" by Tobias Wolff (5 stars)
"While The Women Sleep" by Javier Marias (5 stars)
“A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri (5 stars)
"First Confession" by by Frank O’Connor (5 stars)
"The House Behind" by Lydia Davis (5 stars).
"The Twenty-seventh Man" by Nathan Englander (5 stars)
"The Night In Question" by Tobias Wolff (5 stars)
"While The Women Sleep" by Javier Marias (5 stars)
“A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri (5 stars)
"First Confession" by by Frank O’Connor (5 stars)
Fisher describes the Thanksgiving meal that she and her two sisters
prepared. Includes a stuffing recipe.
Bern from 7 Aug. to 13 Nov. 1938 writing about her husband
Dillwyn Parrish's disease and subsequent surgery. Reprinted in
Our Private Lives: Journals, Notebooks, and Diaries,
ed. Daniel Halpern, Vintage, Jan. 1990: 129-146,
and again as "Berne Journal" in Fisher's posthumous volume
of writings Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me.
These writers are among those featured within, but the book also includes work from many excellent writers including Italo Calvino, Gary Nabhan, Annie Dillard, Gary Snyder, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Hughes, Terry Tempest Williams, Bruce CHatwin, Paul Bowles, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Crace, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. An excellent anthology of nature writing. Should be very cheap from an online bookseller.
Certainly, these are quiet poems worth sinking into for an evening, and enjoyable enough for what they are. As a lasting collection worth returning to, though, I'm afraid they fell somewhat flat.
So, out of eighty-one stories, I was almost always approving, somewhat floored, and rarely disappointed. I already know I plan on using this for many future references. Sometimes a flailing read, though rarely, most of the best compilation short story books always eventually pick up their pace. Obviously, this one is no exception.
But the biggest thing I probably learned here is that I've been missing out on some Mishima, which I immediately remedied by putting all of his books on my "to read" list.
Top Ten:
01. Hair Jewellery - Atwood
02. Spring in Fialta - Nabokov
03. Pariotism - Mishima
04. A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme - O'Conner
05. The Country Husband - Cheever
06. Children of Their Birthdays - Capote
07. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Borowski
08. First Love, Last Rites - McEwan
09. The Tryst - Oates
10. Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality - Aksenov
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Mifune | 2 altre recensioni | Oct 28, 2010 |
Mifune | 2 altre recensioni | Oct 28, 2010 | 
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