One Munro a Week

Last week I got started with my one New Year´s Resolution: to read one of Alice Munro´s short stories every week. Yep, that´s how great I think she is. I started with the collection "The Moons of Jupiter" from 1982 and the first story, "Chaddeleys and Flemings". It´s actually in two parts: "The Connection" and "The Stone in the Field", the first focused on the storyteller´s distaff side and the other on the male line of the family.

The Chaddeleys are represented by the mother´s cousins, four unmarried women, who all come visiting when the storyteller is still a little girl. This visit then becomes part of the family mythology, beginning with a grandfather from England who, everyone admits, was a bit of a posh and haughty jerk, but still someone whom everyone is rather proud of, speculating in what fancy origins he might have had before he fell upon hard times (he seems to have been a bit of a slacker, taking early retirement as soon as his children could support him).

When the storyteller is grownup and has a family of her own, one of the cousins come visiting, and we get a slightly different perspective on the childhood visit.

I was married to Richard then. 

She doesn´t have to write more than that to say that the marriage is bad. The theme of this story is, to me anyway, how strong the desire to magnify one´s own importance can be, and how tempting it is to set aside normal decency and step on others to elevate oneself.

The other story is about the father´s family, the Flemings, which also consists of a group of unmarried women, the aunts, who live in an old farmhouse in the country, completely cut out from the modern world and impossible to communicate with. Their silence provokes the idea that they have secrets, and there is speculation that an Austrian immigrant who died on their property had been one of the sister´s lover. But as the storyteller grows older she starts doubting:

Now I no longer believe that people´s secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize. 

A few days after I finish the story, I also realize that these two families, united by the marriage of the storyteller´s parents, represent the mentality of two kinds of immigrants to Canada: the adventurers, or those who wanted possibilities they weren´t allowed in the old country because of their place in a more rigid society; and those who left their homeland because the only option was to starve to death.

Munro was in 1982 already so skilled at those dense sentences that express so much.

...my mother drove. That made the whole expedition feel uncertain, the weight wrongly distributed. 

Yes, there is enough on these few pages for another author to write two novels. And those of my friends who didn´t much enjoy her latest collection, "Dear Life", I think would enjoy this better, as it is more of a traditional story.

Alice Munro, the Academy´s Choice

Entrance driveway.

The Swedish word for short story is novell. You see how one can go wrong in translation there? That is the worst trap of speaking a foreign language: when it has words that sound and look familiar to you, but has a whole different meaning. I know a real live person who once had an English girlfriend. He went to visit her and was picked up by her slightly suspicious father at the airport. Having spoken at length about the weather, he resorted to that other safe topic: traffic. "Are there any fart controls here?" he said. (Swedish fart = English speed) And there is a classic story about a Swedish road engineer at an international conference on traffic safety, who said in a discussion: "It´s not the fart that kills, it´s the smell." (Swedish smäll = English crash)

Anyway!

When Alice Munro had just been announced as the recipient of this year´s Nobel Prize in Literature (it bugs me when people say someone has won the Nobel Prize; it´s not a competition, it´s an award) the media was all over it, of course. Malin Ullenhag in Dagens Nyheter wrote a short piece about the short story vs the novel, where she argued (based on an essay by literature historian Andreas Gailus) that the short story is the genre of crisis, rather than psychological development. The short story maintains the protagonist´s lack of insight and in that regard, the short story is "stupider" and "more honest" than the novel. I thought that was an interesting point and something to keep in mind during the reading.

I have, in tandem with a friend, read Munro´s latest collection, "Dear Life" (Sw. "Brinnande livet"), and I suppose we chose that one because it was on the e-library. It is also her last collection, as she has announced her retirement.

It is made up of ten proper short stories and one separate collection of four auto-biographical stories, where she tries - I think - to explain how she became the person she is. It is really the story of her mother, a frustrated social climber who never got anywhere but instead was disliked by everyone for her delusions of grandure. In the end, she dies of a disease related to dementia. Munro doesn´t spare herself, she readily confesses that she didn´t visit and didn´t go to the funeral, and she also mentions her father´s new wife in such a way that I get the feeling they got on better. Munro leaves a lot of room for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. It seems to me that Munro is a lot like her mother, and that she knows that too.

Munro is unsentimental and almost cruel in her candour, just as Ullenhag says that short story-writers are (or should be). And I suppost that is what I like about her the most, that she doesn´t avert her eye from the less savoury parts of human existence. In this collection (which is the only one I have read so far) some themes of the stories are

• people just letting things happen to them. They are all frustratingly passive. Almost aggressively passive, which is not the same as passive-aggressive.
• people believing that their imaginations are the truth. Many of her protagonists seem very deluded, perhaps psychotic. 
• strategies for those left over. Those who live their lives on scraps from other people´s table, as it were. 
• fear of community. Actually, community in a Munro story is mostly about oppression, and alone-ness is about freedom. Munro´s people find meaning in their work, for the most part; they seldom find it in each other. 

She has a bold way of adding seemingly irrelevant information to her sentences, information that doesn´t seem relevant to the story. But after a while I realized that she doesn´t write story in a classic way, it´s more like mini-portraits of psyches, and by making them more complex, she is also making them more real. Her characters have so many dimensions, sometimes contradictory, that you feel they just have to be real.

My reading partner was less enamoured with Munro. She found many of the characters irrational, illogical, unreal. When we discussed the first story, about a young mother who acts recklessly towards men, my friend found her unrealistic, while I thought that she acted exactly the way one acts in times of great distress. I thought about this when I walked home, and I think that Munro´s stories are like a dirge to the parts of me that are dead: from broken promises, abandoned hopes, crushed heart, shattered illusions. She offers no solace, but she says "I know", which is all one can do, really.

I really like Munro, reading her opened up some issues I have been struggling with in my own writing. I have already bought another of her collections, "The Moons of Jupiter" from 1982, partly because I want to see if her themes are consistent throughout her work or if they change from collection to collection. Also, I want to read her in her own language. I usually feel there is something missing from a translation. Not always, but sometimes.

This is a proper good read, and - it has been said - unlike many recipients of the Nobel Prize, an author that should be accessible to most readers. I´m not so sure. I think that to really appreciate her, you need to be a survivor; on the other hand, there are many of us out here.

Pathetic Fallacy

So, I found myself with my second young man in pain in a week. This time, he was a bit older and wearier, though. What I was reading was Joshua Fields Millburn´s "Days After the Crash". It´s a novella, which is, I suppose, a long short story. Or a short novel.

This is very well written, I must say. Millburn really makes an effort. It´s well structured, too. We begin on a roof in Brooklyn, where singer-songwriter Jody Grafton has taken his guitar and a cup of coffee, sits in the rain (I suppose he is sitting under something), composing a song for his dead mother. And as he chisels out his lyrics, we get a flashback of the - well, the Crash, I suppose.

What Millburn is not trying to do, is tell you what it´s like to have a bad relationship with your faulty mother, or what it´s like to nurse that same mother as she is dying of cancer. No, what he is trying to do, and doing fairly well, I think, is to create a depiction of what it feels like. And how you go in and come out of that kind of situation. And he uses the setting, the descriptions of the surroundings in which Grafton moves, to describe what is going on in Grafton´s psyche. He is projecting Grafton´s soul onto his environment.

Let me give you some examples:

"He drove south, confined only by the empty cornfields shivering around him, a landscape depleted of its warmth months earlier, naked and exposed to Mother Nature and her cruel intentions. An unemployed scarecrow stood perched in one of the barren fields, waiting to do what he was meant to do with his life."

"As he entered the apartment, its old wood floors creaked under the weight of shared discontent."

As he waits for his mother to wake up from her drunken sleep, to give him the news he suspects will be bad, he falls asleep and dreams of a car crash:

"The sound of the cataclysm didn´t possess any of the shrieks of metal-on-metal tearing he had expected, just the symphonic sounds of broken glass, the windows shattering around him in beautiful dissonance, disobeying the physical laws of the car crash, shattering before impact, breaking in preparation for the collision, not waiting for the accident but bracing for it."

Shattering before impact. Breaking in preparation. I like that. Still, it doesn´t make me feel much. Perhaps because it´s all there on the page. Millburn presents me with Grafton´s pain, dissected and processed, mounted and displayed. Not explained, though. That would have been bad. This is not bad. But he is very heavy-handed with the pathos and does border on pathetic clichés, and in the end, he falls over quite a bit:

"The days after the crash were the hardest. The troubled man sat by himself on a creaking, off-kilter barstool and ordered another round, lit another cigarette, and searched for meaning amongst the wreckage, hunting for some nameless thing under the smoky gray tavern lights, losing count of his whiskey-and-waters, inspecting the bottom of each glass. He couldn´t find meaning there, so he kept on searching."

This is man-pain at it´s most coquettish. In this last part, Grafton has lost his name and is just the troubled man, as in every-man or any-man. This makes me giggle just a bit.

I think Millburn has potential to become a really great writer when he matures. I´d like to see what he can do with a wider perspective, and some restraint.

Home-help Cartoons

What to read while on vacation? With all the action this summer, with friends and family visiting, I haven´t had the peace and quiet and long stretches of time (did anyone mention the Olympics?) to really dig into something serious. Cartoons are the perfect thing, really.

This is cartoons for grown-ups, eight short stories by Pelle Forshed, in a collection entitled "De anhöriga" (= the relatives). The stories are inspired by Forshed´s work in the home-help service, caring for the elderly and dying. The stories are told from different perspectives, but hook into each other, "Short Cuts"-style.

Forshed´s drawings remind me of Tintin in the early days, but of course the stories are much bleaker. He has great affection for his protagonists, but does not hesitate to expose them, and all their faults. While I really felt for them, I could also see the bullshit that we tend to use to cushion ourselves from the harsness of suffering and decline in those that we have depended on all our lives. He says some profound things about parents and grown children.

I think it´s also a book that should be read by everyone who has a parent or relative that needs home care, since it really exposes the day-to-day reality of those who care for our elders. Sometimes I think we just want our aging parents to be as self-sufficient as they always were, and when they are not, we´d rather have others fill in the gaps, so that we ourselves can remain in the child-position, free of responsibility.

Poetical stories

It´s continuing to be hard to get to sleep and I´m doing most of my sleeping in the afternoon these days. Not that it matters, all I´m missing is bleak skies and rain. Last night I read Ray Bradbury, a fairly recent collection of short stories titled "We´ll always have Paris". Twenty-two stories, of which only one can be said that it´s some kind of sf.

Many of the stories are about aging, actually. About being too tired to live, not remembering where one is, being alone and having lost everything, being afraid to die. Many of the protagonists cross boundries, national, professional, sexual. In the title novel, a night-walking tourist in Paris follows a young man and has some kind of sexual/emotional encounter in a basement somewhere, while his wife is expecting pizza at the hotel.

Several of the novels are about trying to get back home, about a longing for the way things were, like the couple of runaways from a mental hospital or old folks home (are they ill or just suffering from dementia?), trying to figure out if they are in their hometown or not. As it turns out, it´s a movie set and the whole, archetypically familiar street is just made out of plywood and plaster. A similar fake town is set up on Mars to prevent an expedition of thirty men to go bonkers from being sixty million miles away from home.

It´s also about how real joy and real entusiasm for living is not welcome in the world, is regarded as a disturbance by the neighbours, like in Bradbury´s own favourite novel "Massinello Pietro", which he says in the foreword is practically all true. It´s about an old man who has lost everything and is about to loose what little he has left, his animals, his home, and his life. A man who dances in the street, not for a living, but to give his fellow men joy.

So yes, there are common themes if you think about it. But at the same time, it´s a bunch of short stories not in the least connected, not in their content anyway. And I realize as I read that this is the reason I find it so hard to remember much about short stories I have read. I´m a fast reader, a bit of a pudding reader, as it happens, and there are just too many impressions at one time in a collection of short stories for them to really settle into my brain. Bradbury said in some interview that several of his collegues have told him he is actually a poet. And perhaps that´s true, even the novels he has written are either collections of shorter stories more strongly connected that these are, like "The Martian Chronicles" or rather short, like "Fahrenheit 451". And as those who know me are aware, poetry isn´t really my thing. And perhaps it´s all due to the speed at which I read.

A bit of a revelation, I find. And I´m wondering if I should see that as a challange. To try and read something more slowly. Take my time and smell the roses, so to speak. I shall consider it.

After the War

I had Antonio Tabucchi´s collection of short stories "Tiden åldras fort" (that´s the Swedish title, as far as I can find out it´s not been translated to English, but the title would be something like "time ages quickly") on a 14-day loan from the library, and because I´ve been travelling, visiting family in the south, I just had time to read two of the nine stories.

Tabucchi is a new aquaintance for me, I didn´t really know what to expect. And from two stories, what can I really say? The first one was about a girl and a man on a beach. She has been watching him for days and strikes up a conversation, probably being a bit bored, as one gets after a few days of leisure. He is a retired officer, not very old, and probably dying. And as they talk, it becomes clear that the girl is adopted (of dark complexion) to Italy and that she has been experiencing a kind of breakdown after meeting children damaged by war. It´s a fascinating conversation, light-hearted but there are depths hinted at. It´s like they really connect in the few minutes that they speak. When the story ends I feel a bit sad that I don´t get to hear them the next day, as they probably will meet again.

The other story I read is about another retired war veteran, but this man was an agent in what we refer to as the Cold War. He is now alone, a widower without friends, struggling to get through his days without something to give them meaning, reflecting on how betrayal and disguise has affected every part of his life. It´s almost comical how he finds it hard to walk the streets without someone to tail, and deeply tragic too.

Perhaps war and the effects of it is a theme in this collection - I don´t know. But as I have googled Tabucchi I have found some other really interesting books by him, that I might borrow. Short stories are always a good thing when one is a bit short of time. Even if you don´t make it through the whole thing, a few complete stories can be read in less than an hour. This is quality literature, a safe recommendation.

A Little Vacation Reading

I started with a Swedish, fresh novel come out this year, and after about page ten I was sooo bored. So I gave it up. I shall mention no names. Instead, I reached for my debit card and logged onto ebooks.com and downloaded the next two Mary Russell-mysteries. Actually, I have already read one, "The Language of Bees", it was the first one in the series I read, almost exactly one year ago. However, I want to read it again since it´s part one in a two-part mystery continuing with "The God of the Hive".

Not that I have come anywhere near either of them yet, it´s vacation after all and the weather is fine and we have other things to do (things that make pretty pictures, like the one below).

Pite River by Grundvattnet

What I have had time to read, though, is Laurie R King´s little e-novella, "Beekeeping for Beginners". It´s a quick, satisfying read, Holmes´s take on his and Russell´s first meeting and what followed. After "Looked Rooms", I had gotten used to Holmes´s point of view and it didn´t feel at all weird. And that´s all I can say, I think, without spoiling it for you.

Of course, without an e-book-reader, or a computer (but reading books on a hot and noisy computer sucks, in my opinion), this book will not be available to you. I suppose short stories must be much more economical to publish electronically. I wish all authors would publish electronically, but sadly, many still chose not to. And I have met some readers who are opposed (???) to e-books. Not that they have ever actually read one... I´m often asked if "the feeling" is the same. I really don´t get the question. Novels aren´t words on paper or screen, they are Worlds that come to nest inside my head.

To get on with it

I have had Mavis Gallant´s "From The Fifteenth District" ("Från det femtonde distriktet") on a short loan (14 days) from the library. This is a brand new translation and many are in line to read it, evidently. An attractive book it is, too. The author is pictured on the back cover, very chic indeed.

This collection of short stories were first published in 1978. It says on the cover that it´s one short novel and eight short stories. I have read them in the order of number of pages, the shortest one first, and the three longest ones I just haven´t had time for. These three are all roughly the same length, about fifty pages, and which one is the short novel, I can´t attempt to say without having read them all. I should borrow it again, at a later time, and try to find out.

Anyway, I started with the title story, "From The Fifteenth District". It´s a ghost story, of sorts. Three complaints, from dead people who are being haunted by the living. It´s a bit absurd, but it doesn´t take much of a think to see what she means. I think. A lot of people have a hard time letting go. Not just of people they love. Perhaps it´s hardest to let go of those we didn´t love, or who didn´t love us the way we had expected? Or the people we failed in some way. What I think she wants to say is not that we should let go, Gallant is no preacher, but how hard it can be to let go. And how much energy is used to chase ghosts.

A lot of the stories are about people who get separated, many as a result of the second world war or the cold war and the divide between eastern and western Europe. In exile and with passing time, memories start to change. The defective son writes to his mother for recipes of dishes she never made for him. She shares stories with other mothers of the loving son he never was. And grown children worry about their aging mother being alone over Christmas, not getting the hints that she has taken in an old lover. Much is about misconceptions, about the way we see each other mirrored in ideas of what a mother, a son, a father, or a lover should be.

She also deals with time and the divide between generations. Just reading her stories, most of which are set in the 1950´s, 60´s and 70´s, where old people are in their 40´s (shudder) and 16-year-olds are accountable adults, reminds me that a lot has changed in the way we think of age. In one story she follows Gabriel and his friend Dieter, two Germans making a living after the war in Paris, playing German soldiers and Jews in tv-films. The first years, the actors perform what they have seen and experienced. They age and younger actors come along, and they are performing what their grandparents saw and experienced. Think about how many actual young parents now weren´t even born when the Berlin wall fell! (Which feels like yesterday to me.) Same thing when I was born in 1966, only 21 years after the war ended. Perspectives all change very fast, and most of the time we don´t even notice.

There is a lot of tension in these stories about what people really are and what those who should be closest to them think they are. One point that she makes over and over is how closed off we are. How inaccessible every person is. There is no real affinity anywhere. But she is never sad. Her characters get over themselves and each other and get on with it. Even after the worst has happened. It´s what people do.

I like Gallant. I will read her again. She reminds me a little of Lorrie Moore and Grace Paley, other short story writers that I really enjoy. Do read more short stories. Most of them are long enough to read through in one sitting and they usually are more focused, thematically, than a novel. They can give a lot of food for thought.

Reading according to Bloom

This morning, as I was putting my socks on, my eyes fell on a shelved book from six years back, Harold Bloom´s "How to read and Why". I remember reading it, but I didn´t remember anything about it. So I thought I´d read it again. And properly this time. I thought I would let Bloom, who obviously knows a lot about reading, guide me through the canon, as he sees it. Seems like a good idea.

He starts with a prologue about why we should read at all. (I can´t make quotations, since my copy is in Swedish.) In short, he thinks we should read without preconcieved ideas, without the filter of some ideology or other. We should not read for others, but for ourselves. We should read for enlightenment. Then he goes into some detail about irony, but I didn´t really get that. He clearly thinks we should not waste our time on inferior literature. And I suppose he has a point. Personally, I always thought reading was taking part in the greatest conversation on Earth, with the cleverest people who ever lived, one that is unrestricted by time and place (in some sense, anyway). I understand fully why the great Controllers (at all levels in society, you know, them) are hostile to literature and to readers. Serious readers are open people. They allow themselves to change, to be formed, to change their minds. To be improved. They do not consider themselves as "having arrived" in life. I like that, I think reading slows aging more than any miracle cream, diet or excercise can do.

A little can suggest a lot. (Can´t remember the artist.)

Anyway, I decided to read one of his first recommendations, Anton Chekhov´s "The Lady with the Dog". A short story, says Bloom, should be read in one sitting, and we read it for the pleasure of the ending. He has a point there. I don´t like short stories that are too long, and I do like a clever ending. A twist of some sort. Chekhov´s story is a story of adultery. A 40-something Moscovite is on vacation alone in Yalta, has an affair with the dog-owning lady of the title. She is only 22, and calls her husband a "flunkey". I had to look that up (lakej, for the Swedes reading this). It´s not his first affair, he doesn´t like his wife and has no qualms about cheating on her. He goes home, expecting to forget the lady. But he does not. Instead, he seeks her out, and she comes to him in Moscow. As they fall into each other´s arms at her hotel, he thinks that now, finally, he has really fallen in love, and this is the woman he will make his own, at whatever cost. The End.

To me, he is clearly a man in a classic 40´s crisis. It´s not so much this woman, it´s that he is ready to go on now. She becomes the container of all his hope for a more meaningful life. It´s all about the timing. I got stuck on this:

"He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And [...] everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not decieve himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth [...] all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected."

I like that. Chekhov had that published in 1899 and I wonder what he would have written in the age of Facebook. Bloom thinks the man is a parody of Chekhov himself, and that the story is all about the banality of life, even when we think it holds profound truth and importance. Perhaps. I think most people can handle a certain amount of role playing, of mask wearing, and then it becomes unbearable and they bolt. Tension builds up and all it takes is a trigger. Banal it might be, but so are most proverbs. It does not make them less true. We all long for deliverance.