#61 - Read 1,000 Short Stories Update

I subscribe to the New Yorker mainly for the short stories and book reviews and occasional good essays and this weeks issue was exceptionally good! Honestly, it's the first one I've read right away in a long time. I have a huge pile of them that I've yet to read. But I got quite excited when I saw an essay by David Sedaris and a short story by Haruki Murakami.

I'm not counting the Sedaris essay, because it's not fiction, but I wanted to just notate it here so that I remember it. It was a particularly touching piece by Sedaris...it was about his sister who committed suicide this past May, which I wasn't aware of. Sedaris managed to somehow still imbibe humor into the essay without making it tacky and also wrote a piece which was a meaningful tribute to his sister while still being an honest piece about the frailty of relationships. It was quite beautiful...it's called "Now We Are Five."

The short story in this issue is by Haruki Murakami and is called "Samsa in Love." I hate roaches with a passion but I LOVE the art for this piece so so so much! And the art pretty much tells you what this story is about. It's sort of a reverse tale of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." In this story, a bug (we're never actually told it's a roach) wakes up as a human and has to learn how to navigate the body that he is in. To add insult to injury, a female locksmith shows up to fix a lock at the apartment that he's awoken at and she's a hunchback, something that he finds oddly attractive, and he finds himself captivated by her adding the dimension of learning not just the mechanics of the human body, but having to learn the mechanics of the heart as well. Quite a neat little story :) Makes me want to go back now and read all of these other issues of the New Yorker I have sitting around!

#61 - Read 1,000 Short Stories Update

Today I started indulging in a new book I got in Penguin's new "Penguin Classic Horror" series....it's a 6 book series curated and edited by Guillermo Del Toro! I love Del Toro, so I'm all about this series! It's mostly classic horror books, but has one book that has a mix of short horror stories, edited by S.C. Joshi. They span from the very late 19th century up til today so I was really excited about this one! Today I sat outside and enjoyed the beautiful fall temperatures that we're getting here in Southern Louisiana (and yes, I'm calling mid-upper 70's fall) and read the first two stories in the collection, now bringing me up to a whole 5/1000 stories read for this goal :p

The first story was "The Adventure of the German Student" by Washington Irving. This was actually the first thing I've ever read by Irving and it was a fantastic introduction to him and fantastic opener to this collection. This is your classic ghost story and would be a wonderful story to tell around a campfire late on a halloween night :) It's the story of a student studying in Germany who's a bit fascinated by the surreal in life and fascinated by the female figure as well. But he lives a solitary existence and has no friends at all. While walking the streets of Paris one day (yes he's in Paris now), he finds a woman crumpled on the ground dressed all in black at the foot of a guillotine and can tell that she's distressed. He offers her company when he sees the sadness that she's in and these two solitary souls seemingly find solace in each other.....but as often happens in ghost stories, solace is often false...oh yes it is :p Truly enjoyed this one.

The second story in the collection was "Edward Randolph's Portrait" by Nathaniel Hawthorne and I just didn't like this story at all. Which was really disappointing because I really LIKE Hawthorne. I generally disliked most of what I was forced to read in high school and I've often thought looking back that it was BECAUSE I was forced to read something. But two of the few things that stand out from high school that I really enjoyed reading were Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter and his wonderful short story, "Young Goodman Brown." This one though...nothing for me. It's the story of a painting from the past that is covered up and lost forever that reveals itself basically but the story is so caught up in elaborate writing that I was just never engaged. It also made me think about something that I've always thought...when you're putting together a short story collection, wouldn't you want to pick nothing but WOW stories???? That's what I would do! Of course, maybe it's just that I'm dumb and don't understand some of these things and of course everyone has different tastes too..so I guess that's also why you're never going to find a universally "perfect" short story collection. Though there are definitely some that are more universally loved than others. But if I was editing a collection, I would never just settle...and say..."well we have to have a Hawthorne story and 'Young Goodman Brown' is too well known, so I guess we'll go with this one" and I feel like that's what happened. Oh well.

Next up is "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe and I've read that one quite a few times actually and I know for a fact I love that one, so looking forward to that ;)

#61 - Read 1,000 Short Stories Update

The second short story for this goal also came from Aimee Bender's collection, The Color Master, and the story is "Americca." It was another story that I absolutely loved, but then again, I don't think there was a story that I disliked in this collection. With this story, the whole concept of "magical realism" really clicked for me. I understand what the concept is....using fantasy elements in a seemingly real, natural environment to illustrate a point, but I don't think I ever really appreciated the style until reading Aimee Bender. She truly is a master of it. Her story "Tiger Mending" is when it first really struck me and when it did strike me, it hit me like an Amtrak train.

The thing with Aimee Bender's stories, and with magical realism in general, I'm learning, is that the "why?" doesn't matter. It doesn't matter why the weird/magical/fantastical elements happen. You don't always get the answer to that question. You just have to accept that in the world of this story, it IS happening. But it's happening to illustrate a bigger point.

In "Americca," items are showing up in the home of a family that struggles to get by. They wake up one morning and there are gourmet soups in their pantry that they would never buy for themselves. Trinkets appear on their nightstands that they would never splurge on. They end up donating the nicest thanksgiving basket to school for the homeless shelter when normally, they might be on the receiving end of one of those baskets.

But we see how this mysterious arrival of riches affects the family. We see them adjust to how life is now. At first it's disturbing that these things are showing up and then it's almost as if they expect them. When this stops happening for ahwile, the family finds themselves missing it. One of the daughters wants a hat that she sees and the mother of the family spends her hard earned money on this hat for her daughter even though the hat is too big. And the daughter cherishes the hat and wears it proudly despite the fact that it's too big. But when she gets home, the gift giving thing has seemingly come back and there's a hat that fits waiting for her. She's made fun of for wearing the hat that's too big and as predicted wears the hat that fits.

Bender paints a picture of American greed here. We don't need to know why the things are magically showing up in people's houses. What the focus is on instead is how people go from appreciating the small pleasures in life to those things suddenly not being good enough when greed becomes a factor...when we get a taste of a different side of life and I know that I've certainly been guilty of that myself.

I'm frustrated right now because I just can't quite put into words exactly what Bender did with this story, but she did it SO WELL. Highly recommended.

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The last story in Bender's book, and my third story for this goal was "The Devourings," and this story returns Bender to fairy tale retellings. This is the story of a human girl who falls in love with an ogre because she finds herself to be ugly. However, she truly does love the ogre and the ogre truly does love her. However, ogres eat humans. The ogre and his wife have children together and they are ogre children. One night a group of humans come by the house wearing crowns and the human cannot turn them away. They go to sleep in the bed with the ogre children but switch their crowns with the caps of the ogre children. The ogre father comes home drunk and smells humans and eats his own children thinking that they are the humans when he sees the crowns. This is all in the first couple of pages of the story.

After this, the human wife leaves the ogre and sets off on her own journey to spend time alone. She finds her heart returning to her husband and her husband finds his thoughts returning to her. There's also a cake that replinishes itself and a blanket that hides the wife and the ogre eats the woman's uncle and I have to say, I don't completely understand this story, but I still loved it. That's what Bender does. For me, it was a good old fashioned fairy tale on the limits of the heart and the nature of things and things being what they are. And maybe that's exactly what this story is about. Ogres eat humans...humans feel loss when they lose loved ones....magical cakes will always replinish themselves.....life goes on.

Would I recommend this collection to everyone I know? Absolutely!!!! Will everyone love it? Hmmm....Put it this way...Tiger Mending is one of my favorite stories  I've ever read and many people who have read that story say "what the FUCK?" What kind of ending is that???? If you read this book, remind yourself that these stories are not about getting answers to the fantastical elements. They're not even about the fantastical elements. The fantastical elements are there as a catalyst to tell a bigger story. And that makes all the difference I think.

#61 Read 1,000 Short Stories Update

#1 "A State of Variance" by Aimee Bender, read on 9/18/13. I SO wish I would've started this project when I started the collection that this story is from, The Color Master. I love Aimee Bender so much. Seriously, after reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and this, my second collection of her short stories, I'm totally in love with her.

This story is about a mother and her son, both born with features that are perfectly symmetrical. Sounds like it may be quite boring right? Well it's not :p Bender shows with this story what value we place on appearance. There has been lots of research showing that people distrust people with symmetrical features. I've actually read some of it during my studies getting my degrees. Basically, the more perfect a person looks, the less likely they are to be trusted. Even though the mother and son may not be perfect looking beauty wise in this story, their features are perfectly symmetrical and therefore they live lives that are solitary...people are afraid to get too close to them.

When the son in the story tries to injure himself or have someone else injure him, even his injuries heal symmetrically. It's not until he can "trick" this trait of his that he can find true love finally. As is always the case with Bender, there's an aspect of magical realism to the story as well and it was just beautiful!!

I only have two stories left in this collection and I don't want it to end :(