#153 Tonight is a Favor to Holly- Amy Hempel

#153 Tonight is a Favor to Holly- Amy Hempel

This story is about complacency, indifference, and apathy. As the narrator prepares for a blind date she does not want to go on, she wonders about her directionless life:

“It takes me fifty-five minutes to drive one way, and I wish the commute was longer. I like radio personalities and I like to change lanes. And losing yourself on the freeway is like living at the beach—you’re not aware of lapsed time, and suddenly you’re there, where it was you were going.”

“My job fits right in, I do nothing, it pays nothing, but—you guessed it—it’s better than nothing. A sense of humor helps.”

She ponders the slow, lack of ambition life of living on a west coat beach. The fickle, flaky, shallow musings of someone trapped by the luring effects of the beauty and vastness of the ocean view.

“The people who live here, what you here them say is I’m supposed to, I’ll try, I would have.

There is no friction here.

It’s kind of a buoyant place.

What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.”

But she has tried moving away, tried other lives, tried switching lanes. Only to move back west. Like the many who die each falling off the cliffs of Highway One, she continues to move West until it’s too late.

“The truth is, the beach is like excess weight. If we lost it, what would the excuse be then?"

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#152 Toyfolk- Edith Pearlman

#152 Toyfolk- Edith Pearlman

There is a lot of subtlety in this story, a lot of lines to read between. Fergus, a foreign Toymaker visits the town of his new sight and befriends an old couple. This couple, also toy enthusiasts, and toy workers lost a child to a kidnapping, Their lives are not whole. Their collection of dolls has a missing space and their attempt to fix broken toys still leaves them childless. There is a theme about holes, or missing spaces in this story.

Fergus and his wife, who have adult children are cold with each other, cordial but unconnected, like they have hole hat needs filling. Perhaps the missing child is what keeps the old couple close. Fergus and his wife no longer have purpose.  The vendor also has a child, but he created his own hole. He cut off the finger of his son.

They talk about dangerous toys, the slingshot being the most dangerous toy ever created. David used his slingshot to make a hole in Goliath. The things we make cant replace the things that are most important, they can only make holes that need filling.

Rating: 7-6-8-6 Total= 27

#151 Sic Transit Gloria- Jabari Asim

#151 Sic Transit Gloria- Jabari Asim

Gloria is paralyzed by fear, fear of people, fear of outside, and more of all fear of the Devil. She is a shut-in, trying her best to fend off the evil of this world and raise her son, Roderick. Roderick is a special child with unnatural intelligence, he is aptly named by everyone in the neighborhood, The Genius. Gloria rarely leaves the house, not even for her own mother’s funeral, because cemeteries have too many places for the Devil to hide. While looking out for Satan, she awaits signs from God.

“All these years of fearing—maybe even believing—that I’ve been marked by the devil. All these years spending every living minute looking over my shoulder for Satan, and here come God, right on time.”

Roderick’s story is an interesting one. He is a Christ-like figure in these tales. Born of a mother with no father, he will bear suffering to uplift the community, his talents likely will have to be sacrificed like his Mentor/Father (figure) Orville. But for now this story is about his mother. What will it take for her to overcome her own burdens, her own fear, and face her own demons. It appears that she is now prepared to face the world to protect her son, her very own savior.

“The sound doesn’t enter my ears like noise normally does. It’s born in my bones, rises out of my pores, and takes shape in the air. It makes me hot and cold at the same time. Chills up my spine, sparks in my limbs. My son speaks, God touches me, and I get up and go.”

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#150 Eveline- James Joyce

#150 Eveline- James Joyce

Joyce is the literary pride and shame of Ireland. He is also one of the main reasons I became an avid reader. Picking up a dusty copy of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man while I was myself was a young man, stoked a fire I was unaware burned inside me. I understood little of that book my first read through (and probably not much more now). But seeing that reading could be more than just an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, could be a tool for sharpening your brain, a key to unlocking parts of yourself that lay hidden to the pale light of mundane pursuits—was a revelation.

Eveline is not the dark, thick style of Portrait or Ulysses, but it is no less an important piece of art. While his novels are on the denser, cerebral side, his short stories like the ones found in The Dubliners, are fluid and soulful; The kind of sober, earth-born feel that can only come from the Emerald Isle.

This is a story about change, growth and about home. Eveline is a young lass, about to be married. Her mother has passed and her drunken father doesn’t seem geared towards raising her or her two brothers, so she becomes a surrogate mother, and the target of her father's anger. “Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence.”

She longs for change, but she struggles with it as well: “It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”

Though they are pains, and hardships, and crosses to bear…they are her pains, hardships, and crosses.

Rating: 10-8-9-10 Total= 37

#149 The Mirror- Haruki Murakami

#149 The Mirror- Haruki Murakami

Not every story in a collection can be a winner. This one most certainly is not my favorite. It’s not on par with the quality that I’ve come to hope for in a Murakami story.

A lot of Murakmai works deals with supernatural occurrences, but in a more subtle, spiritual manner. This story talks about the occult square-on, in a more literal form. The narrator is hosting some sort of gathering and his guests have all shared stories about personal contact with ghosts and unexplained phenomenon. His turn arise and he tells his ghost story. Unfortunately for readers, the story reads exactly like a ghost story told around a campfire. In other words, its campy, cliché, and predictable. I expect a Murakami ghost story to be more inventive.

Notable Passage: “What I saw wasn’t a ghost. It was simply—myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self?”

Rating: 7-6-5-6 Total= 24