#31 Runaway- Alice Munro

#31 Runaway (2004)- Alice Munro

“It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there”

Of all the beautiful writing in this piece, this passage stuck with me.  I’ve never read a more poignant description about what its like to be in an emotionally abusing relationship, painfully breathtaking.

And with that, I am introduced to Alice Munro.  A legendary Canadian author, her name is at the top of nearly every list of best short fiction writers, and for good reason.  Runaway, the title story of this collection I cant wait to read more of, is a seamless literary tapestry, emotional but not pushy, grand but no flamboyant.  It’s a piece that stays with you.

Life is hard.  Changing that life, no matter how uncomfortable, unfulfilling, oppressive it may be, is possible the hardest thing we can do.  Carla is the victim of just such a life, but she like many, can’t see the world beyond. She’s poor and lives in a trailer which she philosophically thinks:

“Some people live in trailers and there’s nothing more to it.”

That’s her feeling on most of her life. This is just how it is.  When they were first married and starting a horse farm, she not unhappily saw herself as one of her husbands horses as “a captive, her submission both proper and exquisite.”

The pastoral nature of this piece softens the level of angst for the reader, as her own pastoral setting probably softened her own suffering sometimes.  Their lost goat, Flora, who was put in the stables to calm the hoses was very much representative of Carla, there to calm her angry husband.  But to her husband, Flora was a symbol of freedom he didn’t want Carla to see.  Carla even dreamed about Flora with an enticing Eden-like red apple in its mouth.

There is a lot to this story, themes about anger, about family, about freedom.  Great, great short story!

Notable Passage: *see above

Rating: 10-9-10-9 Total =38

#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson

#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson

I’ve only just stated reading Neal Stephenson this year, having just finished his impressive Speculative Fiction (SF) novel, Anathem. I found Spew in a collection of his notes, speeches, and short writings called Some Remarks.

The Spew is some version of the internet. Like many SF pieces, this deals with human interaction with machines and privacy in some undetermined future reality, or in an alternative current reality (current at least for 1994 when this story was written). In this world our protagonist is a rookie Profile Auditor 1, monitoring people’s lives through their consumptions, trying to win a promotion to Profile Auditor 2.

He ends up profiling a woman who appears to be too normal and follows her to the Hotel where she works. It appears her “normalcy” is as he expects fabricated, as she turns out to be some kind of mid-nineties hacker.

Its reads like one of those Kurt Vonnegut sketches where he delves into human’s meta-relationship with technology.  Just by talking about what we watch on TV, we are in a way studying our own psyche.  There is a fun moment when he is monitoring the front desk clerk monitoring his minibar activity.

This doesn’t really break any ground in the genre, but its still a decent read. Like a lot of Sci-Fi conceptual pieces, once real technology catches up to where the story is, half of the story is lost.  The questions over internet privacy, and some nebulous entity knowing our entertainment, and consumer trends is, of course still very much relevant…and in fact for 1994 is pretty ahead of its time (at least for the non SF community).

The story has no conclusion and doesn’t really feel completed. Like I stated earlier it feels like something from a Kurt Vonnegut notebook, which is praise enough.

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

#29 The Coming Out of Maggie- O.Henry

#29 The Coming Out of Maggie- O.Henry

It’s O.Henry-Friday again, another week has passed.  I’ve almost spent a month on this short story project, so far so good.

It’s Saturday night in O.Henry’s New York and that means the weekly dance at the local Irish social and athletic club.  Dance night for the ladies and usually fight night for the gentlemen.  Maggie, usually a third wheel for Anna and Jimmy Burns, has finally announced that she has a fella to escort her this week.  The tall strapping young man, Terry O’Sullivan, being a stranger to the club is immediately the envy of all the woman and a target for all the men, especially the Club’s machismo leader Dempsey Donavan. How about those names for turn of the century NYC Irishman? Naturally the two men square off.

“They were enemies by the law written when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too mighty, too incomparable to divide preeminence. One only must survive.”

Turns out that the outsider, having given himself away by breaking the Irish cub’s code of fight ethics by brandishing a knife, is actually an Italian. Gasp.

Word of the day: Encomiums: noun-formal- a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly.

Notable Passage: "And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie’s one perfect night."

Rating: 7-7-6-6 Total= 26

#28 Peg- Sam Shaw

#28 Peg (2006)- Sam Shaw

OK, this is an odd one.  At first it seems like a melancholy story about a young couple failing at marriage after 3 years. “Peg” is a made up fling he creates to make his wife jealous and hopefully kick start a passionate renewal of their relationship. He’s dis-illusioned, she’s closed off, etc. Sure, we’ve seen this before, but then it takes a wild turn to the bizarre and gory.

While out for a walk deciding whether to actually pursue cheating on his wife instead of just pretending to, he comes across a car accident that left the driver decapitated. Feeling helpless himself to do anything useful at such a scene, he couldn’t stop himself from staring at the severed head.  Approaching the head, he looked at its face for a sign of what to do:  “its as if the head had something to impart to him.”

So he takes the head with him…yup.  Suddenly it seems that our protagonist is a psychopath.  I realized it might be time to start reading with a different mindset.  I’m sure I can come up with some parallel or link to what the head represents…his failed relationship, the disappointment in himself. But really I think he’s just carrying around a severed head. 

Well, Mr. Shaw…you have my attention, this wasn’t exactly a home run, but it was memorable. I’ll look for more to read from you.

Notable Passage: I didn’t find anything to post here…but did I tell you that the main character carried around a severed head?!

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

#27- The Silver Key- HP Lovecraft

#27 The Silver Key- H.P. Lovecraft

This wonderful story by Lovecraft, narrated as many of his tales are, by the fictitious occultist Randolph Carter.  Carter is either caught in or waking up from a deep dream state (the details of his dreams while interesting are only important if you read the longer companion piece).  He waxes philosophic about the differences between reality and imagination and within those realms truth and falsehoods.  What’s more real, earthly myths or ethereal dreams?

Carter “could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it.”

Many believe that there is a level of reality I dreams that science has yet to adequately explore.  In fact our brains react identically to dreaming of an image and actually seeing that image. If our brains believe what we see in our dreams is as real as what we see with our eyes, then why can’t we visit, in our dreams, the past or worlds in other dimensions?  Why cant dreams be just as tangible as our awakened experiences?  And to true dreamers, reality is actually more false and hollow than the “reality” of our nightly nocturnal wanderings…“with the dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything…”

According to Randolph Carter, all we need to provide is context, as no thought or idea can exist in an absolute vacuum. “…even humor is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency”

As always Lovecraft’s use of language is intoxicating and the philosophical questions he poses are far more interesting to me than some stories steeped in uncreative realism or the mundane slices-of-life many authors present as fiction.

What better way to describe Lovecraft’s style than to use his own description:

“…he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace.”

Notable Passages: “Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings.”

 “calm lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.” 

Rating: 8-9-8-8

#26 So Much Water So Close To Home- Raymond Carver

#26- So Much Water So Close To Home- Raymond Carver

This is the last story in Carver’s collection, Fires.  It’s a story about violence, apathy, shame, and isolation.  Stuart and his three fishing buddies find the dead body of a young woman raped and murdered in the stream.  Feeling there is nothing they can do to help, they leave her there tied to the shore while they drink, fish and play out their weekend.  After calling the authorities when it is more convenient, their names get printed in the papers as having found the body and they return to their lives.

The problems for Stuart begin when his wife gets appalled at his indifference to such a horrid occurrence.  She reevaluates her life with this man.  The body becomes a metaphor for their relationship, or Stuart’s feelings towards her in general; it’s an abused dead body, floating face down, tied up just enough so it wont float away, and will stay there until it is a more convenient time to get rid of.   She imagines herself in the body of the dead woman floating face-down in the stream.

The repressed, non-communicative interactions between these two is smothering.  Something again that she realizes later when she has scary moment with an over aggressive male stranger trying to “help” her in her car.

“I want to smother…I’m a smothering cant you see”

It begins with violence. Stuart admits early in their courtship that: “someday this affair…will end in violence.”  When he is unable to answer the simple questions of their son he “[wants] to shake him until he cries.”  He gets verbally abusing when she doesn’t agree with him, physically abusing when she doesn’t want to touch him.  She herself turns to violence as a form of communication when all else fails breaking dishes or slapping him in the face.

Violence begets violence, shame begets shame, and apathy reigns when we don’t admit that either one exists. And most times nothing changes if all you do is wait for a more convenient time to take care of the dead body floating in the river.

“Nothing will change for Stuart and me.”  Sadly there is too much truth in this story.

Notable Passage: “…if I was somebody else I’d be afraid I might not like who I was”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total =28