#276 Mnemonics- Kurt Vonnegut

#276 Mnemonics- Kurt Vonnegut

This is just a small story about Alfred Moorehead, a new man. He has learned to unlock a gift for memory. His career has taken off and his life is almost perfect, but there is always one thing that stops us from being happy.

“Now since he has attended the company’s two-day Memory Clinic, names, facts, and numbers clung to his memory like burdocks to an Airdale. The clinic had, in fact, indirectly cleared up just about every major problem in his uncomplicated life, save one—his inability to break the ice with his secretary, Ellen, whom he had silently adored for two years.”

His mnemonic prowess was due to his ability to attach a fact or a figure in his head to the image of a beautiful movie star. This talent was put to the test one day by a long list of things to remember, and when he had to use the image of Ellen as well as the famous starlets, his fondness for her finally slips.

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

#275 Heaven Row- Jess Lake

#275 Heaven Row- Jess Lake

A widower raises his two teenage daughters by himself. As he struggles with parenthood he remembers the risks he took halfway across the world, and the path that lead him here.

The writing here is absolutely stunning. Lake captures the empty, frustrating feelings of a lonely father exceptionally well. A man who’s life is draining away fast, and all he has left are his memories and his children, who at this moment it time, won't give him the time of day.

“But when I sit next to them…and no one says a word, I have a feeling I can’t easily describe. It’s as if my heart has puffed up inside mu chest like a balloon, and every beat presses against my ribs, like the thump of a muffled drum. It’s nothing, my doctor says, but he’s wrong. That beat is the sound of time passing.”

Time is a big theme in this story.

“In my study there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read and reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. I whisper my daughter’s names to the air and say, Listen. Listen to me.”

Notable Passage: “A pardon is a little space, an opening, where the world stands back and leaves you alone. It is a door I walk through every day when I open my eyes.”

10-8-9-8 Total= 35

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

It seems that stories about foreign nannies taking care of American children is a popular short story subject. We’ve seen a few by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and we just had another by Edith Pearlman a few days ago. While each has it’s own theme, I find most of them to feel very similar.

Here we have a Philippine live-in nanny. She jokes that people always want a nanny from the Philippines: “Like a BMW…we are status symbols.” I find that way too true to be funny actually. Like the other stories, the parents seem to be loving and well-intentioned, but aloof, guilty, and slightly jealous of the closeness between their children and their employee.

“Dee told me, when I first came here, I don’t need to teach you children. You have been a mother to five…Children they are not hard. But most you need to think about the mother. Here, the mothers are the ones that throw tantrums.”

What a weird system. The nanny is here raising another couples children so she can send money to her own children. Her services are needed because the couple is so busy working to give their own children—the ones they put in the care of a stranger—the best life they can.  Seems we’ve become a satire about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the story, just a thought while this topic keeps popping up in my reading.

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

#273 The Sign of the Potent Pills- Dashiell Hammett

#273 The Sign of the Potent Pills- Dashiell Hammett

This reads more like a British parlor game of who-dun-it rather than the hard-boiled detective stories Hammett is known for, but it is an entertaining one. Mr. Trate is a young detective summoned to a house full of awaiting people. He does not know why is has been asked there and neither do we. As he stands in the room listening to its inhabitants talk vaguely talk about what has happened, he is occasionally brought into the mix. His 11 day career causes him to be poked at relentlessly:

-“Go ahead young fellow…detect something for the lady.”

-“I hope you ain’t going to be too hard on us young fellow.”

-“I’m gonna smack that punk yet.”

Intrigue, fires, gun-play, and a bit of a twist ending (although a convoluted one), makes for a fun read. The piece did suffer a bit of an identity crisis. What turned out as more of a farce, at first had a bit of a spooky mood, with descriptions like:

-“In front of the house a high grilled gate interrupted the black fence. It was a gate designed for shutting people out rather than admitting, a gate wrought in lines as uninviting as the upright sharp pickets.”

-“Opaque blinds and heavy curtains hid the windows. A glittering chandelier lighted the room. From the farther end a dozen faces looked at Trate with indefinite expectancy.”

Notable Passage: “I think it’s wonderful…to be able to make plans that go through successfully no matter how much everybody tries to spoil them from the beginning.”

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

#272 Dream Children- Edith Pearlman

#272 Dream Children- Edith Pearlman

Willa is a live-in nanny for a family on Manhattan’s upper west side. They are a nice family, thoughtful and careing and probably a little over-protective. She notices how controlled their environment is:

“In her country there was a TV in every village bar, and in the island’s capital city even the poorest family owned a set. But in this New York apartment—none.”

She quietly and gracefully takes care of the children, quietly watching her privileged employers and their friends. She gives them comfort and piece of mind, and even though they don’t recognize their lucky place in the world, she is understanding on a very human level. Their neighbor is losing her apartment and with it the office where her dentist practice is. Instead of taking the opportunity to move to a diferent neighborhood and take a position with another dentist office, she is intent on wallowing in self-pity. Willa sees her in a sympathetic light:

“Back home this woman would have been respected. She would not have been forced to work. People would have brought her stew and beer and smokes, and she would have sat on her porch and looked at the sea.”

Two stories in, and although I see grace and shape in her writing, I have yet to feel a personal connection with the subjects or characters in her stories. That happens.

Rating: 8-7-7-6 Total= 28