#305 Down to a Sunless Sea- Neil Gaiman

#305 Down to a Sunless Sea- Neil Gaiman

“I told him not to go to the sea…the sea won’t love you like I love you, she’s cruel.”

This is a short story about loss. It reads like a elegy. Rain often represents change, cleansing, purity; but when the story is about death at sea, water only represents pain.

“it is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.”

Rating: 9-7-7-8 Total= 31

#304 Adonis- Jerome Charyn

There is nothing quite like New York City. You don’t have to be rich, you just have to be interesting. You hang around long enough and you find yourself woven in the fabric of some crazy world; everybody is connected.

A young high school boy, a poor talented artist, with a family beaten down by war and misfortune is snatched up by a modeling impresario, Rosenzweig, aka-Dracula. This blood sucker has taken many young beautiful models and made them rich, but at what cost?

“I’d lost my belief in Van Gogh’s missing ear—it seemed like madness, not the mystery of great art.”

He finds himself in an intoxicating world of artists, mobsters, scene-makers. But like any intoxicant, too much is poison. Even with a box of cash under your bed, free meals and fancy parties, life gets complicated.  This story is half about the boy, and half about New York, a divided city between the old tradition and the new ethnic underworld:

“We belonged to that clan of West Siders who never wore watch fobs or attended debutante balls. We had galas for indigent artists.”

 Notable Passage: “I had to ride the local in and out of the Bronx. Each stop was a kind of purgatory.”

Rating: 9-9-8-8 Total= 34

#303 Shamengwa- Louise Erdrich

#303 Shamengwa- Louise Erdrich

Shamengwa is an old man living among the Ojibwa community. His arm was broken when he was young and healed in a mangled way, like a broken wing, and was given his named after the Monarch butterfly. His father played the fiddle but traded it for religion when his brother dies young. The fiddle was put away, and the parents turned despondent and had, in many ways, lost their music. Shamengwa needing life, found it:

“It was a question of survival, after all. If I had not found the music, I would have dies of the silence. There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.”

Despite his mangled arm, or perhaps because of it, the music he created became the soul of his community:

“The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge which we paper over with daily life. The music tapped our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and wanted never to repeat. Shredding imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear, and also surprising pleasures. We can’t live at that  pitch. But every so often, something shatters like ice, and we fall into the river of our own existence. We are aware.”

When the violin was stolen, we learn of its incredible history, and when we find out who stole the violin, we learn of his incredible history as well. Instruments, like music often find people most in need of spiritual healing.

This is just great story telling.

Notable Passage: “I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the greater things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this little patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories.”

Rating: 9-10-10-10 Total= 39

#302 Devotion- Adam Haslett

#302 Devotion- Adam Haslett

Owen and Hillary are siblings, they have lived with each other since their parents died. They are very close and have nobody else of importance in their lives. They live a quiet existence. Life goes by in a steady calm wind, and emotions stay under the surface.

“A long shadow, cast by their house and the others along this bit of street, fell over the playing field. He watched it stretching slowly to the chestnut trees, the darkness slowly climbing their trunks, beginning to shade the leaves of the lower branches.”

Once in their lives they had a companion, Ben who they both shared desires and longings for. Upon leaving, he wrote Hillary about his love, but in a move of jealousy, Owen hid the letters and never spoke of them nor of his feelings for Ben. She new of both the letters and the feelings, and she herself let her anger go.

This was a depressing one. Nobody communicating, selfishly holding on to their own secrets, suffering with their own regrets…and in the end, all there is left is quiet acceptance, no hope of happiness of fulfillment, mere complacent survival. The mood is exceptionally British.

Rating: 8-7-7-4 Total= 26

#301 The Five Wounds- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#301 The Five Wounds- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Amedeo is a criminal, a bad seed, a scourge on the community. He is a 33 year-old out of shape, jobless, useless man, and has a 15 year old daughter that is about to give birth to a grandson. He is about to become Jesus.

It is holy week and the town is preparing for their Calvario, the stations of the cross procession. They chose Amedeo this year hoping that picking the wretched man would bring salvation to him and the community. It is a sacrifice.

The more real the act is the closer to God the portrayer of Jesus gets. The flagellations of the past have gone as far as actually nailing the man to his cross. It can be: “More real even than taking communion…You got a chance to thank Jesus, to hurt with him just a little.”

“If he can up there in front of the whole town and do a performance so convincing he’ll substantiate right there on the cross into something real. Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right”

Amedeo has taken his role to heart, and as the sins of his past flash before his eyes, the more he needs redemption. He is beaten, spit on, bleed, humiliated, and the town knows it made the right choice. For unto us a child is born, and may its sins be washed away.

This is a pretty intense story, but one well deserving of attention. You don’t need to understand the religious nature to feel the emotions of the characters.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35