#569 A Tangle by the Rapid River- Anthony Doerr

#569 A Tangle by the Rapid River- Anthony Doerr

Like most stories about fishing, this one has a somber, quiet, tone to it. Mulligan is a recent retiree. He has three things going on in his life: his marriage, his fly fishing, and the woman he sees on the side. 

He takes his daily fishing outing, but most days, he goes to see his other woman. That woman has now given him a sort of ultimatum. All Mulligan wants is for things to stay the same, and for people to let him live his life. The flow of the river, the slowly changing currents, the coming winter, the habits of the trout—these are things he understands and likes to contemplate, awake or in his sleep.

“When you get to be my age, Mulligan says, sleep is not so different from being awake. You kind of shut your eyes and you’re there.”

A dumb lapse in concentration and you can lose not only the fish, but the whole line.

Rating: 9-7-8-8 Total= 32

#541 The Caretaker- Anthony Doerr

#541 The Caretaker- Anthony Doerr

Doerr’s short stories are not like any of the others I’ve read. They don’t tell stories about everyday occurrences, they don’t try to tap into common themes or try to make connections that the reader can relate to. These are singular tales, each an emotional undertaking that takes us into an experience we would otherwise never think possible.

Joseph is a thirty-five year old Liberian man, doing anything he can do to survive, including theft and looting. His mother is a loving woman, teaches his son English from a dictionary and tends to her garden. When civil war breaks out, she disappears and he is lost. He searches for her but only finds death, and he is forced to kill a man.

He finds his way aboard a freighter and is given an American refugee visa. He gets a job as a winter caretaker at a beach resort in Oregon. When he witnesses a pod of beached whales on the shore, he goes into a depression he cannot find relief from. He buries the hearts of the whales. He is fired from the job because during his depression the house was left in extreme disrepair and he settles into the adjacent forest tending to a garden he has planted over the whale hearts.

One day he saves the life of Belle, the daughter of his former employer. She was about to commit suicide. They begin a secret friendship. She is deaf and teaches him sign language like his mother used to teach him English. They grow the garden together, the only thing Joseph has left of his mother. He is discovered, arrested and when he won’t eat, he is hospitalized. He is on the brink of death, and he seems resolved with his plight.

“There is no fight is Joseph, no anger, no outrage at injustice. He is not guilty of their crimes but he is guilty of so many others. There has never been a man guilty of so much, he thinks, a man more deserving of penalty."

When Belle brings his the fruits of their garden, he eats with absolute joy. It might be a last meal, or it might be redemption. But it is pure light.

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

#509 For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story-Anthony Doerr

#509 For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story-Anthony Doerr

The Carnival is at the fairgrounds outside Boise, Idaho. Griselda takes her little sister. She is enthralled by the mysterious metal-eater, amazed at the things she has never seen. She abandons her sister and leaves with the metal eater, not to return for twenty years.

Her legend grows amongst the town folk. So when she comes back to perform, the house is sold out. She was always beautiful and different, but now she is everything they dream about. She fulfills all of their personal desire for adventure and excitement; she embodies that which they cannot do themselves. However, to her sister and mother—all they wanted was Griselda the daughter and sister—she is nothing more than a runaway, someone that has betrayed their love.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#485 So Many Chances- Anthony Doerr

#485 So Many Chances- Anthony Doerr

The wonders of the ocean are all new to Dorotea, a fourteen-year old girl just moved to Casco Bay, Mane from Ohio. She is immediately struck by the vastness of it:

“She had not expected emptiness, flittery light, a blotted horizon. Waves march in from some obscure haze. For a terrifying moment she can imagine herself the only organism on the planet.”

She quickly finds that the closer you look at things as vast as the ocean, the more you see it teeming with life. She meets a young fisherman and so she learns to fish. When the boy goes away though, she still wants to fish. Like the shells brought by the waves, these are things left behind by the people in our lives.

Her father and the boy are not the perfect people she thinks they are, but that’s ok. The waves will bring more chances tomorrow to catch a fish.

Notable Passage: “Life can turn out a million ways…but the one way life will not turn out is the way you dream it.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

This is an indescribably beautiful piece of writing. Doerr has a quality in his writing, a quality found in very few writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind as perhaps the only equal) where you stop reading and it feels like you’ve woken from a day dream. The emotional depth in this story is at once strong enough to feel like a thick blanket keeping you warm against a blizzard and still so fragile that by even mentioning it, it might blow away in the wind. It’s magical, and yet grounded-in-the-earth real. Particularly strong is Doerr’s descriptions of the natural word (a quality we saw in his story, The Deep- (#39 in this blog).

The Hunter’s Wife is a seer, one who can tap into the eyes of dead beings, see where they go and what they feel. She lives with the Hunter in his cabin deep in a Montana Valley.

“Both of them lived in the grips of forces they had no control over—the November wind, the revolution of the earth.”

“When he looked out the cabin window he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under the roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.

            With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.”

Being stuck in the snowed-in Valley all winter (for five years) she was able to hone her skills by touching animals either in hibernation or frozen by the cold. She can see their dreams. By Spring, she gets bored with the wild, as all the animals wake and she can no longer see their dreams.

“More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn’t exist.”

She is a woman living in the winter, while he lives in the Spring and Summer. Yet, he is the one that seems frozen, solidly set in one place at one time, never changing and never thawing. She must leave the Valley and explore the world and share her gift. He stays behind to tend to his hunting and dreaming of wolves.

“He had given up on finding a wolf in that country although they still came to him in dreams and let him run with them, out over frozen flats under the moon.”

Read this story!

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total=40

#431 July Fourth- Anthony Doerr

#431 July Fourth- Anthony Doerr

This story was scheduled to come up in the rotation next week when I start a new stack of books, I didn’t look at the titles till I randomly opened this collection, The Shell Collector, this morning. It’d be foolish not to use this for this week. Having already read the title story, as well as one other last year, and his Pulitzer prize winning All The Light We Cannot See, I am already a big fan of Doerr’s writing.

A group of blowhard Americans get drunk with a group of blowhard Brits. Each group bragging of their amazing fishing prowess. So naturally a bet was born.

“There were the standard provocations: tequila, reminders of the Marshall Plan, rudely phrased questions about the queen’s gender and the president’s bedside fancies. It mounted to a challenge, as these things do, and a contest was born. Limeys vs. Yanks. Old World vs. New.”

The team that catches the biggest fish in each continent wins the bet. The losers have to parade naked through Times Square with signs announcing their inadequacies. They will spend a month on each continent, the first is Europe. We see the Americans traipsing around looking for fishing spots. It ends up in a baboonish trail through Belarusian Bison farms, a Slovakian slaughterhouse, Carpathian mountains, and a dried up Lithuanian canal.

Losing horribly and on the brink of embarrassment, the last day is July Fourth. Being mocked by school children as they fish, they finally hook a monster. It’s the largest carp they have ever seen, and it was there’s for the taking. But alas, their camera didn’t work. They would have to kill the fish for proof or let it go and lose the European leg of their bet.

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