#832 Fialta- Rebecca Lee

#832 Fialta- Rebecca Lee

A college architecture student has been accepted to an exclusive artists residency retreat at Fialta run by the renown architect Franklin Stadbakken.  “Fialta…is dedicated not to the fulfillment of desire but to the transformation of desire into art.”

He is a humble student and lucky to be there. He fits it with the other interns and learns his craft while being tasked with milking cows and feeding the pigs. As with most stories about a group of people staying together in close confines for an extended period of time, this is an exercise in psychology, with references to Freud and Ovid.

He gets romantically entangled with the teachers pet, he is asked to leave. There was one rule, and he broke it. It might have been his best achievement. 

Notable Passages: “This is the whole problem with words. There is so little surface area to reveal whom you might be underneath, how expansive and warm, how casual, how easygoing, how cool, and so it all comes out a little pathetic and awkward and choked.”

“And what is a love affair if not a little boat, pushing off from shore, its tilting untethered bob, its sensitivity to one’s quietest gestures.”

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

#783 The Other- Tove Jannson

#783 The Other- Tove Jannson

An artist or a writer is suddenly stricken with inspiration. It comes in the form of a sort of out-of-body-experience. He is literally standing beside himself and he begins to draw letters, but not necessarily words or sentences. He likes the space and shape of the letters, so he lets the meaning come on its own.

“He usually started inking from the bottom up so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the meaning of he words.”

Then he can’t find it. The inspiration is gone and he stands alone. He misses the perspective he needs to create his art. Without it he wanders around avoiding all contact literally looking for himself. A very powerful metaphor for the artistic struggle.

Notable Passage: “His whole body burned with an enormous unused power.”

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

#755 Black-White- Tove Jansson

#755 Black-White- Tove Jansson

This story is dedicated to Edward Gorey, the American illustrator. Like him, the man in this story drew dark and scary images for books. He has been commissioned to create the pictures for a terror anthology, the chance of a lifetime. When his wife, a talented designer critiques one of his drawings as too gray, he takes it to heart. 

The house she has designed for them is literally a glass house and is too light for the dark subject matter of his book. He moves to a different studio for a few months where he can wallow in darkness and create the proper level of black as the dominant element in his work. How dark is too dark? How far can an artist get lost in his work?

This is a nice homage to an artistic master. The imagery is stark, the black/white symbolism is obvious but handled well. 

Notable Passage: “The darkness crept away, and they stood side by side, throwing no shadows, and he thought, This is perfect. Nothing Can Change.

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

#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

#23 Cell One- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#23 Cell One- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is my first encounter with the fiction of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, however I know of her talks on culture and gender.  The Cell comes from the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck.

This is a story about change, social class, generations and family.  We wee a college community on the Nsukka campus in Nigeria.  There is rash of professor’s sons robbing their neighbor’s houses.  Everyone is aware of the culprits but pride and embarrassment causes them to blame outside riff-raff.  These thieving boys are part of a new cult/gang phenomenon. 

“They are symptoms of a larger malaise.” We see corruption and resentment throughout the piece.  The University, the Cults, and the Police, they are all guilty.

When a brutal murder happens on campus, many in the known cult members are locked up including Nnamabia, the older brother of the narrator. The rest of the story takes place during family visits to the prison or The Cell.  Being of better means, Nnamabia is able to see his family and tell them of what happens inside.  He tells them of an old man who is imprisoned because the police can’t find his criminal son. Just like the old man is in jail for the sins of his son, Nnamabia is in jail for the leniency of his father. 

Nnamabia represents the younger generation in Nigeria, charming, brash, entitled, irreverent, and disrespectful.  His lighter skin is seen as a young virtue where his darker skinned site is scoffed at. In the end, he’s just an immature child, innocent and getting smacked down by the reality of a cruel world. 

Good story telling, easy style. I’m looking forward to the rest of these.

Notable Passage: “It would have been so easy for him, my charming brother, to make a sleek drama of his story, but he did not.”

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

#22 A Service of Love- O.Henry

#22- A service of Love

It’s O.Henry Friday! I know, I know, you can hardly contain yourselves.  I’m starting to really enjoy reading O.Henry once a week. It’s like a way station along the road to stop, re-fill, and take stock of the journey.  These stories are definitely written in an outdated voice and sometimes seem a little too quaint. However, given the context of all the other authors I will read during this project, these will act as a perfect control element.

These stories are also all pretty short, so its kind of useless to completely summarize them.  Just go ahead and read them yourself, or if you trust me, al least the ones with higher ratings.

This is the O.Henry-est of O.Henry stories. It’s about art and all the work, sacrifice, hardship, perseverance, arrogance, monotony, selfishness, hope, and cynicism that comes along with it.  It’s Art as a metaphor for Love.  Throughout all of life’s travails, art and love will find a way to live on.

Notable Passage: “When one loves ones art, no service seems to hard.”

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

#14 Meeting Elise- Nam Le

#14 Meeting Elise (2008) Nam Le

Henry Luff is a successful New York Artist.  Strangely, we don’t see any of his art in this story and ironically we don’t see any beauty in the life of this artist.   From the tragedy of his love dying too soon, to his bitter break with his first wife, to the overly descriptive scene at his proctologist’s office, Henry’s current existence is wrought with ugliness. 

Perhaps that’s why he hasn’t created any art in a year. We’re to believe that Henry is a hard man to like at best, and is more likely detestable.  He has only one friend and has driven away anyone in his life that got close.  His one and only chance for redemption, for forgiveness, for hope as he faces death and obsolescence is seeing his daughter one more time, the first time since she was taken from him 17 years ago. 

It’s a very emotional story, and Le is a capably emotional writer.  I find a very musical quality to his writing.  Where I find the themes and plot elements of his stories a little cliché at times, I find craft and delicacy in the execution of his narration.

Notable Passage: “The past’s a cold body of water for me and nowadays my bones ache after even a quick dip.”

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