#501 Man From The South- Roald Dahl

#501 Man From The South- Roald Dahl

This is a classic story. If it seems familiar it’s because it has been adapted into a couple of movies. Most famous of these adaptations was the 1960 short by Alfred Hitchcock starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre; and the most recent was Quentin Tarantino’s Four Rooms.

The plot is simple but brilliant. A young man is lured into a high stakes wager against a wealthy stranger. The man bets the youngster that he cannot successfully ignite his lighter ten times consecutively. The man bets his expensive green Cadillac.  The younger man not having that kind of loot to put up, agrees that if he loses, he will allow the rich man to chop off the pinky of his left hand.

They retire to the hotel and make arrangements for the wager to commence. The younger man, with his left hand tied down, strikes the lighter once, twice…seven, eight times. As the tension builds, a woman bursts into the room to put a stop to the bet. The car is hers, she has already won it from the man…she has won all of his wealth in fact. When she picks up the keys to the car, we see that she only has one finger left.

Clearly this is a monster of a story. We see its fingerprints in so many places. Besides the many film and television references I also remember a short story by Stephen King that paid homage to Man From the South. The finger cutting wasn’t a straight wager but an incentive to quit smoking, and the woman at the end revealing her lost fingers was a previous client. The story was called Quitter’s Inc.

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