#822 Interesting Facts- Adam Johnson

#822 Interesting Facts- Adam Johnson

This is a cathartic look at a woman dealing with her own death and the loss of her to her family. The husband is clearly written as an autobiographical look at Adam Johnson himself. He’s a San Francisco writer that won the Pulitzer Prize for writing a novel taking place in North Korea (The Orphan Master’s Son). I don’t know whether he actually had a wife die of cancer, and since this is a short story, it doesn’t matter if the reader knows. But if he did, and he wrote this story from the perspective of his dying wife…that’s incredibly brave.

The story begins with the wife and husband managing three kids while she goes through cancer treatment. She wonders about her own death and how fast it would take for him to move on with his life. We see her jealousy and sadness. Halfway through the story, you start to wonder if she is alive at all. I don’t remember if there is a point where we are told that she had died, or if it is left vague. I don’t want to go back and see. The way I read it, things slowly coming into focus was a powerful thing.

Notable Passage: “If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I should stop acting like one.”

10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#521 Charity Begins at Home- Fatima Shaik

#521 Charity Begins at Home- Fatima Shaik

Loutie is a mute, she lives with her parents in Louisiana. They are a old couple, very religious, but not exactly pure of soul. They can physically be best described as very large people.

“Words like wide, broad, heavy or fat are not used in this house. They are much too personal for people in Mama and Papa’s condition.”

Loutie herself is a bit slow, but we see her thought process as she goes about her days. They told her that she was a twin, and her brother never made it. So, she waits for another one, and she thinks about children often.

 “I am a special and innocent child for no matter how old I get, Mama said. She told me that over 30 years past when my mind first wouldn’t work with my mouth. We could never get me to talk. The things I hear stay inside and don’t come back.”

Life in that house is almost dead. It’s stagnant and oppressive as August weather in Louisiana. Her mother has been talking about her own death for as long as Loutie can remember.

“She planned for her funeral over 20 years ago. Since then, she’s just been waiting.”

This is the first story in Shaik’s collection, What Went Missing and What Got Found. So far, so good. This was a unique look into the mind of a non-traditional narrator, so I like that. I hope that Shaik’s Afro-Creole background adds a new viewpoint from other collections we’ve seen here.

Notable Passage: “This is the plan: I will end the suffering of the foreign babies. And when they are all happy, I will be free to be happy, and everyone else will be too. Just like Jesus, I will be free for the sake of all the people and, in the process, I might even get famous.”

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

#505 Chamelta- Luis Alberto Urrea

#505 Chamelta- Luis Alberto Urrea

Private Arnulfo Guererro was shot in the head by the last bullet fired during the battle of Chamelta. His buddies try to save his life as they huddle around the camp fire. Their dog is uneasy as he sees the Private's last thoughts and dreams escape out of his head feeding those around him—literally feeding.

This is a short but touching piece about war, camaraderie and death.

Notable Passage: “They’d come out of the mining lands of Rosario, Sinalao, full of revolution and fun. Men were raised to fight and enjoy fighting. None dared admit they were weary of it, weary of fear, and each had learned to dream, and dreamed at all hours—dreamed while sleeping, while awake and marching, while fighting. Only dreaming carried them through the unending battles.”

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

#475 House of Grass- Lucia Perillo

#475 House of Grass- Lucia Perillo

This is a pretty morbid story about an old woman who commits suicide to save herself the pain of her advanced years. Apparently a lot of the elderly around here commit suicide. They are in a retirement community near the Puget Sound called Infinite Vistas (I-V for an unfortunately honest Acronym). Because of this deadly phenomenon, its joked motto is:“A place where you can be on death’s door and still get it open yourself.”

Dr, Henry is the local Physician and has seen many of these suicides, and probably assisted in his own wife’s while she was suffering from cancer. Like I said, this is all extremely morbid, and not at all insightful. This doesn’t look deep into the psyche of a suffering soul, or have a political point about the failures of healthcare to deal with the inevitable pain that befalls us when we get older. It’s just a story about one woman who decides to kill herself and throws her own goodbye party, and the blasé manner in which her doctor deals with it.

Rating: 7-6-4-5 Total= 22

#428 Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?- William Gay

#428 Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?- William Gay

“The clock didn’t exist that could measure times like these.”

Leonard, aka. The Jeepster is on a forty-eight hour suicidal meth bings. His ex girlfriend has been killed and all he wants in something bad to happen to him

“But I can’t help you. Nobody can. You want to run time back and change the way things happened. But time won’t run but one way.”

Notable Passage: ‘There are events so terrible in this world their echoes roll world on distant world like ripples on water. Tug a thread and the entire tapestry alters. Pound the walls in one world and in another a portrait falls and shatters.”

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

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

Robin Ross has died over night, she was suffering in the hospital a week before finally succumbing to cancer. He goof friend was going to visit the night before she died, but it was late and she decided not go, now she will never have a chance to say goodbye.

This story is a dream, or a mental hallucination, a creation born of anxiety and guilt. She imagines Robin coming back as a ghost for one day so she and her friends can have one more night of drinking together. She tries to put her own life in perspective, feeling inadequate.

“In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our mothers, and one another.”

Notable Passage: “Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew for ourselves, or anyone else.”

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

#404 The North London Book of the Dead- Will Self

#404 The North London Book of the Dead- Will Self

The first few pages feel like a sad, touching story about a son losing his mother to cancer, and perhaps that is what the whole story is, but then it takes a sharp left turn. It turns out that when you die in London you don’t really go anywhere.

“When you die, you move to another part of London.”

“The dead community are self-administering and there are dead people in most of the major enterprises, organizations and institutions. There are some autonomous services for dead people, but on the whole dead services operate alongside live ones. Most dead people have jobs, some work for live companies. Mother for example, was working for a live publishing company.”

Either a work of pure fantasy, or a man unwilling to let go of a loved one. Either way, this is a pretty typical style and quirkiness of Will Self.

Word of the Day: Eschatology- a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind

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

#398 Children of the Sun

#398 Children of the Sun

Even tough kids gets sad at the dying of a dog. Jubal, Nathan, Hoodoo, and Lance take Nathan’s dog into the woods to bury him. They are silent and reflective. At times they almost fall into their normal jovial, juvenile behavior, but are struck at the seriousness of the situation.

“As…we stood there trying to pretend we were grownups having a very proper funeral, something…caught us and halted us, drained us of all the horseplay and laughing and made us look at what we were really doing. How could  a group of kids know about the terror and pain of dying…and yet we did know, we did sense something.”

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