#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

#278 The Worst You Ever Feel- Rebecca Makkai

#278 The Worst You Ever Feel- Rebecca Makkai

A common theme I’ve seen in some of the short stories included in this project is the high perceptive abilities of children, their ability to tap into emotion and meaning in things overlooked or ignored by people with more age and experience. Aaron is more than just a perceptive child, he is a savant. He can see the past, and feel the pain and loss of those around him. And in post war Romania, that loss is beyond the scope any child should see.

Aaron is a spider on the tapestry high above his parents dinner party. This is an occasion to reflect, and celebrate. One of Romania’s brightest talents, a violinist, Radelescu, has returned to society after surviving the pogroms and the communist impresonemnt. He has lost a finger but can still feel the music with unaccny emotion.

Aaron watches from above and with each song, he “remembers” the horrifying things that happened in that house. Each song has a story, and the room has too many memories. “Aaron could feel now that the people in the room below were breathing less, as if afraid to propel the old man back to Romania on the wind of their exhalations.”

This is another powerful story from this collection, with incredible touch and depth. Even without the musical fabric sewn into the plot, there is melody everywhere in Makkai’s writing. This is one of my favorite stories thus far.

Notable Passage: “It was people’s sadness, mostly, that he attempted to feel, the ghosts that surrounded them, the place where a finger used to be but no longer was. He imagined pain traveling through the air on radio waves. If he positioned himself in a room and concentrated and listened, he could catch it all.”

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

#171 Babylon Revisited- F. Scott Fitzgerald

#171 Babylon Revisited- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Charlie is revisiting Paris trying to rebuild his life. It was destroyed by the financial crash, over exuberance or youth, and drinking. He was once a great success, married, with a child and everyone about town loved him for his material things. Now without the party atmosphere of the boom, things were more somber.

His wife dead, is child in the custody of his step-sister, and his business somewhat back on its feet he comes hat in hand hoping for redemption. Paris is a different place when you’re not partying:

“I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after the another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”- And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow –

He is mostly sober taking only one drink a day to remember. He wants his daughter back, he seems matured, and together and lucky to have survived a crash that most did not. His old life keeps revisiting him in the form of former companions and stories of debauchery. They seek him out trying to gain his strength or drag him back to the past.

“They liked him because he was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him, because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw sustenance from his strength.”

Are his past mistakes too many to overcome?

Notable Passage: “In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motions.”

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