#671 Nobody Said Anything- Raymond Carver

#671 Nobody Said Anything- Raymond Carver

This is a story about adolescence. A young teenager, or almost that old, wakes up to his parents fighting; they do that a lot these days. He tries to get his younger brother to wake up and make them feel guilty about fighting but he is asleep. The fighting subsides and the day is about to start but he doesn’t want to go to school. He is at that age where boyhood is ending and everything starts to change, what can he do to stop it. Why not go fishing?

The attachment to fishing is what reminds him of boyhood. As he starts to fantasize about girls, not sure exactly what that’s all about, and he understands that his parents are probably on their way to a separation, all he wants is one more day by the water, with no more than a canteen full of water and a fish tale for the ages.

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#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

#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