#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

#553 The Stray Horse- Felisberto Hernandez

Now this is writing! In a period where some writers try too hard to make virtue out of the mundane, it is refreshing to read a story like this. Language can be an art-form in itself without having to be lofty. It can uplift without looking down its nose. Too many writers try too hard to be clever, mistaking word play for depth. Hernandez has no such affliction.

What better place to showcase beautiful language than through the imagination of a child. The boy in this story remembers fondly his childhood piano lessons. Like many lonely children, he sees the world around him and bends the things he doesn’t understand to a creative world he can. Inanimate objects suddenly have personality and life:

“Although the secrets of grown-ups could be glimpsed in their actions and conversations, I had my favorite way of uncovering them—when the people were absent and I could find their traces in something they had left behind…the moment it was left unattended I could begin to trace that person’s secrets in it.”

He idolizes and falls in love with Celine, his music teacher. Such a crush can have a lasting effect on a person:

“Celine would make me spread my hands on the keys and, with her fingers, she bend mine back, as if she were teaching a spider to move its legs. She was more closely in touch with my hands than I was myself. When she made them crawl like slow crabs over white and black pebbles, suddenly the hands came upon sounds that cast a spell on everything in the circle of lamplight, giving each object a new charm.”

Story aside, there are myriad phrases and paragraphs in this story that ooze with emotion and make the reader stop, breath deep, take a moment, and go back to read them again, only this time slower and with more time to savor:

“Someone dumps chunks of the past at the feet of the imagination, who hastily sorts through them in the swaying light of a small lantern it holds over them, mixing earth and shadows. Suddenly it drops the lantern on the soil of memory and the light goes out. Then once more the imagination is an insect flying over forgotten distances to land again on the edge of the present.”

Notable Passage (as if there were only one): “What never went quite to sleep was the specter of magnolias. Although I had left behind the trees where they lived, they were with me, hidden in the back of my eyes, and suddenly I felt their presence, light as a breath somewhere blown into the air by thought, scattered around the room, and blending into the furniture.”

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

#228 The Paper Menagerie- Ken Liu

#228 The Paper Menagerie- Ken Liu

The Paper Menagerie won the 2013 Nebula Awards for the year’s best Science Fiction or fantasy. This falls in the latter category. Since this is not a genre I read a lot of, it’s always a special treat to find such creativity and heart somewhere I don’t usually look.

Jack is the son of a Chinese mother and a white American father. They live in Connecticut. Growing up, whenever Jack got sad, his mother made him origami animals out of used Christmas wrapping paper. They came alive and became his companions. “I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.”

As he got older, as with most children imagination fades and the need to fit in becomes paramount, especially with a bi-racial child. What used to make you unique and individual, are things that teenagers start to resent in themselves. Jack resented his mother’s foreignness, her language, her looks, her entire being.  He couldn’t see that he was just like her; and he couldn’t see that those things were his mothers only connection to her past and her culture. Rejecting them, meant that Jack was rejecting her. But children are sell-centered and sometimes it’s too late to see such things.

His mother died very young and made Jack promise that he would take out his collection of origami animals once a year on Qingming and think of her. When she died,  “The paper animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated them stopped when Mom died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that these paper constructions were once alive. The memory of children could not be trusted.”

On Qingming, the animals came alive, as did his connection to his mother and his Chinese heritage. This is a fantastic story, and although it has a tinge of fantasy elements, this is no niche work of fiction. It’s truly remarkable.

“The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart.”

Notable Passage: “Contempt felt good, like wine.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#126 Sredni Vashtar- Saki (H.H. Munro)

#126 Sredni Vashtar- Saki (H.H. Munro)

“Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years.”

“One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things—such as illness and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.”

A doomed, lonely child with a wonderful imagination. He has a guardian that is strict and nobody but himself to keep busy. He keeps a ferret that he has dubbed a God, Sredni Vashtar. The guardian is skeptical of the child’s secret and takes the key that will unlock his secret. He prays that his God will escape these evil forces:

Sredni Vashtar went forth,

His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.

His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.

Sredni Vashtar the beautiful

They accidentally allow his pet to escape and worry that they have ruined the one thing he cares about, but he is excited that his God has been set free.

Notable Passage: “The few fruit trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking.”

Rating: 8-7-9-10 Total= 35