#679 The Empty Café- Naguib Mahfouz

#679 The Empty Café- Naguib Mahfouz

Mohammed Rasheedi’s wife has just died after forty years of being married to each other. He was much older than she was, but he has outlived her. He has in fact, outlived all of his friends too; he is the last one left. His son and daughter-in-law have happily welcomed him into their house to live, but he does not feel at home. He is lonely and out of sorts.

It is obvious that he does not want to be a burden on his family, and he does not want to impose on their day to day lives. He feels a kinship with the household cat, but that too does not belong to him. What does he have left but fading memories and days alone sitting at the café forgetting to drink his coffee?

This isn’t exactly sad, but it is melancholy and very delicate.

Rating: 9-7-7-7 Total= 30

#534 Torching the Dusties- Margaret Atwood

#534 Torching the Dusties- Margaret Atwood

This is kind of a morbid story. Inside an assisted living home, Ambrosia Manner, Wilma suffers with Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome, a condition with very lively hallucinations. Her manifestations are benign however, and all she sees are little people climbing around her things.

One day there appears outside her window a protest of people wearing baby masks and signs saying “Our Turn.”

“Our Turn is a movement, it’s international, it appears aimed at clearing away what one of the demonstrators refers to as ‘the parasitic dead wood at the top’ and another one terms ‘the dustballs under the bed.”

Old age homes across the world are being attacked and burned to the ground, alleviating the world of an aging population that is selfishly draining resources when they should acknowledge that their time has come. At Ambrosia Manner, they have surrounded the compound, removed the staff and plan on starving them out. When it seems like they plan on escalating the action to arson, Wilma and Tobias head for an adjoining structure hoping to avoid the attack. The Manner burns with them looking on.

Whether this happens for real or whether it’s a manifestation of her Syndrome, it's still pretty morbid. This is the last of this collection. I enjoyed some of it. There being a majority of stories about woman in the advanced stages of their lives, I didn’t find much to connect with personally. I’m not sure I see why the subtitle of this collection calls them “nine wicked tales.”

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

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

This is a touching first day of school story. A mother takes her daughter to kindergarten for the first time. She takes her to the wrong school though. She wanted her daughter to go to the older school that is across from her church. That’s the school she knows about and that’s where she has thoughts of her daughter learning all the things she hasn’t.

When they arrive at the correct school we see that the mother herself can’t read. This is why her daughter’s education is so important. Her mother is proud but a little out of her element. We see new vs. old as a symbol here, the new school, her new shoes, etc. When her mother leaves her in the hands of her new teacher, we see her old socks have been torn, and the sound of her fleeting footsteps echo like the sound of time marching on.

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

#264 Lily Daw and the Three Ladies- Eudora Welty

#264 Lily Daw and the Three Ladies- Eudora Welty

So far for this project, I’ve leaned more to modern, current authors. O. Henry, Chekhov, etc. have been the exception. Eudora Welty deserves to be on that list. So I begin with a small story about Lily Daw and the Three Ladies.

Lily is a woman with a mental disability of some sort. She has been taken care of by three busy body woman who may or may not have Lily’s best interests at heart. By coincidence two rare opportunities occur for Lily on the same day. She gets accepted into a special program for woman like herself, and she gets proposed to by a xylophone player visiting with the big Tent Show.

Ignoring slightly cringe-worthy stereotypes, the dialogue heavy story telling is humorous if a bit old fashioned.

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#249 Mountains Without Number- Luis Alberto Urrea

#249 Mountains Without Number- Luis Alberto Urrea

Urrea is a new author for me. Mountains Without Number is the first story in his Pulitzer Prize finalist collection The Water Museum. This is such a great start. Great style, nice slow pace, meaningful and full of soul.

It’s the breakfast club at Frankie’s diner in New Junction, Idaho.  “Everything at Frankie’s is like it ought to be, like it used to be.” New Junction is an old boom-town long past it’s hay day. The oil fields and uranium mines have all dried up, and the big roads have taken all the traffic miles from what’s left of this dying town.

“Is a town dead when the old men die, or when the children leave?”

If you live in a city, with new buildings, new cars, new people, everything is fast, exciting and about the future. But if you live in a small town surrounded by times buttes and open sky, everything is slow, old, and about the past.

“The Cliffs don’t count years—years are seconds to them. Flecks of gypsum pushed off the edge by hot wind. They are the original inhabitants of this valley. And they weren’t always cliffs. They were entire mountains once, until the inevitable carving wind and scouring dust and convulsive earthquakes and cracking ice trimmed them, thinned them, made their famous face appear to oversee the scurrying of those below.”

Notable Passages: “Atop the butte, the spirits of the old ones are indistinguishable from the wind.”

“She can never find Bon Jovi on the radio, only Jesus and Trace Adkins.”

Rating: 10-8-9-9 Total=37