851 George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine- Adam Johnson

851 George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine- Adam Johnson

This is the powerful story of Hans Backer, the warden of a Stasi Prison in occupied East Germany. The prison was closed in 1990 when the wall came down and his life changed forever, as did the entire culture. It’s been eighteen years since reunification but Hans hasn’t changed a bit. He lived his life and his career with military precision and he thrived in communist East Germany. But the world has changed around him and like it or not he is about to be challenged from the past.

“I do not need to recall the past…I am certain of what it was.”

Although he has lived nearby the whole time, he hasn’t been inside the prison since he finished destroying all the inmate records. He is unaware that the prison is now a museum to the atrocities of the Stasi cruelty and the torture that happened inside its walls. His old office has even been memorialized. 

One day as he walks past, he overhears a tour guide talk about a famous writer interrogated and imprisoned under his charge. He confronts the guide with vehement rebuttals and apologist rhetoric. Not understanding the technology of the day, he doesn’t realize that he has been recorded via a cellphone. He will become a viral video by the next day.

The curator seeing his willingness to talk and shed light on the dark past (even though Hans doesn’t himself see it as a dark past) he invites Hans to give a tour of the prison and freely tell his side of history. The more he talks the worse he comes across and more entrenched he becomes in his own beliefs.

This is a simple man, who chooses to see the world in black and white. He refuses to acknowledge the evils of the past nor his significant role in it. He liked his work and now that his work is seen by the world as tyrannical, he falls back on the crutch of only being a cog in a larger machine. He repeats common refrains like:

“I only ran the prison…I was an administrator.”

This same stubbornness caused him to lose his wife and daughter. They have become ashamed of him as more and more truths about the past come to light. Imagine learning that the wonderful gift your father gave you as a child was stolen from a girl inmate at your father’s torture prison. His wife has taken to alcoholism and that is a sigh of weakness to Hans—not something to be supported or helped. He doesn’t understand how his daughter or his wife cant separate his career with his life:

“But it wasn’t us…I’m talking about family. You’re talking about work.”

This rigidity over what he sees as right and wrong, legal or illegal, even past and present is probably what made him a good prison warden to begin with—at least in communist East Berlin. Some things just can’t be forgiven, but when the perpetrators themselves refuse to admit culpability—phew, that must illicit rage beyond words.

This story is fantastic. Johnson deals with delicate topics by just diving in full force. I’m reminded of two others stories that in vastly different ways tells stories of survivors of prison torture from both sides. The first one is Stephen King's Apt Pupil. This deals with a former Nazi camp torturer living a life as someone else who decades later is confronted with his true identity. He faces his own indulgences from his evil past. That was, in a very King fashioned, over the top and sensational, although dealt with real evil. 

The second is Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows that confronts evil from the other side. How human reaction to confronting absolute evil changes not only the actions of peaceful people but their complete understanding of the world. All three stories stress the importance of history and education of the past. 

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

#589 The Seventh Man- Haruki Murakami

#589 The Seventh Man- Haruki Murakami

Delicate, imaginative and dreamlike as usual, Murakami hits a nice note with this one. It seems like a man is at a support group or something giving a testimonial about the worst thing that has happened to him.

When he was a teenager he had a best friend, K, who was smaller, slower, and sweeter than he was. He was his protector, and the two were like brothers. During a massive typhoon each was huddled inside their own homes, but during the eye of the storm they walked outside to inspect the damage while it was still calm. 

The seashore was the place of interest, the waves had receded and the shoreline was riddled with debris and others things for them to inspect. Suddenly he felt a rush of fear and felt as if danger as coming. He called for K and ran. K didn’t hear until it was too late.

“I knew instinctively that they were alive. The waves were alive. They knew I was here and they were planning to grab me. I felt as if some huge man-eating beast were lying somewhere on a grassy plain, dreaming of the moment it would pounce and tear me to pieces with its sharp teeth.”

K was swallowed up by the tidal wave and dragged out to sea. For forty years, he has lived with this guilt, this pain, this fear. He left town and didn’t return until now. He may have found peace, but he will never get back the years he lost to grief.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#495 Peep Show- Nathan Englander

#495 Peep Show- Nathan Englander

Allen Feinberg looks down at his $500 shoes he just scuffed and is stricken at how far he has come, or worse how much he has changed. His name changed to Fein, his marriage to a Gentile all come to him with the backdrop of the new, family friendly Times Square that surrounds him.

He sees one of the last remaining “Peep Shows” promising a visual and sensual nirvana for only twenty-five cents. He goes in for the first time since he was a kid. Not much has changed inside that den of lurid desire. But his mind starts playing tricks as the guilt builds up—not only the guilt of being married and going to a peep show, but guilt of how far from his Jewish roots he has strayed. The dancing women turn into his rabbis and his psychologist.

“The rabbis’ return is a lot for him to process. He has worked hard at breaking from their world and he doesn’t remember ever wanting it back.”

All he wanted was a little harmless peek, not of flesh but of his past, of the world that has been left behind, but he finds himself at a spiritual crossroads.

“Where the rabbis are involved, there is always a path to be followed. Either you stay on it or stray into darkness: This is the choice that they offer. And, much as Allen feels bitter and lied to for all these years, he half wishes he could live in their realm, where a man is religious or he is not, a good husband or bad.”

Yes, things have changed, and choices have been made, but the window for your soul will stay open, it doesn’t close—but do you want to go through it or don’t you?

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

#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank- Nathan Englander

#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank- Nathan Englander

You immediately know two things from reading this title: one, it’s paying homage to the great story by Raymond Carver, and two, the subject matter is going to be pretty serious.

Deb and Shoshana were friend at Yeshiva twenty years ago. Shoshana and her husband have been living an ultra Hasidic life in Israel and are visiting Deb and her husband in Florida. They have a long, tense, emotional discussion over what it means to be Jewish.

Most of it focuses on whether it’s healthy to make the Holocaust the defining characteristic of your life, culture, religion. They tell a story about two Holocaust survivors that realize after forty-years that their camp tattoo numbers are only three apart. The observers expect an emotional recognition of this incredible event—surviving and existing this long after having been so close to each other at the beginning –but instead the man with the higher number just say that it proves that he cut the line back then just as he does now. Meaning, that he wanted his life defined by his own actions not by others from his past.

Obviously, these discussions will cause much debate and anger and tears. The part I found the most interesting was talking about the difference between religion and culture and the dangers of tying one with the other.

“With religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it is ever changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld, you hold them together with glue.”

This was brilliantly crafted with impeccable dialogue. I’ll let others more qualified analyze the meaning and religious aspects of this story.

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

#367 Revenant- Margaret Atwood

#367 Revenant- Margaret Atwood

Gavin is a poet, coming of age during the sixties. Now in his old age, he lives in Florida with his third wife, thirty-years his junior. He struggles with vitality, in all forms:

“How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can lo longer taste it.”

He is drying up, as a poet, as a lover, as a man. What he has left is his legacy, which he has ceded somewhat unwittingly to his wife. She controls his papers, his house, his correspondence. She has scheduled an interview with a grad student to talk about his work. Only the interview ends up being about his first love, Constance, the world famous fantasy author (whom we saw in the first story of this collection).

He is angry, hurt, confused and betrayed by this onslaught of memory: “To show anger would be to reveal his soft underbelly, to pile more humiliation upon the primary humiliation.”

But instead of keeping his composure, he gets sucked into a place he wished to keep to himself: “It’s like being drawn into a time tunnel, the centrifugal force is irresistible.”

The world sees Gavin in a public way. They study him, discuss his ex-girlfriends, and now even read back to him private letters he wrote when he was younger. He wanted to keep some things for himself.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#341 Other Brands of Poison- Rebecca Makkai

#341 Other Brands of Poison- Rebecca Makkai

Family legends told decades later often change depending on who’s telling them, but the important parts stay the same.

“If the story is hazy, seventy years later, that is because it is his. If the details are strangely specific—the dialogue, the type of soup—that is because they are mine.”

As I rotate through the fifteen or so authors during this round of short stories, if becomes clear which collection I like best. I have a large stack of these books on my desk and I read one, I put it on the bottom of the stack, with the top book being tomorrow’s story. Each time I get to see Makkai on top, I know tomorrow’s read is going to be a good one.

Even short pieces like this one are filled with rich, deep, emotion. So far, Music For Wartime has been the find of this year.

Rating: 10-7-8-9 Total= 34

#292 Fon- Henry Dumas

#292 Fon- Henry Dumas

Nilmon is a former police deputy, relieved of his duties due to over agreesive tactic dealing with black men. When he hurtles down the street in his car and has a rock break his back windshield, he looks to blame the nearest black person he can find, which turns out to be Fon.

He gathers a posse and comes back the area it occurred only his compadres tell him its abandoned and haunted. Nevertheless Fon is there waiting. The conflict ends with Nilmon dead, killed by his past, his transgressions and four hundred years of guilt.

Notable Passage: “He turns toward the levee where a light in the night reaches out to him and to the great distance between him and the far blinking of the stars.”

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

#284 The Thing About Cassandra- Neil Gaiman

#284 The Thing About Cassandra- Neil Gaiman

It’s funny how themes emerge from stories and books you read at the same time. You see a theme in one, and then, bam…the next book you read there it is again. Mostly it's that your eyes are open to that theme, the taste is still on your tongue, but sometimes its very cool coincidence.

A few days ago I read Kavita Through Glass, where we spent the whole story following along with a narrator’s perspective only to be shown at the end that the important view was through the other character’s eyes. This story is very much the same.

Stuart Innes is a model and an artist. He’s single and doesn’t seem to have the drive to find himself a woman. Suddenly he hears rumors that his first girlfriend, Cassandra has reappeared, and has been looking for him. She was perfect, the one all others were judged against…the only problem is that he made her up. So who is this woman then, well…that’s where the fun is.

We limit ourselves sometime by the fantasies we create, and we are defined by the lies we tell. That sounds like a good summary for this story, but really its just a good story, no need to over think it.

Notable Passage: “People think they’re buying the art, but really, they’re buying the story.”

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total=38

#283 Lorelei- Jerome Charyn

#283 Lorelei- Jerome Charyn

Howell was a con-man, a grifter, a chiseler. He went from small town to small town taking advantage of rich widows. But he always came back to the Bronx where he grew up a poor child of a poor family. He never stole the big money and never hit it big, even as a kid watching Yankees games from afar up the hill, he was always “binoculars away” from what he wanted.

So, now in his fifties, tired of the con, he comes back to live in the diminished Grand Concourse “Lorelei” where he was once the superintendent’s son. To his surprise the love of his youth, the debutante and daughter of the real estate king of the Bronx was still living there, unmarried and waiting for him.

Naomi is a cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Miss Havisham (the old jilted spinster from Great Expectations). She was false, tragic, despicable and irreversibly damaged; and in a way Howell only saw now, more of a chiseler than even himself.

“Howell was in misery. She’d robbed him of whatever thunder he had left.”

I liked this story at the start, I thought the set up was great and built a foundation for something rich and tragic and very dramatic. Instead it kind of fell off the rails and stopped short. I would have liked to see this story as novella.

Notable Passage: “The white rose is a symbol of love as everlasting war.”

Rating: 8-9-6-7 Total= 30