#861 Settlers- Rebecca Lee

#861 Settlers- Rebecca Lee

This story is a group of friends going through life. The narrator is a single woman, the only single woman of the group. She wonders why the only single man of the group doesn’t ask her out. 

We flash forward to big moments as we see big world events go by, like the Clinton scandal or hurricane Katrina. The group at first feels like late twenties or thirty-somethings. There are some normal group archetypes, and oddballs, and coincidence. This could all be a John Hughes movie.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#832 Fialta- Rebecca Lee

#832 Fialta- Rebecca Lee

A college architecture student has been accepted to an exclusive artists residency retreat at Fialta run by the renown architect Franklin Stadbakken.  “Fialta…is dedicated not to the fulfillment of desire but to the transformation of desire into art.”

He is a humble student and lucky to be there. He fits it with the other interns and learns his craft while being tasked with milking cows and feeding the pigs. As with most stories about a group of people staying together in close confines for an extended period of time, this is an exercise in psychology, with references to Freud and Ovid.

He gets romantically entangled with the teachers pet, he is asked to leave. There was one rule, and he broke it. It might have been his best achievement. 

Notable Passages: “This is the whole problem with words. There is so little surface area to reveal whom you might be underneath, how expansive and warm, how casual, how easygoing, how cool, and so it all comes out a little pathetic and awkward and choked.”

“And what is a love affair if not a little boat, pushing off from shore, its tilting untethered bob, its sensitivity to one’s quietest gestures.”

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

#776 World Party- Rebecca Lee

#776 World Party- Rebecca Lee

On a college campus is a group called Harvest. They are a progressive group that learns about social movements, civil disobedience and as many college students do, put that learning to practice. During a recent hunger strike, a student was taken to the hospital and the activities of the group have come under question. The faculty advisor in particular is the focus of the attention. Some see him as a well-meaning academic, and others feel he deserves all the blame.

“I think you’ll find that he’s the devil. Like, the real devil. Using young people’s passions against them, and for his own purposes.”

The advisor must appear before the faculty hearings committee where the narrator sits on a three professor panel. “If a faculty member ever did anything suspect—threatened the dean with a gun, gave their classes all A’s, denied the holocaust—it was referred to us, the most unskilled tribunal ever assembled.”

The deciding vote lies in the narrator’s hands. While she is deciding she attends her son’s World Party, a Quaker alternative to Halloween. The event has the children promoting the things and people of the world they have learned in class.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#748 Min- Rebecca Lee

#748 Min- Rebecca Lee

Sarah and Min are students and best friends at college in Missoula. Min is from Hong Kong, a son to an influential family that deals with Vietnamese refugees back home. Min is marrying age and when he returns for the summer his family is to choose a bride. Because his mother, normally the person to recommend a bride, has passed, the father is left to the task. Min asks Sarah to come home with him this summer. She can work for his father and get to see Hong Kong. She agrees, but when she gets there the job the father wants her to do is screen the bride applicants. 

It’s a confusing time in Hong Kong, and it’s a confusing situation for Sarah. Things get more difficult when she befriends a union leader and gets a whiff of the class politics she has fallen into. A large part of this story is about the political landscape of late 80’s Hong Kong, but it’s also about friendship, family and culture. Not least of which is the story about father and son: 

“I wondered how that would be, to be a father and stare across a table, through the crackling candlelight, and see your own face, younger, broadened and transformed by both time and race. How interesting it would be to see the future that precisely.”

Notable Passage: “Only a man who hates his privilege can be trusted with it.”

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

#720 Slatland- Rebecca Lee

#720 Slatland- Rebecca Lee

At age eleven, Margit was having depression issues but she didn’t know where they came from. Her parents sent her to see a professor of child psychology for a therapy session. This very peculiar man, knew exactly what the problem was and taught her how to literally rise above herself and allow her to see things more clearly.

“For every situation there is a proper distance. Growing up is just a matter of gaining perspective. Sometimes you just need to jump up for a moment, a foot above the earth. And sometimes you need to jump very far.” 

For twenty years, this technique she learned in one session proved to work wonders on any snag in her life. The larger the problem the higher she had to lift up to gain the proper perspective. One day she came across a problem she thought was too big to fix using her special ability. She had to go back for a little fine-tuning.

Such a unique story!

Notable Passage: “Oddly enough, the signs indicating that a man is in love with another woman are often similar to the signs of an immigrant in a new country, his heart torn in two.”

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

#678 The Banks of the Vistula- Rebecca Lee

#678 The Banks of the Vistula- Rebecca Lee

How far would you take a lie to protect yourself from a mistake? Margaret is only a few weeks into her college career and she has gotten herself into a jam. She loves her classes, especially her linguistics class. While researching her first paper, she came across an essay written fifty years ago in the frosty beginnings of the cold war. The paper was stunning, bold, and intoxicating to a young mind. She cribbed the essay and handed it in as her own.

She knew she wouldn’t be able to write anything better, and since the book was out of print, and hadn’t been checked out for decades, the risk of being caught was slim. What she didn’t anticipate was that the subject of the matter went far beyond the beauty she perceived. A young student might see value without understanding the political delicacies that can exist in linguistic analysis. Straight out, the paper was fascist propaganda. 

What follows is a brilliant story about language, oppression, and cold war politics. It’s all wrapped up in a very real stage of campus debate, full of stubborn arrogance and youthful naivte. How much should we be punished for the ideas we espouse in our youth? What about the decisions we make while our lives (or reputations) are at risk?

The symbolism here is strong and powerful, and not very subtle. This passage of Margaret burning the book that would act as evidence against her I found particularly striking:

Notable Passage: “As the flame approached my hand, I arched the book into the murky water. It looked spectacular, a high wing of flame rising from it. Inside, in one of its luminous chapters, I had read that the ability to use language and the ability to tame fire arose from the same warm, shimmering pool of genes, since in nature they did not appear one without the other.”

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

#650 Bobcat- Rebecca Lee

#650 Bobcat- Rebecca Lee

The narrator is a woman, late in pregnancy. Her and her husband are having a dinner party. She is surrounded by people in the writing world, authors and literary agents. She feels both inadequate and superior to her guests, judging them at times harshly. She knows that the husband of one the couples invited has been having an affair with her colleague. 

An author at the party has written a recent acclaimed memoir accounting her harrowing experience of losing her arm to a bobcat while being stuck in the mountains. She wonders if the story is made up and later hears the author say that the bobcat is both real and a metaphor. The bobcat is the things we fear ready to pull us apart when we are at our weakest. It is just like the story about woman creating civilization to create safety around themselves after pregnancy, again at their most vulnerable. 

This dinner party is that type of nesting or civilization building for the narrator. But she spends too much time worrying about her guests and their problems, not seeing the bobcat lurking in her shadows waiting to attack her at her most vulnerable moment.

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