#275 Heaven Row- Jess Lake

#275 Heaven Row- Jess Lake

A widower raises his two teenage daughters by himself. As he struggles with parenthood he remembers the risks he took halfway across the world, and the path that lead him here.

The writing here is absolutely stunning. Lake captures the empty, frustrating feelings of a lonely father exceptionally well. A man who’s life is draining away fast, and all he has left are his memories and his children, who at this moment it time, won't give him the time of day.

“But when I sit next to them…and no one says a word, I have a feeling I can’t easily describe. It’s as if my heart has puffed up inside mu chest like a balloon, and every beat presses against my ribs, like the thump of a muffled drum. It’s nothing, my doctor says, but he’s wrong. That beat is the sound of time passing.”

Time is a big theme in this story.

“In my study there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read and reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. I whisper my daughter’s names to the air and say, Listen. Listen to me.”

Notable Passage: “A pardon is a little space, an opening, where the world stands back and leaves you alone. It is a door I walk through every day when I open my eyes.”

10-8-9-8 Total= 35

#267 Rationing- Mary Yukari Waters

#267 Rationing- Mary Yukari Waters

If you only have a finite amount of energy or time, is it better to lament the bad things around you, or to use that time to try to alleviate the suffering? This story is about the rationing of emotion for more practical pursuits.

Saburo was only 6 when Japan surrendered, and he cannot remember his father from a time before the war, buts sees him as a pragmatic rock of a figure. “What he heard was his father’s voice: a voice like the universe, regulated and unknowable, with the endurance of silent planets rotating in their endless solitary orbits.”

He has a lifelong fear of running out of time, or preparing for a longer life than he will be allotted. This doesn’t seem to spur him into living life more fully, but seems to paralyze him into not making solid decisions. This is a one-life-in-twenty-pages type of story, so all we see are snapshots in the life of Saburo. He is lonely and afraid to disappoint his family.

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

#215 Along the Frontage Road- Michael Chabon

#215 Along the Frontage Road- Michael Chabon

What first appears to be just a nice easy tale about a Father-Son pumpkin picking outing turns out to be something much deeper, layered and complicated like most things father-son related.

There's something quaint and gentle about this story, but there is also something profoundly sorrowful too. The nostalgia that the father feels isn’t just of his childhood, but of regret from the recent past. He is solid and secure for his son, but he is also bitter and regretful.

“I don’t mean to imply that we have somehow rendered the world untrustworthy of our children’s trust and attention. I don’t believe that, though sometimes I do feel that very implication lodged like a chip of black ice in my heart.”

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

#156 Sinking House- T.C. Boyle

#156 Sinking House- T.C. Boyle

After 50 years of marriage Murial buried her husband. She is relieved but unhinged. She needs to cleanse herself, she needs to wash away the bad years. So she turns on all the water faucets in her house. For weeks the water runs, and she sits and listens to the water pouring like she used to listen to her husband pouring his vodka:

“When it was quiet—in the early morning or late at night—she could distinguish the separate taps, each with its own voice and rhythm, as they dripped and trickled from the far corners of the house.”

Next door, a younger couple starts to notice flooding in their yard, and under their house. They confront Murial and demand she stop her foolishness. The man's actions and demeanor remind her of her dead husband, before he got violent. But his aggression shocks his wife who doesn’t like this new side of him:

“Sure there was a problem here and she was glad he was taking care of it, but did he have to get violent?”

The water eventually gets turned off but it doesn’t solve anything: “The place was deadly, contaminated, sick as the grave—after all was said and done, it just wasn’t clean enough.”

Meg sees her future in Murial, battered, dejected, wasted away: “Meg had felt like sinking into the ground.”

Clearly water is a powerful theme, as is the power of nature and time. Perhaps there are homage intentions here to Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, with the connecting theme of woman being trapped.

Rating: 8-7-8-9 Total= 32

#122 A Cold Autumn- Ivan Bunin

#122 A Cold Autumn- Ivan Bunin

Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although his anti-communist beliefs forced him to flee, he was the first exiled author to be published in the USSR.

This is the eve of World War I. A family goes through the emotions of separation before war.  “We sat quietly that evening, only occasionally exchanging the odd insignificant word, hiding our innermost thoughts and feelings with exaggerated calm.”

A young couple not yet married talk of the what-ifs and the promises young couples make when discussing an uncertain future. He dies before they could get married and she lives on, although not without regret.

“Only that cold autumn evening…And that is all there’s been in my life. All the rest has been a useless dream.” Can you tell this is Russian literature?

Rating: 7-6-7-5 Total= 25