#188 Easter Night- Anton Chekhov

#188 Easter Night- Anton Chekhov

Yesterday’s author Mavis Gallant’s simple advive to new authors was to “Read Chekhov.”  Here, as well as many of his stories, we see the brilliance of that advice. This is such a delicate and touching story, balancing joy-sorrow, life-death, light-dark, past-present, gentry-impoverished. A Gentlemen crosses the river to get to an Easter service. The ferryman is a novice who is grieving the loss of a brother, a brother skilled at writing outlaw religious texts known as Akathists.

 “There should be softness, gentleness, and tenderness in every little line, so that there’s not a single coarse, harsh, or unsuitable word. It has to be written so that the one who is praying will rejoice and weep in his heart, but shake and be in awe in his mind.”

Like the poetry of Walt Whitman, or the music of Charles Ives, Chekhov strives to capture humanity at its most pure moments, not lofty, or quaint, sarcastic, or judgmental, but truthful and lovingly. The following passage I found to be a perfect capture of a common shared public experience . He has tapped into the emotion of such a scene with a genuine eye.

Notable Passage: “One would have liked to see this restlessness and sleeplessness in all of nature, beginning with the night’s darkness and ending with the slabs, the graveyard crosses, and the trees, under which people bustle about. But nowhere did the excitement and restlessness tell so strongly as in the church. At the entrance an irrepressible struggle went on between ebb and flow. Some went in, others came out and soon went back again, to stand for a little while and then move again. People shuttle from place to place, loiter, and seem to be looking for something. The wave starts at the entrance and passes through the whole church, even disturbing the front rows where the solid and weighty people stand. To concentrate on prayer is out of the question. There are no prayers, but there is a sort of massive childishly instinctive joy that is only seeking an excuse to burst and pour itself out in some sort of movement, be it only an unabashed swaying and jostling.”

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

#176 Satan: Hijacker of a Planet- Louise Erdrich

#176 Satan: Hijacker of a Planet- Louise Erdrich

“The Antichrist is among us.”

Indeed he is, if you believe in that sort of thing.  A luring, attractive evangelist comes calling to recruit worshipers for a tent revival. The mother, who would have been fine buying anything from a door-to-door man--except salvation--had no interest. Her daughter however, juts learning about her womanly maturation, learning how to flirt and understanding the power of attractive men, but not fully understanding what that means.

The daughter goes to the revival and has her first contact with the power of evangelical speech and is invited to attend a healing session after the service by the young preacher. She believes that she has the power of envisioning pictures, and places with precise accuracy, so when others are having (or feigning) religious fervor she silently envisions her pictures.

The preacher takes advantage of her naivety, her sincere wonderment of the moment and in the ways of the Antichrist himself, stains the purity of the young woman.

Note: I love buying and reading used books. I still remember my first trip to a used book store where I picked up Leaves of Grass and The Iliad, not because I thought I would like those books (LOG did become my favorite book), but because the aesthetics of the old dog-eared, dusty, powerful things they were. However, I should have learned by now that you should NEVER buy a used book that has underlining. My copy of the 1998 O.Henry prize stories that this short story came from was clean right up to this story. Whoever read this story before me was a deranged, serial under-liner who went apeshit crazy on these pages…4 colors and no apparent method. Made reading this a bit schizophrenic.

Notable Passage: “The stars are the eyes of God, and they’ve been watching us from the beginning of the world.”

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#168 The Pagan Rabbi- Cynthia Ozick

#168 The Pagan Rabbi- Cynthia Ozick

Isaac has just committed suicide, an abomination and an unforgivable sin for a Jewish man. He has left his wife behind bereaved and angry. The narrator was his good friend who was raised like Isaac to become a Rabbi but strayed from that path long ago. Their father’s were fierce rivals.

“It is easy to honor a father from afar, but bitter to honor one who is dead.”

Isaac became a ravenous reader, about all things, and not just religion and Jewish texts. This lead to tension between him and his wife. After his death she found a treatise outlining a rambling decent into paganistic hallucinations. In his insatiable desire for knowledge he had become unhinged, but not without lucidity.

“I saw that he was on the side of possibility: he was both sane and inspired. His intention was not to accumulate mystery but to dispel it.”

His letter baffles between brilliance and dementia, finding not only spirit everywhere, but actual spirits that speak to him. Some actually in his words echoing his confusion.

“You have spoiled yourself, spoiled yourself with confusion.”

This story is a beast. It’s impressive it scope and depth. I was a little out of my element on Jewish scripture, so I’m sure I missed some symbolism, but I enjoyed this nonetheless.

Notable Passage: “I envisaged my soul as trapped in my last granule, and that last granule itself perhaps petrified, never to dissolve, and my soul must be released at once or be lost to sweet air forever.”

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

#92 Two Brothers- Brian Evenson

#92 Two Brothers- Brian Evenson

Daddy Norton has fallen and broken his leg. He refuses to let his sons leave the house for help. He believes: “God has foreseen how we must proceed.” That’s the jumping off premise of this O Henry Award Prize Story. Can faith alone heal all?

While Aurel, Theron, and Mama look on in worry and doubt, “…before Daddy Norton’s pure spiritual eye, celestial messengers [cleansed] the wound with God’s Holy love.” It appears Theron is fed-up with the self-proclaimed prophet and his martyr act. He makes a series of callous remarks:  “Tell daddy to ask God what time lunch is served.”

Daddy Norton’s delirium causes him to attempt to cut his own leg off before falling back into darkness. Theron puts his father out of his misery while his mother also dies of starvation and neglect. It appears that God did not provide.

The children, scarred from this experience as well, it is assumed by the crazy upbringing being sons of a living prophet. They go feral in their empty house, naked, demented and occasionally fall into metaphysical hallucinations. They eschew outside influence, hunt their own food but hold the locked room of their dead father as something sacred.

This is pure parable and extremely well done. I wish I had a better grasp of the religious symbolism here to fully understand the references.

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

#33 Ark of Bones- Henry Dumas

#33- Ark of Bones- Henry Dumas

Echo Tree is a collection of Dumas’ short stories recently printed as a part of The Coffee House Press Black Arts Movement Series. The series has reprinted unavailable works seen as important in our collective history, especially those works that deal with authors or subjects that go overlooked by main street histories.

Henry Dumas is such as author. As described in the introduction of this collection:

“As best we know from circumstances that remain unclear, on May 23^rd, 1968, while seated unarmed in a Harlem subway station, a thirty-three year old father, husband, teacher, and emerging writer named Henry Dumas was confronted by a New York City Transit policeman who, in what must have been a case of mistaken identity or imagined provocation, summarily shot him dead”

I guess what’s old is new again (or never changed). We were robbed of another great mind, so I think it’s particularly important to celebrate the great works that he left behind and remember the authors that were never safe enough to make it into our high school English textbooks.

Written in a colloquial style, Ark of Bones is an allegorical masterpiece.  What starts out as a lazy walk down the Mississippi turns into a deeply religious adventure.  Fish-hound goes down to fish and is being followed by local mysterious outcast, Headeye.  Headeye is the holder of a mojo bone, or a keybone which has many in town intrigued, all except Fish-hound.  Headeye says it’s like Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bone and belongs to the people of God.

As Fish-hound fishes, Headeye holds the bone as he wades in the suddenly rising water.  A storm comes up, an improbable Ark appears in the river and the two are escorted to it on a row boat.  “I figured maybe we was dead or something and was gonna get the Glory Boat over the river and make it on into heaven.”

Upon the Ark, Fish-hound sees it is full of bones and is told: “Son you are in the house of generations. Every African who lives in America has a part of his soul in this ark.” He acts as a witness as Headeye is anointed in a religious ceremony. He is chosen because he will never speak of what he has seen. A few days later, Headeye announces he is leaving, and Fish-hound never tells anyone of the ark.

Books can be written about the amount of symbolism and meaning is in this story.  And in fact whole schools of study existed in the 1970's following this story and Dumas’ other important works.  I’m sure I’ll read a few more of them soon.

Notable Passages: “I could hear the water come to talk a little. Only river people know how to talk to the river when it’s mad.”

“Some people say readin too many books will stunt your growth”

Rating: 8-9-9-10 Total= 36