#876 Train- Alice Munro

#876 Train- Alice Munro

Wow, seems like ages when we last read an Alice Munro Story. She is always a joy to come back to, one of the legends of the short story genre. It helps keep in perspective the few hundred other others read for this blog. This story settles in to Munro’s slow fluidity right away.

                       

Jackson is a man coming home from the war (WWII?) and finding himself a little lost. Instead of returning to his life, he jumps off the train, literally, and decides to start new. When he comes across a lonely woman living in near squalor next to a Mennonite community, he decides to stick around. For many years they live as non-intimate life partners, co-habbitating for mutual benefit.

“He had emerged as just one of those loners who may have got themselves in too deep some way or another but have not been guilty of breaking any laws.”

It was the perfect situation. He could live a bare-bones life, un-stressful and unashamed and never have to come into contact with his past mistakes and hurt. He didn’t expect to become old their, but life moves on.

“It made him realize how he must have aged and changed over the years, and how the person who had jumped off the train, that skinny nerve-racked soldier, would not be recognizable in the man he was now.”

When the woman became ill, he brought her to a hospital and left to, once again, run from responsibility and attachment. This is not a “new start” story, it’s about escapism and denial.

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

#401 The Cruise of the Jolly Roger- Kurt Vonnegut

#401 The Cruise of the Jolly Roger- Kurt Vonnegut

Nathan Durant was a seventeen-year army veteran before he was injured during the Korean War. Once only joining to survive the depression, he eventually became engrained in that world, and being a military man defined him, but what next?

“He had always assumed that he was going to die young and gallantly. But he didn’t die. Death was far, far away, and Durant faced unfamiliar and frightening battalions of peaceful years.”

He bought a boat and looked for a new life. Meeting people not in the military made him confused and feel like an outsider. Re-adjustment was hard. Most people treated the war and stories of war glibly or off-handedly. When asked to tell his own war stories:

“…he found himself including details, large and small, as they occurred to him, until his tale was no tale at all, but a formless, unwieldy description of war as it had really seemed: a senseless, complicated mess that in the telling was first-rate realism but miserable entertainment.”

There is a saying that goes something like: For those who have experienced, no explanation is necessary, for those who have not experienced, no explanation is possible. I suppose war fits into that description pretty solidly.

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

#189 Guests of the Nation- Frank O’Connor

#189 Guests of the Nation- Frank O’Connor

The English and the Irish are in constant conflict. A group of young Irishmen are involved and have two British men as captives, sort of. Neither of them really know they are truly captive, nor does half the group that is holding them. They have nightly card games over tea and argue religion and politics.

“The capitalists pay the priests to tell you about the next world so that you won’t notice what the bastards are up to in this.”

It seems that none of them have a full grip on the situation, or the conflict in general other than that-side-did-this-so-we-must-do-this, etc. Yet somehow they are resigned to this violent reality and whether they believe or not in what each one’s side is about, they understand duty and a skewed sense of honor.

Maybe I’m projecting my own sensibilities onto this, but O’Connor does a good job representing the meaninglessness of this sort of regional hatred and Capulet/Montague or Hatfield/McCoys type of absurd feud.

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

#134 Crimson- Josip Novakovich

#134 Crimson- Josip Novakovich

Milan is a soldier for the Serbian army during the war in the Balkans. He is a reluctant participant. He grew up knowing the divide between the Serbs and the Croats but like many young people he had to be taught hatred.

“He had heard that Croats had burned his home, and now he hated them.”

The more powerful Serbian force has the town of Vukovar surrounded in siege.

“No water flowed through the pipes and most of the sewage system was empty, so the people had lived like rats, together with rats, and the rats waited for them to die, so they could eat them.”

Seeing his first close engagement, Milan captures a 55-year old man and is forced to shoot him point blank. “Facing a tall, boney stranger, Milan felt neither hatred nor love, but he did not want to shoot him.”

In a drunken guilty fit, he comes across his captain raping a young woman who he imagines is a girl he once danced with during more innocent times. He kills his captain and escorts the “saved” woman to a refugee bus. He is disgusted and distraught at what he has done and what he has seen, he quits his post and returns to his home town.

“The series of events in Vukovar had changed him; he no longer feared what would happen if he were caught deserting the Serb army or if he were apprehended by the Croat police.”

In a twist only war can create, he finds the woman he saved, she is pregnant from her rape. He convinces her that he is not the evil man she thinks, and eventually marries her and raises the child as if it is his own…and as it turns out, it actually might be.

The story, while hard to read, does a good job not over-doing any of the descriptions. The plaintive truth is graphic enough. There is a parallel between how the more powerful Serbs justify their violence with how the rapist justifies his. The stabbing seems like an apt justice, as the “penetration” permanently wounds but does not kill.

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