#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

#701 East of the West- Miroslav Penkov

#701 East of the West- Miroslav Penkov

A village is bisected by a river. In one of the cruelties of geopolitics it is separated by war. One side is now Bulgarian and the other Serbian. They are allowed only one crossing every five years. Families are torn apart and histories are lost. In the middle of the river is a drowned church, aptly representing lost hope and faith.

Love still grows however, and Nose falls in love with his cousin Vera on the other side. It is a lifelong yearning that can never be fully realized, and ends in unbelievable heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that occurs when holding onto the last sliver of hope can create. 

“You’re holding life by the throat. So get your shit together and learn how to choke the bastard, because the bastard already knows how to choke you.”

Out of darkness and sorrow comes beautiful art. This is a beautifully rendered story about a very dark and sad existence. What do you cling to when hope is lost, when light is gone and when faith is literally washed away? I guess the answer is: anything you can. 

Notable Passage: “The words piled on my heart like stones and I thought how much I wanted to be like the river, which had no memory, and how little like the earth, which could never forget.”

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

#665 You Take the High Road- Frank Herbert

#665 You Take the High Road- Frank Herbert

Lewis Orne was on his first assignment re-discovering and re-educating a far off planet. He is to make sure there are no dangerous signs of a warring society. Without any evidence of war or armies or aggression he presses the panic button and reinforcements show up, but with no evidence, he is on the hot seat. He can’t prove that these people are violent, but he has a hunch, and has to prove that to the investigator from I-A. The I-A officer is skeptical, assuming that Orne is nothing more than a mere nervous first timer. When he asks what gave him a bad feeling, Orne responds:

“They have no spirit, no bounce. No humor. The atmosphere around this place is perpetual seriousness bordering on gloom.”

After investigating himself, the I-A team finds subtle but sure-fire evidence of military presence and Orne is validated and promoted. Would these people even know what peace was without war?

“The most important point on the aggression index: peaceful people don’t even discuss peace. They don’t even think about it. The only way you develop more than a casual interest in peace is through the violent contrast of war.”

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

#574 Cease Fire- Frank Herbert

#574 Cease Fire- Frank Herbert

Corporal Hulser was stationed at an Observation Post in a remote area. He used to be a chemist and was probably too smart to be a military grunt. At the moment, he was under attack by something that his sensors thought was too small to be a human. He survived the attack but was struck by a brilliant idea.

“It was one of those things that had to remain dormant until the precisely proper set of circumstances.”

It took some convincing by his superiors, but his idea, if successful, could end the war. He thought of a way to project onto a field, and explode any organic munitions, including gas, oil, coal, etc. This would make attacks by weapons using these things impossible. He was given the green-light to produce this projector in a project called Operation Big Boom.

When his invention proved successful, the military brass were not happy. They knew the harsh truth that better weapons didn’t put an end to war. Once one side made something, so would the other. This would only change the way war happened.

“Violence is a part of human life. The lust for power is a part of human life As long as people want power badly enough, they’ll use any means to get it—fair or foul!”

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

#541 The Caretaker- Anthony Doerr

#541 The Caretaker- Anthony Doerr

Doerr’s short stories are not like any of the others I’ve read. They don’t tell stories about everyday occurrences, they don’t try to tap into common themes or try to make connections that the reader can relate to. These are singular tales, each an emotional undertaking that takes us into an experience we would otherwise never think possible.

Joseph is a thirty-five year old Liberian man, doing anything he can do to survive, including theft and looting. His mother is a loving woman, teaches his son English from a dictionary and tends to her garden. When civil war breaks out, she disappears and he is lost. He searches for her but only finds death, and he is forced to kill a man.

He finds his way aboard a freighter and is given an American refugee visa. He gets a job as a winter caretaker at a beach resort in Oregon. When he witnesses a pod of beached whales on the shore, he goes into a depression he cannot find relief from. He buries the hearts of the whales. He is fired from the job because during his depression the house was left in extreme disrepair and he settles into the adjacent forest tending to a garden he has planted over the whale hearts.

One day he saves the life of Belle, the daughter of his former employer. She was about to commit suicide. They begin a secret friendship. She is deaf and teaches him sign language like his mother used to teach him English. They grow the garden together, the only thing Joseph has left of his mother. He is discovered, arrested and when he won’t eat, he is hospitalized. He is on the brink of death, and he seems resolved with his plight.

“There is no fight is Joseph, no anger, no outrage at injustice. He is not guilty of their crimes but he is guilty of so many others. There has never been a man guilty of so much, he thinks, a man more deserving of penalty."

When Belle brings his the fruits of their garden, he eats with absolute joy. It might be a last meal, or it might be redemption. But it is pure light.

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

#526 Revolution Shuffle- Bao Phi

#526 Revolution Shuffle- Bao Phi

“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.”

This comes from the introduction to the collection Octoavia’s Brood. It’s a book of social justice science fiction put together in honor of the great Octavia Butler. What they call Visionary Fiction, this looks to be quite a unique literary experience, like Butler herself.

We are five months into a distopic wartime reality. Seventy-percent of the country has turned to zombies and the Asian and Middle-eastern populations were in internment camp “for their own protection.” They were working on giant machinery that would attract the zombies away from the other populations. Guards were there to keep order: “Zombies. Brown people. On any given day, the armed guards were prepared to shoot either.”

Two armed rebels were overlooking the prison camp ready to try to liberate their people. They know that most won't want to come, and even if they did they’d have no safe place to go. But they have to try.

“They strode down the hill together, rifles in hand, straight for the prison camp. Toward a war that just might turn into something like a revolution.”

Notable Passage: “Tragic times do not beg for complexity…In the wake of disaster, America became even less subtle.”

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

#515 Everything We Know About the Bomber- Rebecca Makkai

#515 Everything We Know About the Bomber- Rebecca Makkai

Once again, I really want to urge people to read this collection, Music for Wartime. This is a string of paragraphs of the bits of stuff we learn from the barrage of TV news coverage during a bombing—it’s disaster porn. The needless facts about a bombers life, the endless ephemera that gest thrown at us keep our attention.

This isn’t exactly a new idea, but Makkai does it perfectly, shapes a reality of reality television that shouldn’t look like a fun house mirror but does anyway. Any coverage of a horrible attack or a bombing or a shooting somehow devolves quickly into a lesson on how NOT to cover the news. There is no way we need to know about a third grade report card of an alleged mass murderer…but there it is BREAKING NEWS: KILLER FAILED ART CLASS AS A KID!

What’s worse is that “News” stations are willing to get it wrong, and then correct later. They report a rumor about a person that ends up being false (and sometimes ends with death threats of an innocent person) and don’t think it’s morally reprehensible because they weren’t trying to report facts, they were merely relaying quotes from involved persons near the scene.

Important topic, great social commentary here. In a collection filled with war stories from past generations, the juxtaposition of something this current is powerful.

Notable Passage: “We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns…we will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound lie fate.”

Rating: 9-7-9-9 Total= 34

#505 Chamelta- Luis Alberto Urrea

#505 Chamelta- Luis Alberto Urrea

Private Arnulfo Guererro was shot in the head by the last bullet fired during the battle of Chamelta. His buddies try to save his life as they huddle around the camp fire. Their dog is uneasy as he sees the Private's last thoughts and dreams escape out of his head feeding those around him—literally feeding.

This is a short but touching piece about war, camaraderie and death.

Notable Passage: “They’d come out of the mining lands of Rosario, Sinalao, full of revolution and fun. Men were raised to fight and enjoy fighting. None dared admit they were weary of it, weary of fear, and each had learned to dream, and dreamed at all hours—dreamed while sleeping, while awake and marching, while fighting. Only dreaming carried them through the unending battles.”

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

#453 Sister Hills- Nathan Englander

#453 Sister Hills- Nathan Englander

This is an allegorical tale about the re-claiming of a settlement in the West Bank. Started by two families in 1973 during a time of war, the Sister Hills were “settled” soon after by seven boys, turned quickly into seventy, then in a span of fourteen years, emerged as a metropolis. The story begins with a fight over a tree. As complicated as this topic is, the following dialogue is a pretty brilliant break-down of the fight over this land:

-If it was your tree, I’d have seen you at my side last year during harvest. I’d have seen you the year before that, and ten years before that, and a hundred.

-You weren’t here yourself a hundred years ago. And anyway…you don’t look back far enough. The contract on this land is very old.

-A mythical claim, as meaningless as the one you make today

-It looks like [a war] not a judge [will decide].

Sadly in real life, that’s exactly how this has played out, but of course war hasn’t settled anything. And unfortunately, extremism and stubbornness has stopped the progress of any lasting peace:

-We’d prefer to avoid that kind of extremism.

-Then you do not have my trust.

I have no stirring or lucid insight into the politics of the Israel/Palestine question, but I think Englander does a great job shining a light on the issues.

Notable Passage: “For a judge can know how his heart would decide, but his obligation is always to the law. And they had sworn, these three. Sworn on their lives. A terrible promise to make.”

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

#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

#381 Souvenir- Kurt Vonnegut

#381 Souvenir- Kurt Vonnegut

One of the great things about Vonnegut stories is the simplicity of his form. The first paragraph usually tells you exactly what the story is about. This story is no different:

“Joe Bane was a pawnbroker, a fat, lazy, bald man, whose features seemed pulled to the left by his lifetime of looking at the world through a jeweler’s glass. He was a lonely, untalented man and would not have wanted to go on living had he been prevented from playing every day…the one game he played brilliantly—the acquiring of objects for very little, and the selling of them for a great deal more.”

Another common theme in Vonnegut works is WW II, himself being a veteran and survivor of the Dresden bombing. One day a man walks into Joe’s pawn shop and wants to sell a very expensive watch. Of course, Joe tries to undercut the man. Then we hear an amazing tale about how the watch was acquired in the Sudetenland after the German surrender.

The man walks out after the story, unwilling to be taken advantage of, and Joe, in his greed losses out on a great and historic find. The tale itself was enough for a short story, but putting it in context of a flashback surrounding this war-prize, makes it more interesting, and vintage Vonnegut.

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

#357 Never Was- David Dante Trout

#357 Never Was- David Dante Trout

Booby Hall had a gun, a pearl-handled automatic, that he carried around everywhere. “He had the gun because it was the thing that says, I am.” He was also patriotic, so when his brother went off to war, he also wanted to serve.

It was “A war so large it refitted every tool, swallowed all belief, threatened to change the tomorrow of a continent, or the yesterday of a country.”

“If you can bear arms against your enemy in Europe, you can protect yourself against your enemy anywhere.”

But black men weren’t wholly welcome to serve in combat, apparently not good enough to die for their country. But bobby got a job working for the military auxiliary services. It didn’t get him to Europe but let him do his part, and let him proudly walk around in a uniform.

Of course, the sight of black men in a uniform set many up in arms, and seeing one such as Bobby, strong willed, and carrying a gun just wasn’t going to be tolerated. So, they faked an ordinance and a warrant, and took Bobby’s gun away. The battle in Europe was far away, but there was a second battle at home, juts as important, that one was for freedom as well. Unfortunately for Bobby, the side with the biggest guns usually wins.

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

#356 Adventure Story- Neil Gaiman

#356 Adventure Story- Neil Gaiman

This is a fun little piece. The narrator’s mother seems a bit addled, or maybe just extremely naïve. For her, going down the wrong aisle in the super market and running into an old friend would constitute a “full-blown adventure.”

So when her son asks her about his deceased father’s curious trophy he brought back from the war, the tale she tells seem like much more than any grocery-store run-in. Of course the story includes Pterodactyls, Aztecs, a tony race of men and a kidnapped princess, it all seems too fantastical to be real.

Don’t worry about it, just sit back and drink your tea.

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