#589 The Seventh Man- Haruki Murakami

#589 The Seventh Man- Haruki Murakami

Delicate, imaginative and dreamlike as usual, Murakami hits a nice note with this one. It seems like a man is at a support group or something giving a testimonial about the worst thing that has happened to him.

When he was a teenager he had a best friend, K, who was smaller, slower, and sweeter than he was. He was his protector, and the two were like brothers. During a massive typhoon each was huddled inside their own homes, but during the eye of the storm they walked outside to inspect the damage while it was still calm. 

The seashore was the place of interest, the waves had receded and the shoreline was riddled with debris and others things for them to inspect. Suddenly he felt a rush of fear and felt as if danger as coming. He called for K and ran. K didn’t hear until it was too late.

“I knew instinctively that they were alive. The waves were alive. They knew I was here and they were planning to grab me. I felt as if some huge man-eating beast were lying somewhere on a grassy plain, dreaming of the moment it would pounce and tear me to pieces with its sharp teeth.”

K was swallowed up by the tidal wave and dragged out to sea. For forty years, he has lived with this guilt, this pain, this fear. He left town and didn’t return until now. He may have found peace, but he will never get back the years he lost to grief.

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

#485 So Many Chances- Anthony Doerr

#485 So Many Chances- Anthony Doerr

The wonders of the ocean are all new to Dorotea, a fourteen-year old girl just moved to Casco Bay, Mane from Ohio. She is immediately struck by the vastness of it:

“She had not expected emptiness, flittery light, a blotted horizon. Waves march in from some obscure haze. For a terrifying moment she can imagine herself the only organism on the planet.”

She quickly finds that the closer you look at things as vast as the ocean, the more you see it teeming with life. She meets a young fisherman and so she learns to fish. When the boy goes away though, she still wants to fish. Like the shells brought by the waves, these are things left behind by the people in our lives.

Her father and the boy are not the perfect people she thinks they are, but that’s ok. The waves will bring more chances tomorrow to catch a fish.

Notable Passage: “Life can turn out a million ways…but the one way life will not turn out is the way you dream it.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#323 Double Espresso- Sin Soracco

#323 Double Espresso- Sin Soracco

I got this story from San Francisco Noir, one of a series of City Noir collections.  The series uses local writers to “…help expose the psycho-geography of a city. Hidden and repressed memories are a focal point…”

Here Gina is a homeless woman sleeping in a park built above a filled-in waterway. Water is a big theme here, and rivers dried-up, or controlled by civilization. Gina takes a trip just outside the city to visit a friend. She learns that the world is crazy when you don’t know the lay of the land.

“She discovered a fondness for the city buried somewhere deep in her chest, most noticeably when she was leaving.”

Notable Passage: “Civilization treats pain with lectures.”

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#310 The Shell Collector- Anthony Doerr

#310 The Shell Collector- Anthony Doerr

Doerr writes in pastel colors. Like another writer covered in this blog, Haruki Murakami, he is able to achieve the sense that you are dreaming the stories he write. Its beyond beautiful, and more important its beyond what you know beautiful can be. The creativity, and imagination, and singular style is breathtaking. Is that enough superlatives to illustrate how much I like this story?

It is simple enough. A blind man lives in a remote lagoon outside Lima, Kenya. He is a doctor of marine biology. He lives his life with his dog, spends his days collecting and marveling at the reef-life. He discovers miracles, and experiences incredible loss. He is merely an observer, as the world looks for meaning and value and narrative, he finds only life.

Notable Passage: “He had never comprehended the endless variations of design…Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#305 Down to a Sunless Sea- Neil Gaiman

#305 Down to a Sunless Sea- Neil Gaiman

“I told him not to go to the sea…the sea won’t love you like I love you, she’s cruel.”

This is a short story about loss. It reads like a elegy. Rain often represents change, cleansing, purity; but when the story is about death at sea, water only represents pain.

“it is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.”

Rating: 9-7-7-8 Total= 31

#226 Thawing Out- T.C. Boyle

#226 Thawing Out- T.C. Boyle

Marty is 24 and in the beginnings of a serious relationship with Naina. As it gets more serious, he gets more cold on the subject. He takes a solo vacation that turns out to be a five month long weekend, losing his job, and his girlfriend in the process. Afraid of adulthood and a long term commitment, Marty struggles with adulthood.

The setting and theme is cold water. Naina’s family is Ukrainian and they have an affinity for cold water. Their Polar Bear Club takes a ceremonial frigid dip into the Hudson each winter solstice to reaffirm their lives and virility. Marty needs to take the plunge to rid himself of his selfish adolescent ways.

The plunge has to be voluntary. The accidental fall into freezing water he took in Canada was due to miscommunication, and thus ended in disaster. The real plunge must be embraced, and done on faith; that one will be as warm as bath water.

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

#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