#822 Interesting Facts- Adam Johnson

#822 Interesting Facts- Adam Johnson

This is a cathartic look at a woman dealing with her own death and the loss of her to her family. The husband is clearly written as an autobiographical look at Adam Johnson himself. He’s a San Francisco writer that won the Pulitzer Prize for writing a novel taking place in North Korea (The Orphan Master’s Son). I don’t know whether he actually had a wife die of cancer, and since this is a short story, it doesn’t matter if the reader knows. But if he did, and he wrote this story from the perspective of his dying wife…that’s incredibly brave.

The story begins with the wife and husband managing three kids while she goes through cancer treatment. She wonders about her own death and how fast it would take for him to move on with his life. We see her jealousy and sadness. Halfway through the story, you start to wonder if she is alive at all. I don’t remember if there is a point where we are told that she had died, or if it is left vague. I don’t want to go back and see. The way I read it, things slowly coming into focus was a powerful thing.

Notable Passage: “If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I should stop acting like one.”

10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#535 On Sleepless Roads- Craig Davidson

#535 On Sleepless Roads- Craig Davidson

Graham is a repo-man. He gets up in the pre-dawn hours to repossess vehicles from those missing payments. 95 % of the time, he manages to complete his job without incident; other times, things can get violent. He has been doing this work, on sleepless roads, for twenty-five years.

His wife, Nell is suffering from a degenerative disease called Bradykinesia. It has caused her to lose control over the movement of her body. She shakes uncontrollably and her walk, once a thing of amazement and beauty to Graham, is no longer what it once was.

We see graham go through a few repo stops, and we see some of the tactics people use to beg for their stuff back. In a rare scene, we actually see graham take pity on a man and lets his temporarily keep his trailer.

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

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

This is an indescribably beautiful piece of writing. Doerr has a quality in his writing, a quality found in very few writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind as perhaps the only equal) where you stop reading and it feels like you’ve woken from a day dream. The emotional depth in this story is at once strong enough to feel like a thick blanket keeping you warm against a blizzard and still so fragile that by even mentioning it, it might blow away in the wind. It’s magical, and yet grounded-in-the-earth real. Particularly strong is Doerr’s descriptions of the natural word (a quality we saw in his story, The Deep- (#39 in this blog).

The Hunter’s Wife is a seer, one who can tap into the eyes of dead beings, see where they go and what they feel. She lives with the Hunter in his cabin deep in a Montana Valley.

“Both of them lived in the grips of forces they had no control over—the November wind, the revolution of the earth.”

“When he looked out the cabin window he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under the roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.

            With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.”

Being stuck in the snowed-in Valley all winter (for five years) she was able to hone her skills by touching animals either in hibernation or frozen by the cold. She can see their dreams. By Spring, she gets bored with the wild, as all the animals wake and she can no longer see their dreams.

“More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn’t exist.”

She is a woman living in the winter, while he lives in the Spring and Summer. Yet, he is the one that seems frozen, solidly set in one place at one time, never changing and never thawing. She must leave the Valley and explore the world and share her gift. He stays behind to tend to his hunting and dreaming of wolves.

“He had given up on finding a wolf in that country although they still came to him in dreams and let him run with them, out over frozen flats under the moon.”

Read this story!

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

#429 Custom-Made Bride- Kurt Vonnegut

#429 Custom-Made Bride- Kurt Vonnegut

Krummbein designed his wife. She was his secretary a shy, dowdy, brown-haired woman with a different name, Kitty Cahoun, when they met. Then, he began to “design” her, one by one changing the things about her until she became Falloleen, the perfect woman.

“It’s a Krummbein original…Kitty Cahoun didn’t go with the décor.”

Hal has been hired to take care of Krummbein’s financial woes. He is an incredibly successful man but impractical. He treats his life like he treats his wife, like something is always to be fixed, so now he is broke. Having to face his situation makes his wife’s façade crack, and now his life is in danger of turning upside down. Nothing a little moonlight makeup can’t fix.

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

#413 That Colour- Jon McGregor

#413 That Colour- Jon McGregor

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is a collection that has been on The-Best-Of lists since it was published a few years ago. This first salvo is, as we have seen in several collections, a short mood setter, an "amuse bouche" to announce the intention of the overall work

A woman stares out the window ruminating on the shortness of the years and the changing of the season. She is awed by it, as if it is the first time she has thought these things. Her husband, more pragmatic:

“I asked her why she was so surprised. I told her it was autumn, it was what happened…I told her she went through this every year…I dried my hands and went through the front room and stood beside her. I felt for her hand and held it. I said, But tell me again.”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#367 Revenant- Margaret Atwood

#367 Revenant- Margaret Atwood

Gavin is a poet, coming of age during the sixties. Now in his old age, he lives in Florida with his third wife, thirty-years his junior. He struggles with vitality, in all forms:

“How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can lo longer taste it.”

He is drying up, as a poet, as a lover, as a man. What he has left is his legacy, which he has ceded somewhat unwittingly to his wife. She controls his papers, his house, his correspondence. She has scheduled an interview with a grad student to talk about his work. Only the interview ends up being about his first love, Constance, the world famous fantasy author (whom we saw in the first story of this collection).

He is angry, hurt, confused and betrayed by this onslaught of memory: “To show anger would be to reveal his soft underbelly, to pile more humiliation upon the primary humiliation.”

But instead of keeping his composure, he gets sucked into a place he wished to keep to himself: “It’s like being drawn into a time tunnel, the centrifugal force is irresistible.”

The world sees Gavin in a public way. They study him, discuss his ex-girlfriends, and now even read back to him private letters he wrote when he was younger. He wanted to keep some things for himself.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#286 A Piece of News- Eudora Welty

Rosy Fisher reads a small blub in the paper:

“Mrs. Ruby Fisher had the misfortune to be shot in the leg by her husband this week.”

Funny thing is though, she doesn’t remember being shot, nor does her husband and there is no evidence of any shooting. So, why does the paper say she was shot? Well that’s the twist.

Somehow this story reminds me of a country song about a cold-hearted man and no good cheatin’ wife. That’s all I got.

Notable Passage: “And at moments when the fire stirred, and tumbled in the grate, she would tremble, and her hand would start out as if in impatience or despair.”

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

#282 Kavita Through Glass- Emily Ishem Raboteau

#282 Kavita Through Glass- Emily Ishem Raboteau

Distance÷Longing= Desire. Hassan saw the world as a mathematician. Things could be described using symbols and signs. His wife saw the world through Architecture using meaning through color and shapes. He was a Muslim, she was Hindu. They had trouble communicating with each other. Until she became pregnant it didn’t seem to matter that much. Now, as another life was coming into the world, their own needs became suddenly important.

We see this story from Hassan’s perspective. We see his resentment, confusion, and ultimate acceptance and enjoyment over her designs in the house. We see his confusion over her sudden emotional change when she gets pregnant. We see his hurt as she pursues a secret desire. We are with him…right up to the point that we see her side. Our mistake is apparent in one quick statement:

“Do you realize you never look at me?”

Not only has Hassan been selfish in his thoughts, so have we, the readers. Of course we are used to following along with the author of a story, but this was brilliant! Bringing us along for the sole reason to show us our own blind spot. We all need to step outside ourselves every so often to see how we are can be so selfish.

In the liner notes for this story, Raboteau says that 30 journals rejected this story before Tin House printed it, and eventually was selected for the Best American Short Story compendium for 2003. I wonder how many of those rejections happened without the reader ever getting to the revealing end?

Notable Passage: “White is a color without depth…or a thing without depth, since it is not a color at all, but a thing that makes depth possible.”

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

#277 Ring of Spices- Sandip Roy

#277 Ring of Spices- Sandip Roy

 Romola and Avinash are getting married. She lives in Calcutta, he is getting his PhD in Illinois. It is being arranged by their parents, it is their duty to their families. As these things go, there is little in the way of courtship, and there is a lot of awkward  feeling out between the two.

After the wedding, they move into his apartment near campus. It is her first time in America. She always dreamed of traveling to England (at least the England she knew from Wordsworth), this was not the same thing. Adjusting to this new life was not easy.

“For a moment she longed to be back in here bedroom in Calcutta. She wanted the hum of traffic around her. the sudden blare of horns, the voices of people walking on the street at all hours of the day, snatches of conversation trailing through the air, the yapping dogs, the cheerfully noisy night. Here the night felt almost naked in its silence, filling the room with just the harsh sound of his breath and the drumbeat of her heart.”

She longed for word from back home, so when she finally saw a letter from India she tore it open without seeing that it was addressed to her new husband. The letter was an angry, jealous plea from a former lover, that may actually be another man.

This story is quietly emotional, and we quickly get inside the head of Romola. Her life is full of the senses, and her perception her surroundings is profoundly aromatic.

Notable Passage: “Tomorrow it will be better. Desire will come. Desire will grow.”

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