#243 The Student- Anton Chekhov

#243 The Student- Anton Chekhov

Winter is upon us once more, the cruel, bitter, cold and lonely darkness covers our lives and nothing can escape, not even truth.

“…in their time there had been the same savage poverty and hunger; the same leaky thatched roofs, ignorance and anguish, the same surrounding emptiness and darkness, the sense of oppression—all these horrors had been, and were, and would be no better. And he did not want to go home.”

But with such things, to endure, to survive, there must be hope. “…an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him, and life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning.”

Rating: 8-7-7-6 Total= 28

#38 Imposter (1953)- Philip Dick

The earth is involved in a brutal war with the Outspacers.  Spence Olham, an engineer working with The Project is arrested and accused of being an enemy spy.  According to intelligence, because of his high level access he was chosen by the Outspacers to be killed and replaced by a robot carrying an animated u-bomb.  Of course Olham denies any of this is true and we spend the whole story wondering which side is correct.

“There wasn’t anyway I could demonstrate that I wasn’t myself.”

This is an OK story, which apparently inspired two different feature films, the last of which was released in 2002 and starred Gary Sinise…who knew?  It has some typically fun Sci-fi elements like warring alien races, humanoid robots, space stations on the far side of the moon, etc.  Overall it’s a satisfying read although not at the same level as Dick’s more important works.

Among the myriad nitpicking one can do while reading sci-fi stories, was a fun little moment when Olham escapes capture on the moon.  We are in a society so sophisticated that we can travel to the moon in an hour by ourselves but security is so lax that a war criminal of the highest order can elude his death sentence by the equivalent of a “look at that pink elephant over there” distraction prank.  Amusing.

 Notable Passage: “Everyone was frightened, everyone was willing to sacrifice the individual because of the group fear.”

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

#18 A Vermont Tale-Mark Helprin

#18 A Vermont Tale (1977) Mark Helprin

I’m having an increasingly hard time enjoying this style of writing.  The stories I’ve been reading by Helprin all come from his collection Ellis Island, which won or was nominated for all sorts of literary awards.  I’m not saying they're not good enough to win awards, I’m saying that I, myself have no idea what makes these stories good enough to win awards.  I fully open the door for people to criticize my opinion on this.

Besides the first story Schreuderspitze, I find the writing mechanical and detached.  It’s like a professor showing you step by step how to write a good short story.  Here is Element A, followed by Element B…now if you add a little Element C you will have a good story.  It looks like he’s trying to write emotion. The plot certainly hints that emotion is there, but I just don’t feel it myself.  Clearly this is not the common response to Helprin, so I’ll admit that I’m probably wrong about them.  However, I will not pretend to like them so…

This story, as do the others, drowns on the weight of too much simile.  Simile is everywhere and I find myself often taking issue with them.   They’re either untrue, unfair, unwarranted or straight-up forced, clunky descriptions that go on for days.  Take this gem:

“We sensed as well that warmth in the train and its bright lights were not natural but, rather, like the balancing of a sword at the tip of a magician’s finger—an achieved state, from which an overconfident calculation, a graceless move, an accident of steel might hurl us into the numbing water of one of the many rivers over which the conductor had passed so often that he gave it no thought.”

Whoa there!  First is it really a revelation that light and heat on a train is unnatural, so much that “sensing” it is worthy of mention? Second this lofty thought comes from a child who on the same page naively thinks snowshoes are shoes made out of snow.

Which brings up my next issue.  While trying to describe the thoughts of an untraveled child, Helprin clumsily baffles between stark naiveté and improbable self-awareness.  And as someone growing up in the Hudson Valley, I find it hard to believe that a child growing up in Putnam would be so startled by the winter in Vermont that he had never before heard of snowshoes or seen ice formations on windows. Up until this story, I found Helprin’s writing to be very clean at least. Here I thought it was sloppy, and clumsy.  

One final annoyance (and this one is just personal) came at the beginning where he describes the columns of light shining through the huge windows of Grand Central as “sad light.”  Normally I would say things like descriptions of light are subjective, but really, unless the character seeing them was connecting it to a sad memory (which he wasn’t) that famous image, replicated in many photos and works of art, is anything but sad. Ominous maybe, cold (given the topic of this story would have been understandable).  But sad? Sorry…nope!

Oh, the story:  Two children are shipped to their grandparent’s house while their parents work out a divorce.  The Grandfather tells them a Vermont Tale about two arctic loons that separate and then later find each other. It’s a story about the grandparents and one meant to make the children feel optimistic about their parent's separation.

Done, sorry for the negativity. I’ve been trying to be both fair and positive with my reading, but I did not like this one much.  Perhaps I will put down this collection before I finish. 

Rating: 5-5-3-2 Total =15