#255 A Happy Meal- Sandip Roy

#255 A Happy Meal- Sandip Roy

Don’t Let Him Know is called a "Novel in Stories", with each chapter being a snapshop or a vignette all linked into one tale. I’m not sure if each will work as a true short story, but I’m intrigued with the concept and so I will give it a shot.

The first chapter, Happy Meal introduces Romola, a widow recently moved to California from Calcutta. Her son Amit, the man of the family since his dad died brought her here to be easier to take care of.  On his trip back to Calcutta to finish his father’s affairs, he found a letter address to Romola, from a family friend he recognized as his Uncle. It was written before his parent’s marriage, and showed that his mother was in love with another man. He confronts his mother, but is quick to understanding.

“The past she thought could always be wiped clean like a kitchen counter if you were careful enough.”

But if you weren’t, “…the past seemed too complicated to explain now, full of serated edges that could rip everything to shreds.”

This realization that her past is done, and her son is no longer a boy in need of protection throws her for a loop. “She was tired, so tired of always being the one who had to smooth things over, the one who had to keep things running.”

She is confused in this new place, bot geographically and metaphysically, she has a sudden urge to indulge herself is something forbidden, something new, something truly American…a McDonalds Hamburger.

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

#254 Aftermath- Mary Yukari Waters

#254 Aftermath- Mary Yukari Waters

Makiko is raising her son, Toshi, in occupied Japan after the war. Her husband died and she is struggling with the rapidly changing world. “These last few years, however, with the war and the surrender, the changes have come too fast, skimming her consciousness like pebbles over water.”

Toshi is seven and being taught and fed by American soldiers. Makiko bristles at the same force killing her son's father now giving him sustenance. She tries hard to instill in Toshi the importance of his own past.

“A man who forgets his past…stays at the level of an animal.”

However, she herself has bad memories of this past, of her imperfect husband. What happens to such unpleasant memories? “They get scattered, left behind. Over the past few years, more pleasant recollections have taken the lead, informing all the rest, like a flock of birds, heading as one body along an altered course of nostalgia.”

These aftermath stories are always somber to read, but important to recognize. We’ve seen two so far during this project, the first being Hiroshima by Nam Le. That story was so much about the overall destruction of the war, while this one was more personal and individual.

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

#253 Love and Hydrogen- Jim Shepard

#253 Love and Hydrogen- Jim Shepard

Gnuss and Meinert are maintenance workers aboard the Hindenburg Zeppelin in May1937 on its last voyage across the Atlantic. They are young, adventurous and madly in love. Life aboard a Zeppelin is dangerous as they must climb and scurry outside to inspect and make repairs.

“The propellers are twenty feet long. When the men are down on their hands and knees adjusting the vibration dampers, those props are a foot and a half away. The sound is like God losing his temper, kettledrums in the sinuses, fists in the face.”

“They’ve taken chances as if cultivating a death wish.” This statement could be for them selves and their chosen profession, their forbidden love which would get them fired and worse, or it could be a statement about The Hindenburg endeavor itself.

But life is short, and as life passes, and dreams are sought, you may ask yourself: “How much happiness is someone entitled to?”

Notable Passage: "Life, motion, everything was untrammeled and without limitation pathless ours."

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

#252 The Hunter- Dashiell Hammett

#252 The Hunter- Dashiell Hammett

Hammett, of course, is the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. This collection is a compendium of his previously uncollected short works.  Most of them are not the crime stories that he became famous for. The Hunter however, is such a work, it’s a detective mystery, of the hard-boiled variety—I’ve never been sure exactly what hard-boiled meant in a detective story, but here you have it.

According to the introduction, Fred Vitt is particularly hard-boiled and is on the case of a check forger and narrows it down to a business owner or his bookkeeper. He settles on the book keeper, but gets stonewalled: “That was better. Againts antagonism he could make progress.”

He puts on the hard press and gets his confession. Another good day’s work. The life of a private detective can be a hard, thankless life.

“But he liked its irregular variety, the assurances of his own cleverness that come frequently to any but the most uniformly successless of detectives, and the occasional full-tilt chase after a fleeting someone who was…a scoundrel of one sort or another. Too, a detective has a certain prestige in some social divisions, a matter in no way equalized by his lack of any standing at all in others.”

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

#251 Tenderfoot- Edith Perlman

#251 Tenderfoot- Edith Perlman

A new day, a new author, a new collection of short stories. This is the first offerings of Perlman’s latest, Honeydew. It is a pretty quiet piece, understated and muted, even if the themes run deep.

Paige runs a pedicure salon on main street. She lost her husband to the Iraq war. He was sterile, but they were happy. Across the street lives Bobby, he is an art teacher and has a bit of a crush on Paige.

“His turret was still bright. She new that he spied on her from its oblong window. She had seen him plain, doing it at twilight; she had seen him at night , when the mild light from the streetlamps entered…She’d sympathized with his aloneness; she’d considered it promising. Now—she knew that he was not alone.”

His wife had recently left him because of a moral dispute about helping highway crash victims, but just when he was making his move on Paige, she returned. Mistakes, fate, timing and regret, time moves on…let it.

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