Late Victoria Holocausts by Mike Davis - 2002

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (2002, 470 pages)

Posted in Observation of Indian Independence Day, August 15

If you have any illusions that British rule in India had any positive side,Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis will totally relief you of that opinion.  I recently read a very good history of the Irish famines in which the author said in terms of sheer numbers it was not as bad as the famines in Russia and China in the 20th century but never mentioned  that there was a far worst famine in India famines  in the  1870s in which 60 million people died   I think what shocked me so much in this book was that it exposed the depth to which my view of history has been shaped by historians who see the process of "westerning" the world as progress.

 If I were to divide my five decades plus of near compulsive reading, one decade at least would have been devoted reading history but I was completely stunned by the revelations in this book.    Most people have no knowledge of these famines and those few who do, as Davis shows us, attribute them to bad weather.   Davis explains that very few of the great famines of modern  history were caused by a lack of food. It is caused by the poor not having the means to buy the available food.   (There was plenty of food to feed the Irish but social planners  thought giving out free food would encourage idleness. ).   Indian troops with English officers stood guard in front of huge granneries while millions starved.   Indian land was planted in cotton to be either shipped to the UK or sold in India.   This was part of the cause of the famines.  I know now Gandhi knew this.  Davis explains how El Nino weather patterns worked to limit the rainfall in India, China and Brazil.   He also talks of large scale famine deaths in the Philippines in the 1870s under Spanish rule (I live in the Philippines and have read many books on it history and this not in any of the standard histories..  The old ones were all written by Spanish clerics.)

Davis begins his book with a horrifying description of the famines.  I do not want to get into a "whose famine was worse" contest but my first impression was that that in India was worse than Ireland in terms of human suffering and in terms of the moronic and immoral way the country was administered by the British.   At the height of the famine Lord Lytton, ruler of Indian, and his staff were only concerned with not turning Indians into idlers by giving them free food.   When he did give free food to those in work houses, he gave less than was given in German concentration camps.   The rulers of Indian puppet states were all lackeys of the English and were often worse then them in terms of their indifference to human suffering.

Davis explains how much of the suffering was caused by the transition of India, China and Brazil from small subsistence farmer economies to capitalistic societies.   The famines had large scale social consequences.  The spawned the Boxer rebellion in China and created many religious cults.  Before around 1776 the average Indian peasant lived better than an English or European slum dweller or tenant farmer .   This began to shift as England took more and more of the resources of India.  

Davis expands history to explain how these famines brought in the poverty of the third world and contributed to their stagnation and decline.   Davis in one the most shocking parts of the book explains that from 1759 to 1947 when India was freed the per capita income stayed the same.   Before colonial masters took over, Indian and China had a good record in dealing with famines, better than Europe.   Under British rule in India there was a famine every four year, but in the previous two thousand years there was only one famine a century.

Davis shows how Indian was made to pay for the cost of the British army and when their planners tried to impose European systems of agricultural management the results were disastrous.

Davis backs up everything he says.    I was amazed by how much I did not know but even more amazed by how much of what I though I knew was wrong.    Davis also gave me lots of good reading ideas about Indian history.   He also talks extensively about famines in Africa and Brazil.

This a very serious book which destroys the myths prevalent in western societies about the causes of poverty in the third world.   I am quite sure that many western politicians including recent American presidents and presidential candidates subscribe to the idea that people in the third world are "poorer" than westerners because they are somehow lazy, decadent and in many cases non-Christian.   Davis also explains the terrible way China treated its people during the great leap forward period so he is not just a "left historian".

If you want to understand much of what is going on  the world today, this book is a good place to start.

My great thanks goes out to Max u for providing me with a gift card that allowed me to read this book.

Mike Davis
Named a Macarthur Fellow in 1998, he was also honored for distinguished achievement in nonfiction writing this past fall by the Lannan Literary Foundation. Professor Davis is the author of more than 20 books and more than 100 book chapters and essays in the scholarly and elite popular press. His scholarly interest span urban studies, the built environment, economic history and social movements. Perhaps his best know book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles was named a best book in urban politics by the American Political Science Association and won the Isaac Deutscher Award from the London School of Economics and has been translated into eight languages

Mel u

"The Dredgeman's Revelation" by Karen Russell

"The Dredgeman's Revelation"  by Karen Russell    (2010, 11 pages)

This is my first short story by Karen Russell.  (1981, Miami, Florida, USA)She is the author of a short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (I have not read it but I love the title) while her second book was a novel Swamplandia set in an amusement park in the swamps of the Florida Everglades.   She has won numerous awards.   I know she has a new collection book of short stories being published today, Vampires in the Lemon Grove:  Stories which I predict will get a lot of attention form those in the book blog world who love short stories, as I do.   I was looking through one of the short story anthologies I am in possession of, Twenty Under Forty:   Stories from the New Yorker and I was happy to find a story by Russell included.   The anthology is a collection short stories by authors under forty that the editor, Deborah Treisman feels show great promise.  Treisman has been a fiction editor for The New Yorker for 15 years so she is in a position of significant influence in the contemporary short story world.    The New Yorker has done more to advance the art of the short story than any other publication in at least the last 100 years and maybe ever.   It helped lots of Irish short story writers.   Some say it has also shaped the modern short story as people write works hoping their top paying editors will like.

"The Dredgeman's Revelation" is set in the Florida Everglades in the early 1930s.   The United States was in the grips of a terrible depression, much worse than the economic issues it has suffered in the last decade.  The story opens with the birth of Louis Thanksgiving in a New York City charity hospital.    His unwed mother whose name the hospital did not know named him Louis after his mother died.   He was sent to a foundlings home.   Along with other babies he was advertised as up for adoption and they were then put on a train to the middle west of the USA where he was adopted by a farmer who used him as a slave.  He ran away at 16.   The skipped around the country looking for work and he ended up in south Florida.  He got a job working on a crew that was draining parts of the Everglades for development.  Conditions were terrible, food was horrible and the work was dangerous but Louis did not mind as he had never known anything better.  The men on the crew were the closest to friends or family he ever had.      

Russell does a very good job of letting us see what life was like for the Dredgemen, as the workers were called.  Florida in the early 1930s was not  Miami Glitz and Disney world.  It was a very different world than most think of now and I really liked how Russell this story helps us understand just how hard life was for the people in those times.

"Florida, in those days, was a very odd place: a peninsula where the sky itself rode overland like a blue locomotive, clouds chuffing across marshes; where orange trees and orderly rows of vegetables gave way to deep woods and then, farther south, broke into an endless acreage of ten-foot grass. This, finally, was the vision that reached Louis through the boxcar door: a prairie that looked as vast as the African savanna."

Am amazing surreal event takes place at the end of the story.    It involves elements of Magic Realism and it is really powerful.

I enjoyed this story and will await curiously to see how her new collection is received.

"Water Child" by Edwidge Danticat Project 196 Haiti

"Water Child" by Edwidge Danticat (2000, 11 pages)

Project 196

Country 6 of 196

Haiti

Edwidge Danticat

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti

f you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.  

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.

I also want, and maybe this is crazy, to publish a short story, over the next 196 weeks from a writer in each 196 countries. 

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world.   The population is about ten million.  The official language is French with Haitian creole being the most commonly spoken language.  Almost all of the population are descendants of slaves imported to work the sugar plantations.  It has been an independent country since 1804 but for long periods was under the domination of the United States.

Like our writer from Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat is an immigrant who made her writing name and fortune in New York City with the aid of The New Yorker.  Born in 1969 in Purt au Prince, Haiti.   Her initial schooling was in French though she spoke Creole at home.   She along with her mother moved to New York City when she was twelve  her father had already been there for ten years.   As a teenager she felt alone in her new environment so she turned to reading and then writing as her escape.  In her late teens she began to get stories accepted for publication.  She graduated from the elite Bernard's College with a major in French.   She has gone on to win many awards for her books.   Her novel, Breath, Eye, Memory about a 12 year old girl who moves from a very small town in Haiti to New York City was an Oprah Book Club selection.

"Water Child", originally published in The New Yorker and reprinted in one of their anthologies, is the first work by Danticat I have read.   It is about a nurse who moved  from Haiti to New York City decades ago.    In away it is another story about the immigrant experience and is a very good exemplar of that, but it is on a deeper level a story about failures to communicate with others and more importantly with yourself.   She sends half of her income home to her parents in Haiti.  The letter opens with a very moving letter from her mother.  The nurse used to call her parents every week but she has not called in three months and they are worried.   Her mother express thanks for the very badly needed money, tells her that her dad is in poor health, as is normal, and ask her if she has a man in her life.   These letters are the nurse's life line but they somehow also torture her   She is very aloof and standoffish at the hospital, having and wanting no friends there.   Her ward at the hospital deals with a lot of people who have to have their voice boxes removed and she tries to help them with the trauma of never being able to speak again.  

At first she seems to lead a simple, very unselfish and lonely life.  Her apartment is full of books.   Then we find she has had an affair with a married man, also, a Haitian immigrant.   Here we see the woman does not understand the basics of her own life and/or she has a very selfish side as she wants to tell the wife of the man about their relationship while the man seems to want to be shed of her.   We don't know if she wants to do this to hurt the man and his wife or if she does not see the man is no doubt just using her for sex.

"Water Child" shows a lot of psychological depth and is beautifully written.  For sure I hope to read more of her work in the future.

Mel u

"Girl" by Jamaica Kindcaid Project 196 Atigua and Barbuda

"Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid (1978, 3 pages)

\Project 196

Country 5 of 196

Antigua and Barbuda

Jamaica Kincaid

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 

f you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.

I also want, and maybe this is crazy, to publish a short story, over the next 196 weeks from a writer in each 196 countries. 

If you are a short story author from Antigua and Barbuda, Georgia, Korea, the USA or Canada I would like to publish one of your short stories.  By the time this project ends I expect to have had between ten and twenty million visits so this is a good opportunity to get your work read

Antigua and Barbuda is a two island nation with a population of about 80,000 on the outer edges of the Caribbean Sea.  It obtained independence for the UK in 1981 and the primary language is English.   It population are largely descended from slaves brought from Africa to work the sugar plantations.  

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 in Antigua but it can safely be said The New Yorker brought her to  world attention as a writer.  In 1965 she moved to Westchester, N. Y. to be an au pair or as we say in the Philippines, a yaya.    She then after leaving this position studied photography at The New School for Social Research and began to write short stories based loosely on her own experiences.   Through contacts she made from her writing she ultimately went to work for The New Yorker while frequently publishing short stories in the magazine.    She ended up marrying the son of the editor of The New Yorker.    She has also written some well regarded novels and works of non-fiction.  Her non-fiction work, A Small Place, is considered a very important work of post colonial West India studies.  I hope to read it soon.   Many consider her the most important contemporary female writer from the West Indies.  

I have previously posted on a great short story by Kincaid, "Poor Visitor".

"Girl" is a long outflowing  of advise given by a mother as her daughter is about to start her first job as a live in maid.  The mother gives her a series of admonitions that show how deeply a sense of colonial mentality and slavish manners adopted to get buy has permeated the mind of the mother and her culture.   You can feel the flavor of her mesmerizing motherly monologue in these lines:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap;wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry;
don't walk barehead in the hot sun;
cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil;
soak your little cloths right after you take them off;
when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash;
soak salt fish overnight before you cook it;
is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school ?;
always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach;
on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming;
don't sing benna in Sunday school;
you mustn't speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions;
don't eat fruits on the street - flies will follow you;
but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school;
this is how to sew on a button;
this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on;
this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and to prevent yourself from looking like the slut you are so bent on becoming;

In addition to the stories obvious relevance for colonial studies it tells us a lot about the role of the sexes in Antigua.   



You can read the story here.

I was happy to find a great writer to represent Antigua and Barbuda.

My next Project 196 post will be on Haiti.  

If you have any suggestion for writers form other Caribbean nations, please leave a comment or contact me.

Mel u

"Soldier's Home" by Ernest Hemingway

"Soldier's Home" by Ernest Hemingway (1925, 6 pages)

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

A Reading Life Project

My Prior Posts on Hemingway

"Krebs went to war from a Methodist college in Kansas."

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) is considered one of America's best writers.   He won the Nobel Prize in 1954.   Among his most famous works are  For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.  In the long ago I read most of his major novels but I neglected his short stories.  Now I know that many, including Clifton Fadiman, consider them his greatest legacy.   The total volume of his short stories in under 700 pages, way less than many a novel.   I have decided to read all of them, though I probably will only post on a few of them.   

Hemingway wrote a lot of stories and longer works that deal with war.   "Soldier's Home" is about a man, not as young as he was when he left, back in Kansas after serving in the USA Army during WWI.  It is told in the third person in a minimalist style.   There are only three on stage characters in the story.   Harold Krebs comes home deeply troubled by his war experiences.   This story line maybe a cliche now but I do not think it was in 1925.   He knows he no longer fits in at his parents comfortable home in Kansas and he knows he cannot make his family understand how he has changed.  I think, this is just a guess, that he picked the state of Kansas (near the geographical center of America) as it was considered somehow a bland place of simple values and people.   As in the famous line from The Wizard of Oz, "Toto, I think we are not in Kansas anymore".   We also have his deeply religious mother who wants him to find a job and a girlfriend who will become a wife so he can "settle back in as the other fellows are".   Herbert's younger sister who worships him is also in the story and he tries to relate to her to help him feel the innocence that is lost to him forever.

This is a very good story.   

The story is not yet in the public domain  but it can be read online (I read it in the collection) here.

Often teachers will place copy written stories online for their classes not realizing anyone can find it.  

I read this story as part of my participation in The War Through the Generations WWI Reading Challenge

Do you have a favorite Hemingway short story?

Mel u

John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk  (2012, 416 pages)


John Saturnall's Feast is  Lawrence Norfolk's (1963, UK) newest historical novel.  A. S. Byatt has said he is "the best of the young novelists writing today".   He has three earlier novels, all got great reviews and sound really interesting.   Based on this work, I hope to read through his works in publication order.  

This novel is the story of a young boy, whose mother was considered a witch and whose father was never known, who went from being a kitchen boy in a great house in seventeenth century England to being regarded as the greatest cook in England, selected to cook for the king.  The novel does a wonderful job of taking us inside the kitchen.   Everybody had their roles and the kitchen masters ruled with an iron hand.   We experience the kitchen from the point of view of a young boy who sees finding a place there as his way to stay alive on up to his days as a great cook.      We follow his career as he rises up.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this novel was the lush and highly detailed descriptions of the cooking procedures and the luscious food.   No concerns about cholesterol here.

The novel is set in the times of the English Civil War (it covers a lot of years).   There is also a romance between John and a noble daughter of the house which, as you could guess, is a rocky one.   She is being forced into a marriage with a man who hates her as a condition for receiving a large bequest.

There are big moments, when the king is there for a feast, when Cromwell's men take over the castle and when we end up seeing them hung when Cromwell is defeated.   We go into battle with the cooks from the big house.  I laughed when one of them told the others not to worry we always get put in the back lines as who will feed them if something happens to us.  

I really enjoyed reading this book.   I thought the only weak spot was in the romance between the cook, John and the young noblewoman.

I will, I hope, soon read his first novel, The Pope's Rhinoceros, set in the 16th century.  It sounds fascinating.

I recommend John Saturnall's Feast to anyone who likes a very well written literary historical novel set in England in the 17th century.

Please share your experience with Lawrence Norfolk with us.   Besides Hilary Mantell, what historical novelists do you like?

Mel u

"Several Garlic Tales" by Donald Barthelme

"Several Garlic Tales" by Donald Barthelme (1966, 9 pages)

Donald Barthelme 

1931 to 1989 USA

Donald Barthelme was a very prolific very highly regarded short story writer with 100s of published works.   In addition to being a writer he was also a reporter, a curator of an art museum and worked as a visiting professor of creative writing at several universities.   I am currently reading some of the short stories in a brand new anthology Object Lessons:   The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story and I was excited to see a story by Barthelem in the collection.  

It is not terribly easy to see fully what is happening in this story.   It seems to be about a wealthy man, perhaps in the movie business, travelling the world in the company of his Japanese girlfriend.   As the story opens Amelia and Paul (I wonder why the Japanese girlfriend has been given a very English name-is it not her real name-is this story orientalizing her?  Her nickname is "Yum-Yum") are looking at some travel pics of Denmark (this was in the day when people saved their pictures in physical albums).   The point of this story, as most postmodern short fiction is in the twists, the language and the images.   I loved it when they went to see one of my favorite Greta Garbo movies, Queen Christina.  (question of the day-is Queen Christina camp?)   We wonder why Paul wanted Yum-Yum to wear white rubber pajamas.   Is the world a toy for Paul as is perhaps Yum-Yum.  

This is a very interesting story.   The language is magical and the images and scenes evoked are fascinating.

I hope to read more of the author's work one day.

Mel u

The Reading Life

"Ten Stories from Flaubert" by Lydia Davis

"Ten Stories from Flaubert" by Lydia Davis  (2010, 10 pages)

Lydia Davis

"Later I heard that after this exhibition of savages, their manager abandoned them."

I have wanted to read a short story by Lydia Davis (1947, USA)  for sometime.  Davis is known for her short stories and her translations of  Madame Bovary and Swann's Way.   I was very glad to see one of her short stories included in Object Lessons-The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story.   All of the stories have previously been published in The Paris Review and each story is introduced by a short story writer who has also been published in The Paris Review.   "Ten Stories from Flaubert" is introduced by Ali Smith, author of numerous novels, plays and short stories.  

Davis is known for the extreme compression and precision of her short stories.   Many of her stories are just a few lines and some just a sentence.     Given that, a ten page short story by Davis is almost like a 100 page  work by most writers.  All of the stories in "Ten Stories from Flaubert" read as if they were translations from letters or journals by Flaubert, and in most of our cases including mine, how would one  know the difference.    I will reveal enough about the stories to give you a feel for them.  

"The Cook's Lesson" is that she does not know that France is no longer a kingdom but is now a republic even though there has been no king for five years.  She says the fact that there is no longer a king simply "does not interest her in the least-those were her words.    And I think of myself as an intelligent man!  But compared to her I am an imbecile."

"Pouchet's Wife" lets us in just a few sentences feel the terrible pain of a man whose beloved wife has passed.  He was a doctor and his wife, a pretty Englishwoman, helped draw him out and makes him seem more human.   The narrator says he has been told that he does not have much compassion for people, common complaint about Madame Bovary was that it looks at its characters almost like they were insects.

There is a story about a man who hates the tapeworm in his stomach so much he decides to kill it by killing himself.   There is a very interesting story about the fate of tribal people from a very primitive area brought to Paris for a show of some kind and then abandoned. 

"Ten Stories from Flaubert:" is a brilliant story and helped me understand Flaubert just a little better.   In fact this morning I completed my second reading of A Sentimental Education and will post on it soon.  A few of the short stories of Davis can be found online.   I see myself buying her collection of short stories once it is available as a Kindle.  

"I knew Flaubert, Turgenev and de Maupassant"
Carmilla

Mel u

"Funes, the Memorious" by Juan Luis Borges

"Funes, the Memorious" by Juan Luis Borges  (1968, 8 pages, translated by James Irby)

Juan Luis Borges (1899 to 1986-Argentina) is best known for his fables and short stories as well as his essays.   He is one of the dominant figures in Latin  American literature.   I was very happy to see that included in Object Lessons:  The Paris Review Presents Art of  the Short Story edited by Lorin and Sadie Stein, 2012, was a short story by Borges.   I have read his work before but it has been several decades.   Each of the stories in the collection has a brief introduction by a well established short story writer.  Borges' story is introduced by Aleksandar Hemon, author of three short story collections and The Lazarus Project, a 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Set in the middle of the 19th century in Buenos Aires, the story centers on a man with incredible mental capacities, a man who wants to know everything.    There are strong connections for many people, myself included, between a compulsive love (that is the wrong word but will let it go for now) for the reading life and a compulsion to know as much as you possibly can.  As illustrated in the story, these compulsions are at least as isolating as they are connecting.

As Hemnon says in his great introduction, the work of Borges "belongs to the tradition of literature with cosmic ambition:  the Bible, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses..works that strive to convey complete universes, containing everything".   In order for this to work, human language has to be able to articulate all  knowledge.   The vision in this story and the other works in the tradition us that you cannot really conceptualize humanity without literature.

Funes, the central character in the novel cannot forget anything.  He can pull up the number of leaves on a tree he saw 25 years ago.   The story focuses on the attempt of the narrator of the story to tell of the life if Funes, a near impossible task as his very project transcends human limitation.  This is a beautiful fable.   It has a lot to tell us about the reading life.

Mel u
The Reading Life

"The Hitch-Hikers" by Eudora Welty

"The Hitch-Hikers" by Eudora Welty

The Short Story Initiative for October

Crime Stories

A Simple Clockwork 

My Prior Posts on Eudora Welty

"Toward Evening, somewhere in the middle of the Delta, he slowed down to pick up two hitch-hikers".

A Simple Clockwork, my collaborator in The Short Stories of the Philippines Project, is holding a yearlong event  devoted to the short story.   Every month she offers us a  different theme.   This month it is crime stories and in November the focus will be on short stories from India.  (You can find more data on her blog and learn how to participate.   Last month we had short story enthusiasts from all over the world join in.)

One of my several reading projects is The Collected  Short Stories of Eudora Welty.   I intend to read all of them, maybe it will take a month or maybe years, and post on some of them.   For me personally it is too time consuming to post on all of the stories.   I was originally not planning to post on "The Hitch-Hikers" until I realized it was a perfect Southern Gothic style crime story which would allow me to participate in Nancy's event.   (You can find some background information on Welty in my prior posts on her work)

One of the words of received wisdom in the American South is "never pick up hitch-hikers".  ( "Hitch-Hiker" is American slang for a person who solicits a ride from a stranger by standing on the side of the road with their thumb stuck out.).   Hitch-Hikers were considered to likely be escaped convicts and such and female hitch-hikers were looked upon as likely prostitutes.   These parental warnings did not always sink in as we learn in this great story.

Tom Harris, a thirty year old travelling salesman (travelling salesmen are big in the short stories of the American South) picks up two men by the side of the road, one with a guitar case.  The car is crowded in the back with his supplies so they all have to sit in the front seat.  The one with the guitar starts to sing.  They begin to talk.   Mississippi in the late 1930s was in the midst of a horrible economic time so tramps were common.    They stop to get some food, the tramps are his company, and he buys them some lunch and beer when they stop at a roadside place, also a brothel.  The guitar player begins to sing.  There is a huge amount in this story.   I think I can tell the conclusion without spoiling the story but if you do not want to know the end stop here.

The tramp that does not have the guitar murders the one that does by bashing his head in with the guitar case.  He reveals they had intended to steal the car also.   The killing was motivated by feeling that one tramp thought because he had a guitar he was better than the  other.    The biggest quandary at the end of the story is who will get the guitar now that the owner is dead and the other man is headed for prison or a death sentence.

Please share with us your favorite Welty story and consider joining in for The Short Story Initiative  for October, focusing on Crime stories.

Mel u
The Reading Life

"Axis" by Alice Munro

"Axis" by Alice Munro (2011)

The Best American Short Stories 2012

A Reading Life Project

Alice Munro
1931
Ontario, Canada

I have three "Best of 2012" short story anthologies, one devoted to British Short Stories, one to European Fiction and The Best of American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta.   It is my hope to finish these three collections by the end of the year    I will  keep a running best of the best contest in which I list the top five from each collection and the top ten overall.   There are about seventy stories in these collections so I hope to get a bit of a sense of the contemporary short story from this project and read some great stories in the process.   I will only be posting on a small percent of the stories as it will often take me as long or longer to write a post on a story as to read another one.    In order to be eligible for inclusion in the collection a writer must be either an American or a Canadian (or have taken up long term residence) and their story must have been published in an American or Canadian journal.

Top Five Stories So Far (with only four read-in random order)
1.  "Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka
2.  "Axis" by Alice Munro
3.  "The Last Speaker of the Language" by Carol Anshaw (no post)
4.  "Miracle Polish" by Steven Millhauser (no post)

I think a lot of people were hoping either Alice Munro or William Trevor was going to get the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature. I certainly was.    Many of the short story writers I have been in contact with in the last two years have said they greatly admire the work of Alice Munro.   Buried in Print, one of the best of book blogs, is doing a read through of all of Munro's stories.   I have only read and posted on only one of her short stories, "Runaway" so I was very glad to find one of her stories included in The Best of American Short Stories 2012.

This story is set in rural Ontario, just like most of her other stories.   Munro is known for covering many years of characters lives in her stories.   That is just what she does in "Axis".   Reading this story I cannot help but wonder how influenced her work is by the extreme cold of the Canadian winter during which just going outside without heavy clothing can kill you.  It also essentially traps most people inside in small quarters often heated to an uncomfortable degree. People say escaping from a trap is one of the common threads found in many of her short stories.

"Axis" introduces us to two Canadian college women, good friends.   They are on the bus taking them back to their rural homes.   They carry serious books with them like The Medieval World, Montcalm and Wolfe, and The Jesuit Relations, so their families can see they are serious students.   They will most likely end up as high school students.   To their families, they are farm girls.  Of course the big event in the life of college women is "the first big romance".   In one great scene, the mother of one of the women walks in on her daughter and her boyfriend naked in bed.  Any parent can relate to the horror of this.  (We have three three teenage daughters)   It was a very ugly scene and the man fled the house never to be seen again.  The other woman ends up marrying and having six children with her first boyfriend.  

As the story closes, Munro flashes us decades forward to an accidental encounter between the man who ran away and the other woman.   This is where the brilliance of Munro shows through.

"My Life Would Make a Great Movie,
Mr Le Fanu left out the best parts"
Carmilla

"Axis" is a great short story and I really hope to read a lot more of her stories.  

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka

"Diem Perdidi" by Julia Otsuka  (2012)

I have three "Best of 2012" short story anthologies, one devoted to British Short Stories, one to European Fiction and The Best of American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta.   It is my hope to finish these three collections by the end of the year    I will  keep a running best of the best contest in which I list the top five from each collection and the top ten overall.   There are about seventy stories in these collections so I hope to get a bit of a sense of the contemporary short story from this project and read some great stories in the process.   I will only be posting on a small percent of the stories as it will often take me as long or longer to write a post on a story as to read another one.

Top Five Stories So Far (with only two read)
1.  "Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka
2.  "The Last Speaker of the Language" by Carol Anshaw (no post)

I was very happy to see a story of JulieOtsuka included in the collection.   Her debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, based on the lives of her parents, was set in Japanese American intern camps during World War Two.   It has received numerous awards and been greatly lauded in the book blog world.  Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, has also been very well received.

In the notes from Otsuka she says that "Diem Perdidi" was inspired by her observation of her mother's    extreme mental decline brought on by the failure of her memory.  "Diem Perdidi" is told in a very creative fashion.  It has almost none of the textbook elements of a short story.   Here is how it starts out and it basically goes on like this for the whole story.   "She remembers her name.  She remembers the name of the president.  She remember the name of the president's dog.   She remembers what city she lived in".   All of the story is told in sentences that begins in "She remembers".   Otsuka allows us to see the great love the daughter has for her mother and we reconstruct the wonderful person the mother was from the daughter's impressions of what she thinks her mother recalls.

"Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka is a very good very moving story that show great depth of feeling.

You can read more about Otsuka and her work on her webpage

Please share your experience with Otsuka or any of the various best short story anthologies with us.

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"All I Know About Gertrude Stein" by Jeanette Winterson

"All I Know About Gertrude Stein" by Jeanette Winterson  (2011)

I have recently begun to read through The Best British Short Stories 2012.  There are twenty stories in the collection, edited by Nicholas Royle.  I plan to read all the stories in the collection and post on some of them.   (Not posting on a story is not always a sign I did not like it that much, though it might be, it just is a question of time as it takes me just as long to write a post on a short story as it might to read one!)   I will keep a tab of my "fab five" (in no order), just for the fun of it.  I also have two anthologies of best  American short stories and  Best British Short Stories 2011 and I think  I will stage a transatlantic battle.   (So far the UK stories are a good bit better but I am just getting started.)







Top stories (in random order) Reading Life Best of British Short Stories for 2012-
1.  "iAnna" by Will Self
2. "The Heart of Dennis Noble" by Alison Macleod"
3.  "I Arrive First" by  Emma Jane Unsworth
4.  "All I Know About Gertrude Stein" by Jeanette Winterson
5.  "An Appointment with Mr. Hemingway" by Jonathan Trigell (a very good story on which I did not post.)

I have also read and will not be posting on stories by HP Tinker and Robert Shearman.  

I was very happy to see a short story by Jeanette Winterson included in Best British Short Stories 2012.  A quick glance at the author biographies included in the collection reveals she is the most distinguished of the contributors to the anthology.    She is most famous for her first novel,  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which I posted on sometime ago.   I also read and greatly enjoyed her very creative novel, Powerpoint.  

"All I Know About Gertrude Stein" is a very creatively designed story that draws you in from the start.   It is a story about two women, both on journeys motivated by love.  It starts out with Alice B. Toklas in 1907 who has just arrived in Paris to meet a woman who will become her lifetime love and partner, the famous author,  Gertrude Stein.  The story after the opening paragraph takes us to 2011 and we are on the Eurostar traveling with a woman from London, Louise, also on her way to Paris.  "Louise was traveling alone because she was trying to understand something about love."   Much like the relationship of Alice B. Toklas to Stein, Louise's lover was a much more important person than she was, Louise is defined as the love interest of  a greater in the eyes of the world person.

We learn  good bit about the facts of the life of Toklas and Stein in this wonderful story, it flips back and forth between Louise and them.   Louise's segment is devoted a lot to her reflections on the nature of love.   The thoughts are wonderful and will make you think about your relationships, present, past or hoped for one day.  

Please share your experience with Winterson with us.  

My thanks to Max u for giving me a gift card that allowed me to read and post on this story.


Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"I Arrive First" by Emma Jane Unsworth

"I Arrive First" by Emma Jane Unsworth (2011)

I have recently begun to read through The Best British Short Stories 2012.  There are twenty stories in the collection, edited by Nicholas Royle.  I plan to read all the stories in the collection and post on some of them.   (Not posting on a story is not always a sign I did not like it that much, though it might be, it just is a question of time as it takes me just as long to write a post on a short story as it might to read one!)   I will keep a tab of my "fab five" (in no order), just for the fun of it.  I also have two anthologies of best  American short stories and  Best British Short Stories 2011 and I think  I will stage a transatlantic battle.   (So far the UK stories are a good bit better but I am just getting started.)

Top Five (in random order) Reading Life Best of British Short Stories for 2012-
1.  "iAnna" by Will Self
2. "The Heart of Dennis Noble" by Alison Macleod"
3.  "I Arrive First" by  Emma Jane Unsworth
more to come (I hope!)

Bio from the blog of the author

My name is Emma Jane Unsworth and I live in Manchester, England. My short fiction has been published in various places including The Best British Short Stories 2012 (Salt). I am a columnist for The Big Issue in the North.

My first novel Hungry, the Stars and Everything was published by The Hidden Gem Press in 2011 and won a Betty Trask Award.

"I Arrive First" is a romance fantasy for library lovers.  Reading this story once again made me thing of the great hole in the culture of the giant megacity of 20 million I live in brought about by the lack of public libraries.   One thing libraries are said to be is a very good, hopefully safe for book lovers, often typed cast as shy and romantically backward to meet each other.  This is sort of what Unsworth brilliant and heartwarming story is about.  But it is much more than that, it is about the closing of a loved library and about a life imagined or projected through the titles of books and their beloved content.  I will tell just a bit of the plot of this marvelous totally enjoyable story as I do not want to spoil it for potential readers.  

A young, perhaps college age woman and man have been making eye contact for a good while in a library.  They each feel a strong attraction, or at least the woman narrator of the story feels it is mutual.   They communicate through leaving a carefully selected book title, on a table in the library, that is meant to express their as yet unspoken feelings for each other.   This has been going on for a month now.    She first noticed the man when he was sitting at his library table and he left, facing away from him so others could see it, a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.   She sees this as an obvious cry for help.  As I read the story I began to wonder how much of this byplay in real and how much the fantasy of the young woman.  She tells the man her name without speaking to him by making sure he sees a copy of Rebecca.  She is in a state of panic as the library will be closed soon and she wants to make real life, or does she, contact with the man.  She sees him what a copy of After You'd Gone and sees it as direct message from him.  They go back and forth with book titles, maybe the man is also interested.   The interaction goes on and on, fired up by the closing of the library.   I will leave the rest of the story untold so as not to spoil it for potential readers.

"I Arrive First" is a very smart story, it leaves you wondering if this is just the woman's projections or if it is real.  It is also an account of how any communication from a possible lover is fraught with meaning.  Anyone who has ever fancied a stranger in a library will relate to this story well.  I greatly enjoyed read this wonderful story and hope to read more of the work of Unworth one day.


You can learn more about her work from her blog, fall and fall again.

I owe my thanks to Max u for giving me an Amazon gift card that made reading and posting on this story possible.


Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"Housewife" by Ismat Chugati Banned Books Week Day Five

"Housewife" by Ismat Chugati (1951)

Banned Books Week-2013

September 30 to October 6

Day Five

1915 to 1991

Mumbai, India
Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent
A Reading Life Project

Prior Posts on Banned Books Week

Today is the last day of Banned Books Week, now in its 30th year.    This was my first year observing Banned Books Week, a world wide event initiated by the American Library Association.   As one might expect, it is a very America centered event with most participants talking only about American books that were banned in the USA for reasons of prudery, racism and political correctness.   I am observing the week by posting five guests posts, courtesy of Open Road Media, from distinguished authors talking about Banned Books.  In addition to this I have posted this week on a short story by two writers whose works were banned for  long periods, Franz Kafka and Zora Hurston.  Today I will post briefly about a story by Ismat Chughtai, one of the foremost 20st century Urdu short story writers.  Her work was banned for a long time in India, Pakistan and in Islamic theocracies (and probably still is) as too radical in its treatment of women and for its open treatment of sexuality.  The stories seem like the mildest of works now to me but that her stories once were so controversial shows the changing of the times.   She was considered a great champion of the rights of women, which is probably what got her in trouble!

Her most famous story by far is "The Quilt" (there is some background information on her in my post on this story) which has very deeply veiled reference to a lesbian relationship, something punishable my death under Islamic law.  (She was a Muslim but she stayed in India after the 1947 partition.)    Of the two stories of Chugati, I found "Housewife" the more interesting.   The story is set among ordinary people in Mumbai.  (I have an attraction to stories and novels about Mumbai/Bombay as I have many wonderful readers who live there).    There are two central characters, Mirza who owns a small shop and his maid, who becomes his wife, Lajo.   I wonder how many millions of women in India had life histories like this:

"Lajo was an orphan.  She was abandoned on the streets by unknown parents.  She lived by begging and snatching a living from garbage until she grew into a shapely an attractive woman.  "Youth etched her body into  bewitching curves and this became her only asset   The street intitiated her into the mysteries of life.   She never haggled   If it was not a cash down proposition, it would be sex on credit.  If her lover had no means, she would even  give herself for free".

No one ever taught her any sense of religious morals, she felt no shame at all.  As she aged she became a maid and all of her masters ended up having sex with her, beating her and then throwing her out, maybe for fear their wives would find out or from shame.  She was almost certainly of the Dalit (untouchable caste) and to have sex with her was a source of great blame for those in higher castes.  It is my understanding that it was, and for all I know still is, a common practice for Brahmins to take Dalit women as mistresses or seek them out as prostitutes, maybe this way they avoid bring shame on higher caste women.  Anyway one day Mirzi's friend brings over Lajo and tells him she should hire her as a maid.  He sees her as a "slut from the street" and at first he does not want her in the house but she offers to work for nothing but some food and a place to stay.  It turns out she is a marvelous cook and a great housekeeper and manages the kitchen budget with total honesty.   She is confused that Mirzi does not want to have sex with her, all the other men she has worked for have been very eager for this.   One day Mirzi succumbs, we knew he would!   He really enjoys having Lajo in his house, he likes her food and he relishes her shapely body and the sexual skills life on the streets taught her.   I will tell a bit more of the story as It will be hard, I think, for most people to read this.  Against the advise and strong wishes of his family, his mother is outraged, he marries her. Now she begins to wonder why he never beats her like a husband should.   He does at last beat her and now she feels like she is truly his wife.   Other men she has worked for loaned her out to their friends but Mirzi is very possessive of this and she likes that.  

This story gives us a good look and life in Mumbai.    Under it all, it is a story of caste issues, heartbreaking poverty and a society which throws out female children.  I really liked it alot and I think anyone who reads it will also. I know it sounds wrong to say this, but it was told with a lot of humor.  I read this in a very good anthology of Indian short stories, Best Indian Short Stories, edited and introduced by Khushwant Singh.   You can download a sample of the book from Amazon which will allow you to read the very interesting introduction and see all the stories in the book.  I bought it and I almost never buy any books.

It was translated from Urdu by Fatima Ahmed.

I was able to purchase this book through the generosity of Max u in providing me with an Amazon gift card.

I hope to post again in Banned Books in 2013.

I will be posting on a good number of stories from the anthology by Singh.

If you know the exact publication history of this story, please leave a comment.  My publication date for it is an estimate.  If you know where more of her work can be read online, please let us know

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife