Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

I didn't read this collection specifically for this challenge, but it's so awesome that I had to cross-post my review here. :)

I just finished reading J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, and that man could write! Each story evokes a post WWII world where everyone smoked, parents weren't terribly concerned about what their children were doing every minute of every day, people wore their racism on their sleeves, and some of the soldiers who came home weren't quite right anymore. The first story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is probably the most famous; I was planning on writing why I loved it so, but it turns out that Mariel decided to do that today as well! So I'll talk about some of my other favourites. My absolute favourite, even over "Bananafish," was "For Esme-With Love and Squalor." In it, an American GI training in Dover wanders around the town one day and meets thirteen-year-old Esme. Esme is rather what I imagine Anne Shirley would be like if she had been born to a titled British family. She loves big words, and the way Salinger captures her voice is simply magical. The GI is in a cafe when Esme, her little brother, and her nurse come in. Obviously, Esme comes over to talk:

The next thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with enviable poise, beside my table. She was wearing a tartan dress-a Campbell tartan, I believe. It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress for a very young girl to be wearing on a rainy, rainy day. "I thought Americans despied tea," she said.
It wasn't the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she'd care to join me.
"Thank you," she said. "Perhaps for just one fraction of a moment."

The narrator himself was really neat too: he's a writer and a reader, and I think we'd all identify with his priorities:

By three in the afternoon, I'd packed all my belongings into my barrack bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I'd brought over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I'd slipped through a porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the enemy ever did use gas I'd never get the damn thing on in time).

They have a wonderful conversation, and when Esme learns that the narrator is a short story writer, she asks him to write a story for her that's full of squalor ("I'd be extremely flattered if you'd write a story exclusively for me some time. I'm an avid writer.") The second half of the story is the narrator's short story for Esme, but it's still based on the narrator's experiences. I don't want to give away anymore (but I promise it doesn't have an abrupt, depressing ending like some of Salinger's other stories), but it's one of my favourite short stories ever (I really long for a whole novel about Esme). And you can read the whole thing here. Go do it.

Have you read it? Now do you understand my passion? Ok, so we'll go on to a couple of my other favourites. "Down at the Dinghy" focuses on an afternoon at a beach house. It begins with two women talking, but the focus quickly shifts to a young mother:

The swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost hipless girl of twenty-five with styleless, colorless, brittle hair pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was-in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces-a stunning and final girl.

I love how Salinger describes his characters. The heart of the story is a conversation between Boo Boo and her four-year-old son, who has an odd habit of trying to run away. He's just done it again, and he refuses to come out of the familys dinghy, so Boo Boo tries to find out why. Unlike most of Salinger's mothers, she's just wonderful, and I loved watching her interact with her son. In looking up a link to the full story (you can read it here), I learned this is part of Salinger's Glass series. I really need to read Franny and Zooey, even if Boo Boo doesn't play a big part.

This is becoming a long post, and those were my two favourites, so I think I'll leave it at that. I'd highly recommend this collection to everyone: Salinger perfectly captures children and teenagers (I think I understand now why Catcher in the Rye is so popular) and the psychological devestation of war. The stories are quite varied, dealing with everything from a little boy who is something of a guru and believes in reincarnation ("Teddy") to a husband at his wit's end about his wife's roving eye ("Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes") to a teenager convinced by his years in Paris that he is the Next Big Thing in art ("De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"). They're all united in their powerful endings (a very important feature for me in a short story) and distinct voices.

"The Barrow" and "Conversations at Night"

In Orsinian Tales (which isn't sci-fi, despite being written by Ursula LeGuin), LeGuin has created a fictional Eastern European country (Orsinia), and then written stories about its inhabitants at various times in history. The year the story takes place isn't revealed until the very end, which is interesting. So far, it's ranged from 1150 to 1960. Le Guin really captures that kind of old forest, secretive feel that I think we all associate with Eastern Europe, as well as the danger of Communist times when appropriate. I'm about half way through, and some of the stories are certainly better than others. So far, my two favourites are "The Barrow" and "Conversations at Night."

"The Barrow" takes place in 1150, and it just feels so medieval. It looks at the conflict between Christianity and paganism, and specifically focuses on a chief in the region. His wife has been in labor with their firstborn for a very long time, and he's getting nervous. But what can he do to help? He already has a midwife, and he's not even allowed into the room (since this is women's business). Meanwhile, he's hosting a traveling priest as a guest, and the priest sees everything in black and white, or in his case Christian or heathen. Through fireside conversations, the chief and his men argue with the priest, all the while trying to ignore screams from the women's quarters. It's pretty short, at twelve pages, but the atmosphere is just perfect.

My other favourite, "Conversations at Night" moves up into 1920. It looks mainly at Sanzo, a strong young man who had a bright future until a war wound blinded him, and Lisha, his neighbour who begins reading aloud to him in the afternoons. As their relationship deepens, they have to face all the problems that come along with Sanzo's blindness. I liked this one because the characters, and how they interact with each other, rang true. Both Sanzo and Lisha have families, which resulted in lots of minor characters that were fun to watch. This one is also much longer, almost forty pages, which gives it more resonance.

The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk

This week, I read a stunning short story collection: Katherine Shonk’s The Red Passport. All eight stories are set in the post-Soviet Union, the majority in Russia, but one in Ukraine. The stories themselves all feature an intersection between Americans and Russians/Ukrainians, but the view points differ. Shonk spent a year in Moscow in 1995, and her familiarity with the culture shows. I felt as if I was back there much of the time, and when I finished the book I was left with a deep longing for Krasnodar and my host family there. While I enjoyed all the stories, my favourites were “Our American,” “My Mother’s Garden,” and “Honey Month.”

In “Our American,” thirteen-year-old Ilya is trying to figure out why his brother Sasha, just home from the Chechen war, has changed so much. Then a young American-Amy-moves in next door; it turns out she has Russian heritage and has a year-long job with a collective farm outside Moscow. Sasha begins working as Amy’s driver, and soon Sasha, Ilya, and Amy have become close friends. But when this close friendship leads to dangerous dreams, things get out of hand. I love how Amy’s introduced:

That evening, as they finished dinner on their balcony, the American girl burst onto Elmira Petrovna’s, the sude hood of a forest-green dublyonka coat shrouding her face. She stood sniffling and blowing her nose. When Sasha coughed, she whirled around and lowered her hood. Her pink nose and cheeks emerged as if from a pool of water, the sun’s last years flaring in her dark curls. “Hi,” she said, burshing dampness from her lashes. “I’m Amy.”

Shonk is so good at showing the fundamental differences between Americans and Russians, it’s so impressive!

“My Mother’s Garden” takes place in Ukraine, in an area of extreme radiation contamination. The main character is a grown woman, with a twelve-year-old daughter and a very stubborn mother. The mother’s moved back to their home village, despite the levels of radiation, which spurs most of the conflict. The main character hates having to go back to sucha toxic place, but doesn’t want to leave her mother alone. On the other hand, she categorically forbids her daughter from coming with her, despite her mother’s incessant pleas to see her granddaughter. Americans barely play a role in this story, although this is an American scientist, which is an interesting exploration of the effects on regular people of Chernobyl.

Finally, the last story in the collection is “Honey Month.” The main character is Rachel, an American who has been living in Moscow for the last year with Jack her boyfriend/fiance who’s conducting research there. They’ve planned a honeymoon to Prague, and yet circumstances make Rachel wonder about her relationship. If I say much more, I’ll give away most of the story; but I connected most with Rachel and her very human insecurities out of all of the collection.

Yegor’s eyes narrowed. “What are you, American?”
Did she really say “Da” with an accent? Or did her assitance betray uniquely American luxuries-an excess of time and naivete? Jack would be mortified if he were here, she thought, and for the first time she felt glad he wasn’t. “Da,” she sighed.

I highly recommend this collection, both for those interested in modern Russian, and those interested in how people confront change.

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom

I just read my first collection for the challenge, and it was beautiful! First off, isn't that cover gorgeous?! Might not be the best one to read on the public bus, though-my mom saw it and got the wrong impression. hehe While these stories definitely aren't erotica, several of them do focus on sexuality, and the myriad forms that it comes in. Most of my reading is heterosexual-centric, so it was refreshing to read a collection that includes trans-gendered and homosexual characters as well! The title story focuses on a mother who, when she realises that her little girl wants to be a boy, decides to go about fulfilling that wish to the best of her abilities. Bloom's prose really creeps up on you; its beauty seems to obscure some of the emotional content until all of a sudden you find yourself laughing and crying along with the characters.

In addition to sexuality, Bloom likes to focus on loss. In "Stars at Elbow and Foot," the main character has just lost her baby; then, in the following story entitled "Hold Tight," we have the reverse of a teenage girl losing her mother. Both of these are exquisitely rendered. Really, the entire collection is about love: maternal love, friendly love, sexual love, and how sometimes they can get all mixed up. In the center are two stories focusing on the same characters-Lionel and Julia. What makes it interesting is that the first story ("Night Vision") is told entirely from Lionel's point of view, so the reader meets the people in his life through his eyes. Then, in "Light Into Dark" we suddenly see Lionel as these others see him, and it's just fascinating to see the differences! Bloom's prose is consistently stunning. Take this passage from "Rowing to Eden," a story about Mai, a middle-aged beauty who's going through treatment for breast cancer, her husband Charley, and her best friend since college (and a lesbian) Ellie

It seems to Mai that even her subconscious has lost its subtlety. Mais is famous for her subtle humour, her subtle beauty, her subtle understanding of the Bronte sisters, of nineteenth-century England, of academic politics and the art of tenure, which she got at thirty. Now she feels as subtle as Oprah and not even as quick.

That's Bloom being delicate; she also knows how to be raw, as in the thoughts of the narrator of "The Story":

The story I began to write would have skewered her, of course. Anyone who knew her would have read it and known it was she and thought badly of her while reading. She would have been embarassed and angry. That really is not what I have in mind. I want her skin like a rug on my floor, warm throat slit, heart still beating behind the newly bricked-up wall.

There isn't really a weak point in this collection; the only thing I wish is that it was longer (it's only eight stories and weighs in at 163 pages). If you love stories that focus on characters and emotions, rather than plot, and if you eat up beautiful writing, you will definitely want to own this book. And if not, well, this book just might change your mind!

Eva's List

I thought I'd start by sharing some awesome short story collections I've read. If I've reviewed them on my blog, I've linked that. :)
Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman: this collection focuses on the same house, located in a small New England fishing town, and the people who live in it through the centuries.
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen: she uses an old-fashioned style to tell these delicious gothic stories; the best two in the collection (imho) were "The Dreamers" and "Supper at Elsinore."
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman: his first short story collection, this contains two of my favourite short stories ever: "Snow, Glass, and Apples" and "A Murder Mystery."
Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie: the format is a Tuesday murder club, where each participant tells a murder story and the others must guess the killer; since Miss Marple is present, one guess on who's always right! ;)
Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt: described as fairy tales for adults, I read this over six years ago and the stories have stuck with me; my favourite was "The Thing in the Woods."
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri: when I read it, I didn't realise it'd won the Pulitzer, but it was well deserved. The characters in all of these stories seem very, very real. If I had to pick one, I'd go with "A Temporary Matter."
A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Butler: this collection (another Pulitzer winner) about Vietnamese immigrants adjusting to America was written by a Vietnamese linguist who served in the war. It's full of humanity and great one-liners, and it introduced me to a culture I know next to nothing about. My favourite was "Mr. Green."
Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel: another collection that focuses on people and their struggles; both "Nashville's Gone to Ashes" and "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep" have stayed with me for a long time.
And, of course, the collection of Chekhov's short stories translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (they're the truest to his style). So simple, yet so good!

Now on to my plans. :) Late last year, I started bookmooching a ton of short story collections in my quest to read more of them (since I always really enjoy short stories when I do read them). I'm taking option four, and I have a pool of books to choose from:

The Lost Stories of Louisa May Alcott
Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Miguel Street by V.S. Naipul
Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields
The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom
Get Down by Asali Solomon
Stained Glass Elegies by Shusaku Endo
Pack of Cards by Penelope Lively
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell