Throughout these five stories, the reader becomes hypnotized by the succession of Bolano’s images, by the lives he depicts (including his own in the two essays which follow), and by the metaphysical suggestions and possible symbols of his stories, despite the fact that Bolano does not make grand pronouncements or create a formal, organized, and ultimately hopeful view of life as other authors do. There is no coherence to our lives, he seems to say: chaos rules. Although artists of all kinds try to make some sense of life, Bolano suggests that their visions may not be accurate since they have no way of knowing or conveying the whole story, the big picture, the inner secrets of life. He himself avoids such suggestions of order in life. Vibrant and imaginative, Bolano’s stories seduce the reader into and coming back to them again and again looking for answers or explanations that often remain tantalizingly out of reach. Two essays at the end are particularly poignant and important for students of Bolano and lovers of literature. “Literature + Illness = Illness,” dedicated to “my friend the hepatologist, Dr. Victor Vargas,” explores the relationship between writing and the illness which would claim Bolano’s life at age fifty, soon after writing this. In “the Myths of Cthulhu,” a wonderful companion essay, he eventually concludes that “Writers today…are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but [instead] products of the middle and wofire eater imagerking classes determined topampas photo scale the Everest of respectability, hungry formara hare2 rpampas photoespectabilitypampas photopampas photo
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Last week, if someone had told me that I’d be able to take only one book of short stories with me on a long trip to a desert island, I’d have looked first at all the powerful and intriguing stories by Andre Dubus II. Then I’d have thought about the stories of John Updike, another favorite story writer, pausing for a long time over the volume which contains “Pigeon Feathers,” one of my favorite stories. Today, however, I’d be gravitating toward this book, completely different from any collection of stories I’ve ever read, a volume containing so much variety and color in its subject matter, so many overlapping themes, such strange and ultimately intriguing characters (who peek in at various points throughout the book and revisit us in new stories throughout), and so much fascinating discussion about the nature of stories and story-writing that I’d probably choose this one for the island trip. The Dubus and Updike collections are among the best in the world, but on my desert island I think I’d want the stimulation, excitement, humor, uniqueness, and, especially, the sense of wonder that are all contained in this one volume.
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Published by Random House of South Africa, this new, complete collection of Alan Paton’s short writings contains two kinds of stories. About half of them are about individual boys under Alan Paton’s care when he was Principal at the Reformatory for African Boys (1935 – 1948)– sensitive and insightful tales about young teenagers at crossroads, often inspired to lead honorable lives but without the ability, always, to make the right choices. The second group fo stories is about people, mostly white, who reflect the ingrained attitudes of apartheid which have permanently affected the attitudes, aspirations, and achievements of the native majority population–and which Paton sometimes despairs of ever changing. Together they show Alan Paton in his most personal, most revealing moments, in which he shows himself and makes statements that he cannot make in his novels, a more rigid form for which “the inexorable rule is that you must put your story first, not your politics or religion or your anger about the Group Areas Act.”
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In this haunting collection of stories about life’s uncertainties, Robert Boswell picks up his characters like mechanical toys and winds them up tight, and just when they are at maximum tension, he twists the key one more turn, guaranteeing that they will unwind noisily, out of control. Virtually all his characters are losers. A woman, having lost her disabled husband, now finds that she has also lost her best friend. A housecleaner has been abandoned by her husband. An attention-seeking motel manager demands that a patron strip search her. A needy young man goes broke while in the thrall of a fortune teller. A priest tries to help a pathetic family by offering a “story to have faith in, even if he cannot entirely believe it.” The characters are just one twist away from the normal, the safe, and the real, feeling instead to be “different,” irrational, sometimes dangerous, and even frightening.
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Memories, and in many cases, the memories of the aged, infuse this collection of fourteen stories with surprises. Author Jane Gardam, two-time winner of the Whitbread Prize, creates ironies and absurdities for her readers, at the same time that she creates poignant and often moving scenes. Filled with wry humor and clever turns of phrase, this collection, like Gardam’s novels, asks questions about whether we are the people we think we are, whether we are the people other people think we are, and whether we are the people we want to be. The secret lives and not so secret lives, the realities and the fantasies, and the faces we keep firmly fixed for the outside world–all become fertile soil for Gardam’s exploration of her characters.
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