I intended to read the entire volume for the Circuit (about 600 pages), but I’m finding that summer living has made reading time scarce. Even reading half the volume, though, makes for quite a long post here, so I hope you don’t mind. I read the authors I had never read before and share my thoughts below: Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Sergey Akaskov, Karolina Pavlova, and Ivan Goncharov. Some of them are writers that I intend to revisit. Other writers were a good read, but I’ll probably not revisit them.

According to Merriam Webster, superfluous means “exceeding what is sufficient or necessary: extra; not needed: unnecessary.” As I read the collection of stories, poems, and novellas, I couldn’t help thinking of that word. Ivan Turgenev wrote the novella “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” in 1850, which focused on one of the gentry who lived a rather aimless life. I haven’t read the novella (it is not in my Reader), but I read Mel u’s post about it early in the Classics Circuit Tour. As I read my selections, I kept thinking about how each story or poem seemed to discuss one of these “unnecessary” people in Russian society. Reading Russian literature in that light is quite depressing, yet the stories are, for the most part, wonderfully drawn together.

Alexandr Pushkin’s Poetry

In Russia, apparently, Aleksandr Pushkin is considered the greatest Russian writer, not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Ever since I heard that, I have wanted to read his poetry. I love the little bits I tried, although there were only about 30 pages in the Reader. It was so beautiful, and want to read more. The longest poem given in the Reader is called “The Bronze Horseman: A Tale of Petersburg.” It begins as an “ode” to St. Petersburg, and it ends by describing a man (one of the “unnecessary” or “superfluous”) during a flood of the Neva. He takes refuge by holding on to a bronze statue, all the while hoping his loved ones are safe. It ends sadly, and to me it seemed to echo the “superfluous man” concept:

…Against the threshold carried,
Here lay asprawl my luckless knave.
And here in charity they buried
The chill corpse in a pauper’s grave. ¹

In the end, he was expendable.

I also started reading Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s novel in verse, but I have not had time to make much progress. (It is not in the Reader.)

“The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol

Gogol surprised me. I knew he was a satiric writer, and that is about all I knew. Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat” was immensely satisfying, and I think it may enter my “favorite short stories” mental list. My thought when I finished it: simple yet sublime.

“The Overcoat” tells the story of a superfluous man. He is a very poor man, working a menial job in a boring routine. One winter, he discovers his overcoat is no longer repairable and a new one must be made to order. This is his story of that new overcoat.

I am not sure how to express why I enjoyed this story. Akakii Akakiievich is a nobody, but I liked him immensely, possibly maybe because I could so easily relate to him (It’s not that I’m quite that much of a nobody, but he certainly seemed realistic and I pitied him). But also, I loved how Gogol moved the story so seamlessly from what was realistic to the supernatural. It seemed Gogol just wanted to see justice be done, and it made it quite satisfying as a story. Things came full circle, as we’d want them too. It was unrealistic in that sense, because life doesn’t end prettily for us. Although it was about a “superfluous” person, it was not as depressing as some other Russian stories I read. I look forward to reading more Gogol.

“Princess Mary” (from A Hero for Our Time) by Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin is also one of the “superfluous.” He is middle class and idle, except for what he can do to entertain himself. He is utterly despicable, from my perspective, and that is the point. “Princess Mary” is told as Pechorin’s journal entries, an extended excerpt from A Hero for Our Time. In Pechorin’s journal, we see that his motives are all selfish, and in the story “Princess Mary,” he essentially uses a woman’s emotions for his own entertainment, even though he could not care less for her.

In the introduction to A Hero for Our Time, Lermontov wrote:

A Hero for Our Time, gentlemen, is indeed a portrait, but not of a single individual. It is the portrait composed of all the vices of our generation in their fullest development. You will tell me again that no man can be as bad as all this; and I shall tell you that since you have believe in the possibility of so many tragic and romantic villains having existed, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin? … You will say morality gains nothing from this. … However, do not think that the author of this book ever had the proud dream of becoming a reformer of mankind’s vices. … He merely found it amusing to draw modern man such as he understood him to be… ²

An excellent write-up from earlier in the Circuit by Exiled By Accident got me interested in finding the rest of the volume at some point. The “Princess Mary” section is, apparently, more than a third of the entire Lermontov collection.

“Mikhail Maximovich Kurolesov” (from The Family Chronicle) by Sergey Aksakov

Amateur Reader wrote about Sergey Aksakov a few weeks ago for the Circuit, so if you are interested, I defer to his posts. My Reader had just one small excerpt (called “Mikhail Maximovich Kurolesov” after the main person within it) from the more lengthy collection, and I found it horribly depressing. There was not much about the characters that I liked. Kurolesov turned out to be a rotten and abusive overlord and husband, and he eventually met his just reward. I failed to personally connect to any of the characters, and there was no engaging plot to draw me in. The biographical note indicates that Aksakov’s The Family Chronicle (also called A Russian Gentleman) is based on his own family history. In terms of history, I think the story of the different classes could be found interesting. As an engaging story or novella, it fell flat for me.

Chapter 6 from A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova

Karolina Pavlova’s contribution in the anthology was quite different in tone. It was a story of an eighteen-year-old girls’ dance with the man she loves. I liked the look at society, and it seemed, on the surface, less depressing than the other stories I read in the anthology.

Cecily lay down to sleep with that abounding happiness which sometimes fills and eighteen-0year-old heart for a moment, and which is so alive that in quiet and solitude one becaomse almost ill with it. … Happy, she sighed sorrowfully, not knowing why. ³

Yet we know why she was sorrowful, because earlier in the chapter, Pavlova wrote:

So much is forgotten in life, the years change and reshape us so strangely! So many young, inspired dreams in time become tax farmers and distillers. So many carefree young idlers become owners of Siberian gold mines. So many flightly scoundrels become merciless punishers of ever kind of passion. Time is a strange force! ⁴

Hence, even though the short excerpt from Pavlova’s novel had some “happiness” in it, I suspect in the end it will still reflect the “superfluous” theme as a whole. The title of Pavlova’s novel is A Double Life, which doesn’t suggest happiness to me!

“Oblomov’s Dream” (originally a short story, later included in the novel Oblomov) by Ivan Goncharov

One of the main things I wanted to read when I did that research for the Classics Circuit was Oblomov. I loved that cover (at left), and the thought of a novel revolving around man who could not get out of bed seemed ridiculously intriguing. However, my TBR has to be cut somehow, so I decided that the 400-page novel was not on the soon-to-read list, despite the fact that Oblomov was more popular in its day than Tolstoy. Reading the excerpts from the novel hasn’t removed it completely (I’m still very interested), but it is not a “must read.”

The excerpt I read was an extended dream that Oblomov had of his childhood. I loved how Goncharov described a scene (such as the surrounding countryside) and the little comments about society were so amusing. For example, here’s one exciting evening when the Oblomov family is sitting together in the drawing room:

Half an hour seemed to pass like that [dead silence], unless of course, someone yawned aloud and muttered, as he made the sign of the cross over his mouth, “Lord, have mercy upon us!” His neighbor yawned after him, then the next person, a though at a word of command, opened his mouth slowly, and so the infectious play of the air and lungs spread among them all, moving some of them to tears. ⁵

And then after a few more pages of such descriptions, it continues:

In his dream Oblovmov saw not one or two such evenings, but weeks, months, and years of days and evenings spent in this way. Nothing interfered with the monotony of their life … They would have been miserable if tomorrow were not like yesterday and if the day after tomorrow were not like tomorrow. ⁶

There was something so sadly sweet in Oblomov’s discover of the transitory state of childhood. I liked it, and I want to see how it all affected the grown Oblomov, as I know that is what the novel itself focuses on.

He looked sadly about him, and seeing only evil and misfortune everywhere in life, dreamed constantly of that magic country where there were no evils, troubles, or sorrows … ⁷

For thoughts on the entire novel, see what Stefanie at So Many Books said earlier in the tour.

I still want to read more from the Reader. If you’re looking for a general overview of many different voices from Imperial Russia, you may also find it satisfying. It’s a great collection and a broad overview of the era. There is even a timeline in the beginning listing both the political happenings in Russia and the publication dates. (I know nothing, so this is helpful to me!)

Still for me to read are 250 or 300 pages of the following: Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilych), a Chekhov play (Uncle Vanya), some Turgenev stories (I didn’t enjoy the two ones I read a few years ago, but he deserves a revisit), and an excerpt from Dostoevsky (the excerpt in this volume is from The Brothers Karamozov, which I read years ago but don’t recall anything about).

Which of these (if any) have you read?

• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi
• Caldecott Corner Author Spotlight: Simms Taback
• If You Are Looking for Georgette Heyer….
• Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The first part of the month was taken up by reading a Dover Thrift anthology of stories by American Women. Edited by Candace Ward, the volume had thirteen stories, one of which I skipped because I couldn’t get into it. (That story was “Life in the Iron-Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis. The blurb about it compared it to Emile Zola, and that was enough to turn me against it. It also started quite slowly.) The anthology has (mostly) public domain works in it; I’ve found an online link where available.

The stories I did read, with my thoughts about them, were as follows. This is the order I read them in. A dark red font indicates it was one of my favorites.

1. “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston. An unappreciated laundry lady deals with her adulterous husband. I thought this was an interesting story, but the writing was not as impressive as I thought Hurston’s other works are. As in her novels, Hurston writes dialog in dialect, and the characters and situations were realistic. This was her first major publication, and it appeared in one of the Harlem Renaissance journals, so I appreciated it for its historical value as well, even though it wasn’t a favorite story.
2. “Sancturary” by Nella Larsen. Loyalty is put to the test when a young man shows up in Annie Poole’s house seeking a hiding place. I have Larsen’s novel Passing on my TBR, so I was really hoping I loved this story, which was one of her last published works. It was so short that I felt I couldn’t get into the characters. Yet, the theme is one that couldn’t have been extended. It was a plot and issue-based story, not a character one. Read it online >>>
3. “A New England Nun” by Mary Wilkins Freeman. Louisa has been waiting fifteen years for her lover to return with his fortune and marry her; the time has come. I think it’s a great short story because the characters and setting are well introduced, and I also have an emotional connection. In the end, there is a catharsis, and someone is changed by the end of the story. I had read this before and once again I found it subtly satisfying. Read it online >>>
4. “Trancendental Wild Oats” by Louisa May Alcott. A family settles in an utopian community. The note in my book indicates that this was semi-autobiographical, and I could sense Alcott’s bitterness toward the event. As a short story, though, I found there to be little point to this story. I didn’t connect with any characters, I didn’t think it was humorous, and I was plainly bored. (Apparently, this is a satire. I totally missed that!) Read it online >>>
5. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A woman is put on house rest to calm her mental state, only to find the wallpaper tormenting her. I’ve read this many times before, and I’ve always enjoyed it. It was definitely time for a reread. Although it was not my favorite story from this collection, I think it’s a necessary story because it does such a great job of capturing a tormented woman’s mind.  Read it online >>>
6. “Smoke” by Djuna Barnes. The weakly child of a strong couple struggles to meet their expectations for the family. This was the most unmemorable story that I read in the volume. I wasn’t impressed with the writing or the story line (such as it was). I didn’t feel drawn in to the characters in any way.
7. “The Stones of the Village” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. A mixed-race young man tries to escape the racism of his past by “passing” for white. While I knew a lot of Harlem Renaissance stories dealt with “passing,” I haven’t read any, other than Schuyler’s satire. I found this quite interesting for that historical reason. I didn’t feel drawn in to the characters or the story but there is plenty there in this story. Maybe it deserves a reread someday so I can give it another chance.
8. “The Storm” by Kate Chopin. During a violent rainstorm, a happily married man stops in the house of a former lover, who is now a happily married woman. This was a great story. It was incredibly short but the two characters’ thoughts were foremost in the action, and the concept of the raging storm was an appropriate symbol for the passion of the young people. Chopin did a great job of capturing people and characters in little space. It made me want to read more Chopin (see below). Read it online >>>
9. “The White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett. A young New England woman meets a traveling young hunter who wants her to reveal the home of the local white heron. I read this years ago and I had hoped I’d “get” it more now. Unfortunately, I still didn’t really enjoy it much. The introduction indicates that Sylvia’s decision (help the man or save her friend the heron) allows her to gain “an awareness both sexual and spiritual.” I didn’t see that at all. I just never connected to the characters and I felt bored as I read it.  Read it online >>>
10. “The Angel at the Gate” by Edith Wharton. Paulina feels it is her duty to keep up the House of her famous ancestor, even though no one else remembers him.  Wharton always seems to write about “duty” and makes us think “what would you do?” From what I’ve read by Wharton, this was not her strongest work. I didn’t feel any sense of connection with Paulina. But I’m not one to hold on to strange traditions for no reason; maybe if I did, I’d have related to Paulina’s predicament more.
11. “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather. A young man seeks for his place in the world, only to be constantly thwarted. This was a complicated story. At parts, I felt like I was getting to really know Paul, but other times he felt just out of reach. In some respects, I think that was the point. Paul was supposed to appear non-understandable. Since I’d hoped to love Cather’s contribution, I was disappointed, but this may be because I was getting bored with the short story overall by this point. Read it online >>>
12. “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell. A quiet and unassuming local woman is accused of murder and her neighbors visit her house to try to figure out what happened. I loved this story! Although it was plot driven and not character driven, it was a refreshing look at how women were underestimated and discriminated against in a small community at the turn of the last century. I connected with the women in the story and loved the ending punch. Read it online >>>

After I finished this volume of stories, I decided to read my volume of Chopin’s stories. (I have her novella The Awakening, with about 10 short stories afterward). I wasn’t, overall, impressed with the Louisiana short stories. I struggled with the dialect, the French, and the unfamiliar themes. But I really enjoyed the stories about women in distinct situations. Two stood out to me.

My favorite story this month is one I think all should read. In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin follows the thought process of one woman when she gets news of her husband’s death. It is so perfect, and I love the irony at the end. Because it is incredibly short, I don’t want to say anymore. Instead, go Read it online >>>

The other Chopin story I really liked was “A Pair of Silk Stockings.” In this, a busy and frugal woman spends her $15 on herself instead of on her children. Chopin doesn’t follow the woman’s thoughts, but rather her actions in this. I loved it because, I admit, I can relate to some extent! Mothers certainly need time to splurge on themselves. I felt sorry for this woman who hadn’t had the chance to do so for so long a time. Read it online >>>

I also have a volume of Mary Wilkins Freeman short stories, and since she’s contemporary to these other authors, I thought I’d give hers a try to. At this point in May, though, I was quite tired of short stories. I only read a few Freeman’s stories before I ended the project early.

The one Freeman story that I really did like was “The Revolt of Mother.” As with the last Chopin story, this is an action-driven story rather than one that follows the character’s thoughts. I cheered for the woman’s choices, for she was also a slighted woman who deserved something for herself. Read it online >>>

In the end, I have decided that a short story a day is far too many. I don’t like them that much, and reading that many shot stories gets tiring. I like a plot and characters that I can sink into, and short stories can’t do that. That said, I have rediscovered some old favorite stories, and I need to read more of them at some point. Just maybe not all at once.

What are your favorite classic short stories? How often do you read short stories? Do you get tired of them if you read them in bulk?

• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers
• Love in a Fallen City and Other Stories by Eileen Chang
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor

P.G. Wodehouse’s collection of short stories about Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves was simply perfect. It was my first foray into the world of Bertie and his witty butler, and these stories made me crave more.

The best part of the Jeeves stories is the interaction between the two. Bertie is a wealthy British bachelor who thinks quite highly of himself. He is ridiculous. Jeeves is, quite simply, a perfect servant and a genius. Jeeves takes control of situations and use things to his advantage all the while Bertie thinks he’s in charge.

Carry On, Jeeves has ten stories, including one about the first day Jeeves entered into Bertie’s services. A few of them take place in New York, but others are in England and Europe. Jeeves saves the day in all of them, in his own style. Bertie, of course, is ridiculous.

Much thanks for my library’s e-audiobook website. The version I listened to was wonderfully narrated by Martin Jarvis. I now know I have a perfect go-to when I need an audiobook like this!

What is your favorite Bertie and Jeeves story? I’m ready for more!

• Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome (narrated by Martin Jarvis)
• Alexander McCall-Smith
• The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King
• Einstein by Walter Isaacson
• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Reminder: Giveaway for Really Old Classics Reviews
• Kissinger by Walter Isaacson
• Victorian Second Helpings (The Moonstone by Collins and North and South by Gaskell)
• Genre Fiction: A Tolkein, A Heyer, and A Verne
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

I studied Spanish for a few years while in college and I spent ten weeks in Bolivia one summer, so at one point I knew the language fairly well. I bought La casa en Mango Street back in the days when I dreamed in Spanish; reading it was delightfully easy because I knew the vocabulary. But, needless to say, when you don’t use a language skill for five years, you start to forget things. I recently met a woman at church who speaks Spanish and little English, and I found myself laughing and delighting in our broken conversation as I struggled to find Spanish phrases and she struggled to find English ones. It inspired me to rethink my relationship with this foreign language I once knew.

I was delighted to see that Neruda’s slim volume of poems had the Spanish alongside the translation. And while I no longer was able to read La casa en Mango Street with ease in Spanish, I was able to pick up a volume of the English and compare the two. I read Mango Street in Spanish, then in English, and then bits of it again in Spanish.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

There is no doubt in my mind that the second volume of poetry that Pablo Neruda wrote is an example of his Nobel Prize in Literature greatness. Oh my, but his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair are absolutely incredible to me, especially after I learned that he was twenty-years-old when he wrote them.

The beautiful introduction says, “These are not abstract poems aimed at idealizing beauty or love, but the messy, scented perceptions of lived loves – and lusts.” (Cristina Gracía, introduction, page vii)

That description – messy, scented perceptions – is why I enjoyed this volume. Although it the emotions and perceptions were “messy,” as whole it was perfectly controlled and beautiful.

What struck me is that this volume of poetry is telling a story. The love poems have elements of sadness (the woman is always sad) and the last poem of love is essentially a “good-bye”:

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Immediately following that is the “Song of Despair.”

I think my favorite poem was poem 1, “Cuerpo de mujer/ Body of a Woman.” It just has awesome imagery.

I’ve mentioned before that I am not trained in poetry. I don’t know how to read it or interpret it. All of these thoughts are my own impressions on this reading of the poems, not true analysis.

I picked this volume of Neruda’s poetry up because I saw his name on a Hispanic Heritage Month list somewhere and it piqued my interest. I am so glad I picked it up. It also counts for my Nobel Prize in Literature personal challenge. I will certainly be revisiting Neruda some day.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

While Cisneros did not originally write Mango Street in Spanish, she writes about a young Hispanic American girl growing up in an Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Esperanza is an awkward girl, and she is determined to someday leave her past behind and live the life she dreams of. It is a coming-of-age story and it reveals some harsh realities of the world she lives in, including the horrendous abuse her friends live with and the homesickness some have for the country they left behind.

I felt I could not relate to most of it, but I did appreciate seeing Esperanza’s growth. Her personal stories were those that I remember. In the end, she realizes that even as she moves beyond her childhood neighborhood, she must come back and remember those she’s left behind.

“They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.” (page 110)

I read La casa en Mango Street for Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15). (Obviously, I read it after the month ended, but oh well!)

Reading in Translation

Reading poetry in the original Spanish and in the English translation was eye-opening, as was reading prose in a Spanish translation and then visiting it in English.

How does a translator capture the feeling of poetry? The translator for Neruda’s poetry (W.S. Merwin) did a great job, and I felt Neruda was beautiful in both Spanish and English. While I am of course not a Spanish expert, in some cases, though, the English translation did seem to change the nuances of the beautiful Spanish.

Consider poem 12. In Spanish, it is called “Para mí corazón” (For my heart), which is taken from the first line, which is “Para mí corazón basta tu pecho.” In English, it is called “Your Breast Is Enough” after the first line, which is “Your breast is enough for my heart.” While those two lines say the same things, putting “breast” before “heart” in the title and reversing the order of the sentence seems to lose something. The order and emphasis is changed and I don’t think it’s quite as gorgeous.

On the other hand, there are some beautiful translations that capture the language, albeit in a different way. In poem 13 (“I Have Gone Marking”), the last stanza begins with three verbs: “Cantar, arder, huir” The beauty of those words are the differences: the –ar, the –er, the –ir verbs are all represented and each word sounds so different. I just loved it. The words in translation (“Sing, burn, flee”) likewise seem to capture the same feelings for me. It’s a word-by-word translation and it works just as beautifully in English as in Spanish.

Reading Cisernos’s prose in Spanish translation and then in the original English is harder for me to comment on. Because I wasn’t reading English as I went along (as I had with the Neruda), I was much more lost as I read the Spanish. Entire sections didn’t make sense because I was interpreting some words wrong. I’m not a dictionary user – I liked to learn from context and I don’t have patience to look up words constantly. But that was a mistake in my approach to this book. I would have gotten more out of my reading experience had I stopped and looked up some words.

After I read the book in English, I went back and compared the two versions. There were some disappointing translations that I believe changed the meanings.

For example, in one chapter, the girls are jumping rope to little rhymes. The rhymes were not translated: instead, completely different rhymes were inserted. The English rhymes had to do with Chicago: it gave the entire story a sense of place. Obviously, to literally translate the rhymes into Spanish wouldn’t make it the “familiar” rhyme it is in context in the Spanish book; there is logic to it. I was just surprised to see such a difference. It changed the overall feel of the book to not have the Chicago references.

There were also a few conversations in mixed English and Spanish that just don’t make sense much sense all in Spanish.

I guess my bottom line is, it seems best to read a work in its original language! Something is probably lost in translation, even if it is a great translation.

My Experience

Although I’m glad I read both these works, I didn’t much enjoy my experience reading (or attempting to read) Cisneros in Spanish, simply because it was full of so much once-again new-to-me vocabulary. It also didn’t sound as beautiful and far-reaching. But is it truly fair to compare Neruda’s Nobel-worthy poetry to Cisneros’s prose-in-translation when I’m not looking in a dictionary?  No, I don’t think so. Neruda’s poetry was inspiring; it was sweeping; it was awesome. Cisneros’ prose was challenging, and it was prose, not poetry.

In the end, reading Neruda and Cisneros reminded me of how far I’ve fallen in being able to read Spanish. After reading Neruda, I have to agree with Cristina  García, who wrote in the introduction to Neruda’s poetry:

With their gorgeous sweep and intimacy, their sensuality and rhapsody, and their “secret revelations of nature,” Neruda’s poems also made me want to reclaim Spanish … after a long, long silence. (introduction, xvii)

Thank you, Neruda. You’ve encouraged me, too, to revitalize my Spanish.

Does anyone have any suggestions for reclaiming a struggling second-language ability?

Can you suggest a not-too-hard book in Spanish that I may have a good experience with?

I rarely get a chance to practice my Spanish in daily life (I remain at home with a two-year-old who doesn’t even speak English yet!), and I don’t have a television connection (nor would I like sitting and watching it). Maybe reading a children’s book would be easier. I also suspect I should find my old Spanish dictionary!

• October in Review
• The Norton Introduction to Poetry + My Introduction to Poetry
• Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
• Reading Journal (7 Oct): Books for Every Season
• A Selection of Poetry by John Donne
• National Poetry Month + Call for Poetry Posts
• Reading The Iliad by Homer, trans. by Robert Fagles
• Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Poetry Friday: Christmas Poems
• Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll

Haddawy indicated that his first volume of translation was from one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Nights, and supposedly it was one of the most authentically original manuscripts. And yet, the manuscript omitted some of the traditional (and most commonly recognized) of the tales: “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Ala al-din” (Aladdin), “Qamar al-Zaman.” Haddawy, then, went back to various other manuscripts to translate these other four stories in The Arabian Nights II.

I came to these stories, then, with a few expectations and some questions. I expected the stories (at least the first three) to be familiar stories, but I also wondered how they compared to the previous volume of stories. Do these stories seem “authentic” as compared to the older translation? Do they seem to be written by the same or a similar anonymous author?

The first three stories were somewhat familiar to me. In the first, Sinbad is a sailor telling his story to Sinbad the porter. His seven sea voyages are certainly fantastic and entertaining. In the second story, Ali Baba overhears thieves entering a magic cave full of treasure, and ends up outwitting them (with lots of murder in the meantime). In “Ala al-din,” a poor young man finds a magic lamp and wishes to become a prince to win the princess’s hand, while a wicked magician attempts to steal the lamp back from Aladdin.

As for the tone, I have to say, these first three stories felt completely different from the first volume of the Nights. They were interesting stories, but nothing spectacular (although reading the “original” Aladdin was lots of fun). Rather than being a story within a story, each almost felt like a stand-alone adventure story. Shahrazad was not present, and so there was no “nightly” breaks to the stories. Each story was told with lots of action (this happened and then this did too) and little detail. The gorgeous princesses were not described with poetry (an aspect I didn’t realize how much I loved until it was gone), and even when a beautiful palace is created by magic, the details of its beauty are glossed over. In other words, the stories felt like abridgements of something that could be so much better.

The fourth story, “Qamar al-Zaman,” on the other hand, had those writing aspects that made it reminiscent of the first volume of stories that I read. While Shahrazad still didn’t narrate, it did feel “official.” Once again, the character’s attractive rosy cheeks and “hips that quiver while they move or rest” (page 168) are described in poetry when characters are introduced. But unfortunately, I didn’t like this story that much. It was bawdy and erotic and all that; it just was a bit too weird, especially when it got to the incestuous step-mothers. Eck.

I’m glad I also visited this volume, particularly for the first three stories; I’m just surprised to see that in the end, the first volume I read felt most “authentic,” or at least more delightfully literary.

A Short Note about Disney’s Aladdin

I rewatched Disney’s Aladdin this week too, just so I could see how they interpreted the story. I’m not too picky about Disney adaptations being “faithful” to the original (at least I wasn’t for this one and I only half-watched it), but one major changed bothered me. In Haddawy’s translation, it is clear that the events happen in a Muslim country. The princess is a veiled beauty, and Aladdin is only intrigued by her when he spies her face when she takes off her veil (a forbidden thing for him to see). The only woman’s face Aladdin had ever seen before had been his mother’s face.

In the Disney version, on the other hand, despite the fact that this story occurred in a Muslim country, the princess wears a scanty outfit that reveals far more than her face (or it would if she wasn’t a cartoon). Now, I agree that Disney didn’t need to veil the princess’s face for the movie. But was the scanty outfit really necessary? That really bothered me, and I felt it completely detracted from the Muslim country setting.

One other difference: I liked how in the story, the master of the lamp got as many wishes as he wanted, not just three. It made it much more interesting.

Does Disney’s lack of modest clothing for the princess bother you, or am I the only one bothered by this?

If you have reviewed The Arabian Nights II (trans. by Husain Haddawy) on your blog, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy
• Really Old Classics Challenge Retrospective
• Beauty and the Beast + The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Reading Journal (June 17): Reinforcements
• The Iliad by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles: Love and Hate But Mostly Love
• Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
• Reading The Iliad by Homer, trans. by Robert Fagles
• Reading Journal (June 10): Book Clubs
• The Odyssey by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles
• Reading in Spanish (Neruda’s Poetry and La casa en Mango Street by Cisneros)

As I listened to the stories, I kept recalling my time reading the short stories of Chekhov and Maupassant last year. Cheever’s stories reminded me of theirs, but it’s been so long since I read Chekhov and Maupassant that I couldn’t figure out exactly why. Maybe it’s because Cheever, like the others, focuses on normal people in regular, realistic situations.

Of course, Cheever stories take place in 1950s and 1960s suburban New York, among the upper-middle class society. His stories try to determine what would be the natural result of a given situation, and they often felt sad in the end.

After I put down some of these thoughts, I found that Wikipedia claims Cheever is “the Chekhov of the suburbs.” At least I’m right on that! His stories did remind me more of Maupassant’s stories, but still, the title fits him.

The John Cheever Audio Collection has twelve stories by John Cheever, read by various personalities.

• The Enormous Radio read by Meryl Streep
• The Five-Forty-Eight read by Edward Herrmann
• O City of Broken Dreams read by Blythe Danner
• Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor read by George Plimpton
• The Season of Divorce read by Edward Herrmann
• The Brigadier and the Golf Widow read by Peter Gallagher
• The Sorrows of Gin read by Meryl Streep
• O Youth and Beauty! read by Peter Gallagher
• The Chaste Clarissa read by Blythe Danner
• The Jewels of the Cabots read by George Plimpton
• The Death of Justina read by John Cheever
• The Swimmer read by John Cheever

My favorite story of these twelve was The Enormous Radio. It had a supernatural element, as some of Maupassant’s stories did, and yet it felt real. In that story, a couple gets a new radio. After a day or so, the wife realizes that listening to the radio allows her to hear the private conversations of the people living in the apartment complex around her. At first, she loves this new ability to pry into other people’s lives; by the end, she realizes her life and problems are just like theirs.

The Enormous Radio reminded me strongly of all the “reality” things people have now to make their private lives public: twitter, blogs, television shows. People don’t hesitate to share with strangers the intimate struggles of their lives, and as Irene realized, that’s not always nice. Her life became one of listening in, and she neglected her own life. It became rather depressing.

Many of Cheever’s stories felt like they ended suddenly. Because I was listening to them, I wasn’t always sure if the story was over or my audio had cut out (which happened a few times too). When a story just ended suddenly, I sometimes felt I’d missed something, so look forward to rereading. I liked the stories, depressing or not, and the majority (all?) were depressing.

Now I intend to keep reading a few of Cheever’s stories every week.

If you are intimidated by his 800+ pages collection of stories, this audio selection is well worth your time. You can get a glimpse of Cheever’s stories without being overwhelmed, and they are well read by the readers for your enjoyment.

Other Reviews:

• things mean a lot
• Rose City Reader

If you have reviewed The John Cheever Audio Collection or any Cheever stories on your site, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts
• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (abridged audio, read by the author)
• Literature in Translation
• What is Reading? and Audiobook Review of The Book Thief
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)

As The New Lifetime Reading Plan reminds me, these were one of the first “best-sellers,” the popular fiction of centuries past. I read the tales to gain a better understanding of a traditional literature.

It’s easy to see the appeal.  The stories remind me of the Grimm brothers’ tales in that magical things take extreme directions. But while Grimms’ tales had morals and were told in the guise of children’s tales, The Arabian Nights tell plain crude stories that cater to the basest of instincts: sex, betrayal, alcohol, and thievery to name just a few. But beyond the magical elements and the crudity, the tales themselves claim a higher place as they emphasize the import of story-telling in general.

The tales themselves are tales within tales within tales. In each section, someone is telling a tale to save their life. In the basic frame element, the queen Shahrazad tells stories every night to keep her husband, Shahrayar, from murdering her in the morning (she stops at key moments of the story to build suspense). The characters in the stories she tells do the same thing, as they come to genies or kings who threaten to kill them.

“What until you hear my incredible story!” the characters cry. In most cases, their creative stories save their skins, for they truly are incredible.

It was entertaining, albeit challenging, for me to read. I struggled at first (as I mentioned here), and so I began by reading just five or ten pages a day. I thought taking it in small doses would help. But the “nights” divisions didn’t really make for good stopping and starting places, and I found myself lost amid the various stories. It worked much better for me to read it in 40-page intervals. If I followed one story from beginning to end, I could keep reading on momentum.

Some stories were much more interesting to me; those without magical elements actually bored me. And while I enjoyed the translation I read (done by Husain Haddawy), it was taken from a 1500s manuscript that omitted stories such as Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sinbad. After having read 425 pages, I still don’t know those traditional stories, which is a huge disappointment. I knew it was going to be the case, but I’m still disappointed. I’m actually going to get Haddawy’s companion volume (which translates those subsequent stories) so I can experience those “traditional” stories as well.

To be honest, after reading The Arabian Nights and parts of the companion by Robert Irwin, I find myself considering why this is literature. They aren’t written well (in my opinion) and they are really quite crude in subject matter. Don’t misunderstand me: I do think The Nights is “literature” and I did find it worthwhile reading. I just wonder what it is that kept these stories going for so many years.

I think the answer hearkens back to the fact that these stories applaud and reverence stories themselves. The original, now anonymous, author of The Nights wrote something that championed a good story teller. And anyone who loves stories can appreciate that.

What do you think makes something “literature”?

Other Reviews:

• A Striped Armchair (thoughts on beginning the Huddawy translation)
• Once Upon a Bookshelf (thoughts on a Selection of stories)

If you have reviewed The Arabian Nights, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• The Arabian Nights II, trans. by Husain Haddawy
• Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
• Reading Journal (June 17): Reinforcements
• Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel + Giveaway
• Really Old Classics Challenge Retrospective
• Reading Journal (June 24): Learning to Read Better
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translated by Simon Armitage)
• The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
• Bookworms Carnival Call for Submissions: Really Old Classics
• Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

Beauty and the Beast

My all-time favorite story in this slim volume was “Beauty and the Beast.” The heroine of this story is Beauty, who is caring and sincere in all her actions and rightly deserves the “happily ever after” of the story. Beauty’s story differs from the Disney version. I much prefer the Perrault version, for Beauty is more likeable. Besides, the story, while still magical, holds a sincerity that is lacking in Disney. Note that my summary below provides “spoilers.”

Beauty is the youngest and prettiest of a rich merchant’s six children. Beauty’s two older sisters are quite arrogant and unpleasant, while Beauty is polite and delightful. As a result, many of the town gentlemen court Beauty, while the sisters are ignored, thus encouraging her older sisters to be very jealous. But instead of marrying, Beauty wishes to remain with her lonely father. When he loses his fortune, Beauty determines to be happy:

“However much I cry, I shall not recover my wealth,” she says, “so I must try to be happy without it.” (page 115).

Beauty works hard at their new home in the country, while her sisters are lazy, wishing for riches and luxury and pitying themselves. When her father goes on a business trip, hoping to recover some fortune, the older sisters greedily ask for many fancy things, while Beauty asks only for a rose: “Beauty had no real craving for a rose, but she was anxious not to seem to disparage the conduct of her sisters” (page 116).

The father fails to recover his wealth, and on his return home, he is lost late at night. Coming upon a lighted palace, he enters to find a table spread with dinner and a bed prepared for him. Despite not seeing any host, he feasts and rests. The next morning, as he departs, he sees a beautiful rose bush and picks a rose, remembering the selfless request of his youngest daughter.

Of course, this angers the Beast, who has secretly been the old man’s host in the palace. The old man is taken prisoner and condemned to die for his foolish act, until the Beast learns that the rose was for his daughter.

“Well, I am willing to pardon you if one of your daughters will come, of her own choice, to die in your place,” the Beast declares (page 119).

The old man departs, never intending to send his daughter in his place. But when Beauty hears the story of the dearly bought rose, she determines to give herself in her father’s place. Her loving older brothers try to stop her, but she goes anyway.

From the beginning, the Beast always treats Beauty kindly. And every night for three months, as they dine together, he asks her to marry him. While Beauty has come to appreciate the Beast and his sincere kindness, she is still repelled at the thought of his ugliness and always declines, thinking, “What a pity he is so ugly, for he is so good.” (page 126).

The Beast has a magic mirror, in which Beauty can look on her family. She longs to visit her father; since the marriage of his two oldest daughters, he has been left alone and he mourns every night for Beauty, who he assumes dead. Upon expressing her grief to the Beast, he allows her to return to her father:

“I would rather die myself than cause you grief …” the Beast says. “You shall stay with [your father], and your Beast shall die of sorrow at your departure.”

Beauty mourns at that and determines to go for just a week. When she is with her father, however, she forgets the Beast and stays longer than a week. When she looks in the magic mirror much belatedly, she sees the Beast dying of grief. In panic, she returns, mourning her friend. And as she mourns him, she realizes that she loves him:

“It is neither good looks nor brains in a husband that make a woman happy; it is beauty of character, virtue, kindness. All these qualities the Beast has” (page 130).

And when she tells the dying Beast so much, promising to be his wife, he becomes a prince (“more beautiful than Love himself”) before her eyes, for he had been condemned by a wicked fairy to be ugly until a girl consented to marry him.

I love “Beauty and the Beast” because it is a story of what sincere love is: it isn’t about love at first sight, but rather about true love of personality. Beauty and the Beast have become friends. I loved Beauty’s selflessness. I felt she was the most loveable character in all the fairy tales I’ve read, for she was sincere in both wanting to do good and recognizing the good in others. Even though her sisters were insincere and rude, she still served them. And even though she was mocked for her habits (like reading lots of books!), she still loved life and herself. Beauty is a true role model.

In contrast, Disney’s Belle was concerned with fitting in and concerned with looking for adventure; Disney’s Beast had a rude temper and seemed all-around unlikeable.  The enchanted furniture in the palace was entertaining, but in the end, I much prefer Perrault’s characters.

Other Perrault Stories

Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales totaled fourteen in this volume, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots. I much preferred reading Perrault’s fairy tales to reading those by the brothers Grimm (thoughts here). Perrault’s were gentler. While they did were more didactic (with “morals” at the end), they also tended toward happy endings. They also seemed to be written directly for children, even though they claim to be a direct translation from the French. Maybe my volume of Grimm was more of a “complete” collection and/or a correct translation, but they didn’t seem directed for children at all.

Which is your favorite Perrault fairy tale? Did you like Beauty, the Disney version or otherwise?

Have you compared Perrault to the brothers Grimm? Which style of fairy tale do you prefer?

• Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
• Bookworms Carnival: Fairy Tales
• The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter
• A Few Fairy Tale Reviews
• The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
• Two Books by Eric Carle
• The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
• The Arabian Nights II, trans. by Husain Haddawy
• Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
• The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelma

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities is a collection of very short stories between one and three pages long. These stories are about strange cities around the world. Some are cities with the ground in the sky, some are cities of strange people or religions. These sketches are framed by conversations between Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler in China, and Kublai Khan, the ruler of China. We find in these conversations that Marco Polo is the one telling the aging Kublai Khan about these outrageous cities. And by the end, we find that Marco Polo’s many cities seem to merge together. Was he really describing just one city? Is he describing cities at all?

I enjoyed the conversations between the two people more than I enjoyed the stories. The conversations seemed to have interesting discussion that gave light to the brief sketches about cities. Toward the end, Marco Polo says, “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear” (page 135). To which Kublai Khan responds, “I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again” (page 135-136).

Calvino, then, in describing (possibly) one city in so many different ways, brings that city to life in many different ways. Yet, my ear strained to get the meanings out of this book. If it is the ear that commands the story, my ears failed me. But I sense a deep purpose and philosophical meaning behind it all.

HTR&W

Bloom’s commentary on Invisible Cities makes no sense to me after reading the book. I will cease to try to make sense of Bloom, and I return once again to my own question: Why do I trust Bloom’s list of books to read? I don’t comprehend the depth of some of these works, and I believe I must be reading them at the wrong time in my life because I am not connecting with them at all. I will have more thoughts on this in my upcoming HTR&W short story retrospective. (Calvino was the final short story author for my HTR&W project.)

Suffice it to say, though, that Bloom believes Invisible Cities to be a masterpiece to be read and reread:

Calvino’s advice tells us again how to read and why: be vigilant, apprehend and recognize the possibility of the good, help it to endure, give it space in your life. (page 64)

I appreciate those reasons, but I didn’t get that out of the strange book. It was beautifully written and odd at the same time. I am determined to revisit it when I have more patience to struggle through it.

Are other books by Italo Calvino this odd? I’ve heard a lot of blog talk about If on a winter’s night a traveler, but if that’s also odd, I’m probably not interested any longer.

Other Reviews:

• OF Blog of the Fallen
• This Book and I Could Be Friends

If you have reviewed Invisible Cities on your site, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• My Life, According to Literature
• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• April in Review
• The John Cheever Audio Collection
• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Two Stories by Turgenev

In some respects, Landolfi’s stories reminded of Borges’ Fictions: they have elements the bizarre. I didn’t enjoy reading Borges (thoughts here), but I did sense a genius and power behind the writing. Landolfi’s writing is likewise laudable, although I wonder once again what the genius behind the stories actually is. I think it is beyond me.

In some stories, Landolfi narrates incredibly unbelievable events as if they actually occurred, a technique that seemed much like Borges’ stories. For example, in his title story “Gogol’s Wife,” the narrator describes his association with the author Nikolai Gogol and Gogol’s wife, who is a balloon. Yes, a balloon. The bizarre accounts in the story would have been amusing if I wasn’t so distracted by the oddness of it. “Pastoral” likewise is odd: a lonely girl visiting the country writes a city girl about the “hibernation” of the country people during the winter.

Other stories don’t have supernatural elements but have rather difficult personal subjects. “The Two Old Maids” is about a monkey that breaks into a chapel at night. “The Death of the King of France” is a “long and wearisome” account of a man letting go of his obsession with his 12-year-old adopted daughter. (I don’t think I completely understood this disturbing story; please correct me if you think there is a different point to it.)

Some stories weren’t disturbing and were short and easier to relate to. “Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies” asks the question: are poems written in a nonexistent language really a work of art? “Giovanni and His Wife” shares the story of two duet singers – who sing out of tune completely together. “Sunstroke” details the last moments of the death of an owl, and “Wedding Night” is about the chimney sweep visiting during a wedding feast.

In the end, it seems Landolfi’s stories ask questions attempting to define art, right and wrong, and acceptable relationships.

I read Landolfi’s stories because Harold Bloom recommends “Gogol’s Wife” in How to Read and Why. In reading Harold Bloom’s praise of the story “Gogol’s Wife,” I now realize that I must be familiar with Gogol and his writing before it will make sense. Yes, Landolfi’s story was definitely beyond me.

In the end, I readily admit I missed something. I can’t say I loved reading Landolfi, but it’s nice to know that I’m trying things I would not otherwise pick up. I’m trying to have an open mind. Maybe someday I’ll revisit Landolfi and understand better his themes.

If you have reviewed any of Landolfi’s stories on your site, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Two Stories by Turgenev
• Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Stories by Ernest Hemingway
• A Taste of Imperial Russian Literature
• Great Short Stories by American Women + Thoughts on A Few Other Great Stories

Ficcciones

Borges’ writing style is powerful. In some sense, I’m glad I struggled through Borges just to get a feel for his different style. But unlike Nabokov’s powerfully written stories, Borges’ well-written stories are weird. I seriously can’t think of any other word to describe them. I overall did not like them, and I will never read more Borges.

Weird

Author Yann Martel, who is more literary than I am, explains Borges to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in this way:

These stories are intellectual games, literary forms of chess. They start simply enough, one pawn moving forward, so to speak, from fanciful premises-often about alternate worlds or fictitious books-that are then rigorously and organically developed by Borges till they reach a pitch of complexity that would please Bobby Fischer. Actually, the comparison to chess is not entirely right. Chess pieces, while moving around with great freedom, have fixed roles, established by a custom that is centuries old. Pawns move just so, as do rooks and knights and queens. With Borges, the chess pieces are played any which way, the rooks moving diagonally, the pawns laterally, and so on. The result is stories that are surprising and inventive, but whose ideas can’t be taken seriously because they aren’t taken seriously by the author himself, who plays around with them willy nilly, as if ideas didn’t really matter.

Here are a few notable stories with my summaries that may help you understand why “weird” is the only word I can think of to describe Borges.

• “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” A man discovers a reference to the odd country of Uqbar in an Encyclopedia and tries to find out more information about it. In the course of the next few years, the world becomes obsessed with this country, which has been invented on an invented planet, and begins to live as if the world of Orbis Tertius is the reality. This was the first story I read and was the most challenging to read.
• “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Writing a critical review of Menard’s life, the narrator explains how Menard’s best work, although unknown, was his rewrite of Don Quixote. Menard rewrote Quixote from memory, living as if he were Cervantes.
• “The Circular Ruins.” A man washes up on the shore outside of circular ruins. Over the next year, he dreams a man into creation, and sends his begotten son into the world. This was probably my favorite story, weird as it was: to think that he dreamed a person into being, from the heart to each hair on his body. Great twist at the end, too.
• “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In a subtle mystery, during the end of WWII a man travels by train to escape his murderer and to deliver a message. It was quite confusing to me.
• “Funes, His Memory.” A young man named Ireneo Funes developed a collective memory of everyone and everything.
• “The Shape of the Scar.” The story of how an Irishman got his scar. This was also one of my favorites as it was the least weird.
• “Death and the Compass.” A detective is trying to solve the mystery of three murders and he thinks he has the solution.

Reading in Spanish

I had started reading Borges’ stories in Spanish. I studied Spanish in high school and college, and would like to not forget all the things I studied. This was to be a refresher.

But I would read a paragraph and try to translate it, feeling frustrated. My preliminary thought was always “I don’t get it!” I read the first story (“Tlon”) twice in Spanish before I determined to find an English translation. To my surprise, I read it in English and felt similarly confused. I still didn’t get it.

I read that first story about four times before I started to appreciate it as the bizarre philosophical whatever that it is. I do now think it is rather interesting. But I’d suggest reading it in your first language from the beginning.

In the midst of struggling to read the second story in Spanish, I read Yann Martel’s letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

Upon rereading Fictions I was as unimpressed this time around as I remember being two decades ago. …

Now why am I sending you a book that I don’t like? For a good reason: because one should read widely, including books that one does not like. By so doing one avoids the possible pitfall of autodidacts, who risk shaping their reading to suit their limitations, thereby increasing those limitations. The advantage of structured learning, at the various schools available at all ages of one’s life, is that one must measure one’s intellect against systems of ideas that have been developed over centuries. One’s mind is thus confronted with unsuspected new ideas.

Which is to say that one learns, one is shaped, as much by the books that one has liked as by those that one has disliked.

I can certainly appreciate that logic: that reading something you don’t like can still teach you something.  But I still determined not to spend all the extra time required to read the book I don’t like in a foreign language.

Where It Fits

I read Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges primarily for my personal HTR&W challenge, in which I’m reading through Harold Bloom’s list of short stories, poems, plays, and novels. But then, to my delight, I found that it is also a part of the Martel-Harper Challenge. Since it was so painful to read, I’m counting it for both challenges.

Borges’ Fictions was just 120 pages in English; I was determined to finish it. But if I didn’t have Martel’s letter of encouragement and my personal HTR&W challenge, I may have given up.

Do you read books that you don’t like? How much do you read, not liking it, before you give up?

If you have reviewed Fictions (or any of Borges’ stories) on your site, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi
• Reading in Spanish (Neruda’s Poetry and La casa en Mango Street by Cisneros)
• Thoughts on Blogging and Reading + HTR&W Giveaway Reminder
• The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
• Really Old Classics Mini-Challenge Round-Up
• Caldecott Corner: David Wiesner
• Two Stories by Turgenev
• January 2009 Month in Review and February Reading Journal
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

His writing in these stories is so well done that I, a very amateur writer, feel the urge to try my hand at capturing the images around me, a task I will surely fail because I know I will never even remotely measure up to Nabokov’s incredible talent.

The unfortunate aspect of reading more than 60 of Nabokov’s short stories in one month is that the characters he so adroitly creates, the settings he so carefully draws, and the feelings he so perfectly captures are, for the most part, miserable, gloomy, and ultimately depressing. Also, some of his stories have fantastical elements that failed to resonate with me, and most dwell on negative aspects of human nature – subjects that weren’t pleasant for reading in bulk.

But I feel that the overall quality of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing is so extraordinary that he should be read simply for the marvelous experience that comes from reading his words, even if the reader doesn’t necessarily consider the negative underlying themes amazing.

Nabokov’s Style

Unlike the concise Ernest Hemingway, Nabokov uses many words to write his poetic stories. Some paragraphs are longer than a page; sentences are five lines long. It’s very dense, but, to me, beautiful.

Through his wordiness, Nabokov carefully creates a scene, as did James Joyce, and the scene seems to be imperative to many of his stories.  Also like Joyce, Nabokov’s purpose or theme for each story isn’t revealed until the end. While Joyce’s stories often left me confused (revealing my ignorance, I suppose), Nabokov’s left me depressed. Sometimes the abrupt endings are a sort of epiphany and sometimes they are just the result of the character’s actions, and we, the readers, must determine Nabokov’s aim.

In that way, Nabokov’s writing reminded me of Anton Chekhov’s stories. Both authors seemed to describe every-day people (peasants in Russia for Chekhov; poor Russian émigrés living in Berlin for Nabokov) living their lives, with a sudden realization (either for the character or the reader) in the last moments of the story illustrate the depressing state of human nature, life, and relationships.

Guy de Maupassant also wrote about the dirty side of human nature. But, while Maupassant’s stories ended up being funny, Nabokov’s stories rarely had humor (although I may have missed any high-brow humor). Some of the stories with fantastic elements reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe‘s or Washington Irving‘s stories. (In fact, one story appropriately refers to Rip Van Winkle.)

In the end, Nabokov has a style completely his own. Just as I felt after reading Flannery O’Connor‘s stories, I can’t place his style and themes into a category with any other short story writer.

Favorites

As I mentioned, Nabokov’s stories tend to be rather sad. My two favorite stories happened to be the least unpleasant. A number of other stories have also stayed with me.

Two Stories

In “First Love,” a man reflects on his first love. In the course of his description of a childhood summer’s events, it’s unclear to the reader whether his first love was traveling by overnight train; swimming at the beach; learning about butterflies; or meeting the little French girl, Colette. This story doesn’t have much plot or grand finale, but it is a beautiful story that I’ve already reread three times.

“The Vane Sisters” was the story that Harold Bloom recommended in his How to Read and Why book list. In this story, a man reflects on his relationships with two sisters, one of whom was once his girlfriend.  It also is incredibly subtle. (Highlight to read spoiler.) Nabokov’s subtle ending tells us that this man’s life really hasn’t been all that affected by the life and then the death of these sisters. It’s kind of depressing for the sisters, but an interesting realization for the man. It made me think about my own life and relationships. What impact do certain people have on me? For example, how often do I think about old boyfriends? Did they really impact my life significantly?

Other Stories

While I can only see myself rereading those two stories, there are a number of other stories that I keep remembering, even after starting the next story. Note that I do think Nabokov’s writing improved through the years; if you read the 60+ story volume as I did, start in the middle or go backward.

Here are some that stayed with me, with short introductions.

• “That in Aleppo Once…” His wife never existed, he’s sure of it.
• “A Forgotten Poet.” A dead poet arrives at the banquet held in his honor.
• “A Guide to Berlin.” One man recounts the small details of Berlin.
• “Music.” At a recital, a man sees his ex-wife across the room.
• “Perfection.” A very proper tutor is asked to take his young charge to the sea shore.
• “The Visit to the Museum.” A man goes to a museum to acquire a painting for a friend – and gets lost inside.
• “An Affair of Honor.” A man finds that his wife is having an affair with his friend, an ex-cavalry man, and he must fight a duel to save his good honor.
• “A Slice of Life.” The woman once loved him; now that his wife has left him, he has come to her to get drunk and commiserate.
• “The Dragon.” A dragon awakes after his ten-century slumber.
• “The Fight.” The elderly man he sees at the beach is also the bartender; he observes one night’s bar fight.
• “The Potato Elf.” A small dwarf in the circus seeks love.
• “Terra Incognita.” A group of bug collectors in the tropics get sick, lost, and angry at one another, as told from the perspective of the ill, delirious man.
• “The Reunion.” Two brothers, one living in Russia and one an émigré in Germany, meet after ten years.
• “Breaking the News.” The elderly, deaf woman’s son has died, and no one wants to tell her.
• “Cloud, Castle, Lake.” A man is forced into his first vacation, and he’s hoping that he’ll find the elusive happiness he seeks.
• “The Thunderstorm.” A man awakens in a storm to see Elijah dropping his mantle for Elisha.

The Bottom Line

Have I made myself clear? Maybe not. To be safe, here it is as clearly as I can write it:

Read Nabokov’s short stories, at least one or two. His writing is incredible.

Have you read already read Nabokov’s stories? What did you think? How would you describe his writing style and the themes he writes about?

Note: Because Vladimir Nabokov’s stories are not in the public domain, I cannot link to them online. Here is Wikipedia’s information about him.

• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov + Giveaway
• Bookworms Carnival: Relationships
• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Stories by Ernest Hemingway
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Love in a Fallen City and Other Stories by Eileen Chang

One of Hawthorne’s collections of stories is called Twice-Told Tales. As I read, I began to understand why: while many stories are on the surface about Puritans in the early days of America, they aren’t really about Puritans. Hawthorne is telling us a different story. (Links below are to the stories in the public domain.)

For example, in Hawthorne’s probably most well-known story, “Young Goodman Brown,” the titular character is invited by the devil to practice witchcraft one night. To his surprise, the people he sees with the devil are his own religious teachers and leaders. But what we read is only a part of the story. The “tale” is told again when we realize the symbolism: even those striving to lead are hypocrites full of error.

Other stories likewise have a “ghostly,” Halloween-ish feel to them. For example, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the woman is literally poisonous. In “The Snow-Image,” two children make a snow person come alive; I loved this “Frosty the Snowman” precursor. Similarly, in “Feathertop,” a witch brings her scarecrow to life. In”Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” a woman’s coat becomes the carrier of a plague of sorts. In “Ethan Brand,” the titular character has sold his soul to the devil. I think these would be perfect for a ghostly but not scary Halloween read! I think “Feathertop” and “The Snow-Image” would also be appropriate for children.

While not all of Hawthorne’s stories are gothic, all of them have subtle meanings. Some people may not like Hawthorne’s blatant messages in his stories, but I thought his stories were also entertaining stories.

Probably my favorite non-ghostly story is “The Great Stone Face.” In this story, a small rural community is looking for the fulfillment of the legend: a person whose countenance appears the same as the face on the local hillside. This person will bring honor to the community. Over the course of a lifetime, they find the image of the stone face in a rich entrepreneur, a war hero, and a poet, all of whom end up failing the community. I loved the message of this story: that we can make a difference to others without doing something grand, and humility is always better than pride.

Further, in “The Birth-mark,”a husband wants his wonderful wife to undergo his experimental surgery to remove a birthmark from her face that he thinks is the hand print of the devil; but it’s not the hand of devil. A young man enters Boston in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” looking for his relative to help him get started in the world; but his relative doesn’t have time for him. In “The Great Carbuncle” a group of people are searching for a huge, precious jewel, each for their own reasons — to their ultimate downfall. Finally, in “The Wives of the Dead,” two sisters find out on the same day that their husbands have died. I won’t tell you what happens, but it is “touching” in the end.

There were other, well-known stories that I read and didn’t like very much. I think I disliked the slow pace and the lack of engagement I felt with any particular character. These were “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” “Wakefield,” “The Gentle Boy,” “Endicott and the Red Cross,” “The Gray Champion,” and “The Ambitious Guest.” While these stories were good, and I don’t want to miss mentioning them, I wasn’t drawn in to them. Maybe I’ll revisit them sometime and find them delightful as well!

In the end, Hawthorne has a style of his own. I can almost say he’s a favorite for me, after Maupassant and Chekhov. His style may not be a favorite for you, but why not give him a try? These are short stories, after all.

Have you read Hawthorne’s stories? What do you think of his “subtle” (or not so subtle) messages?

For the rest of October, I’ll donate 10 cents to World Food Programme for every (non-spam) comment I receive on any post of Rebecca Reads. See most post on Blog Action Day 2008 here. I’m also donating any proceeds (4%) from my Amazon Store.

• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Great Short Stories by American Women + Thoughts on A Few Other Great Stories
• Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
• Caldecott Corner: Wintery Miscellany

I’ve stopped liking Halloween and the concept of “scary stories,” but I was still disappointed by Poe. In general, I felt his stories were disturbing, not scary. While the gothic elements were certainly there, as they were with Washington Irving, I failed to like the narrators in Poe’s stories. The narrators were mentally ill. They lacked the social skills that would suggest them to me, as a reader, as people that I would like to meet. They told their stories in a matter-of-fact way that failed to resonate with me.

Besides, I felt Poe was extremely wordy and took forever to get to the actual story. I listened to most of the stories via the public domain Librivox recordings, and I was frustrated as I listened because they were so long and rather boring to me.

Nonetheless, my favorite Poe story hands down was “The Tell-Tale Heart.” This narrator was the most naturally mentally ill (the others, such as the narrator of “The Black Cat,” were just disturbed). As I listened to Poe’s stories, I started to mind his style less in general. They are disturbing, but not all that bad.

In How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom has nothing nice to say about Poe; he doesn’t say why he doesn’t like him, but he’s not complimentary in general. I don’t think that’s fair. I think Edgar Allan Poe is an acquired taste: the more I read the less he bothered me, and I think some like him and others don’t. I’m in the “not such a fan” category. But you may love his twisted little tales!

Seven-Word Reviews (with Spoilers)

• The Tell-Tale Heart: Man murders Evil Eye; heart still beats.
• The Pit and the Pendulum: Inquisition tortures man with pit and pendulum.
• The Fall of the House of Usher: Man entombs sister alive; house falls down.
• William Wilson: He killed his arch-rival: his own ghost.
• The Gold-Bug: Gold-bug leads to buried treasure through skull.
• Ligeia: Beautiful (dead) first wife possesses second wife.
• The Masque of the Red Death: During plague, corpse crashes party; all die.
• MS. Found in a Bottle: Ghostly crew sails man to world’s edge.
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue: Superhuman violently murders; smart men solve it.
• The Cask of Amontillado: Man bricks man in with wine cask.
• The Black Cat: Attacking cat, man kills wife; cat screams.
• The Purloined Letter: Genius solves mystery and finds stolen letter.

Others Similar to Poe

I kept comparing Poe’s stories to ones I’ve already read.

If you liked Poe’s stories of madmen, you may like some of Maupassant’s short stories. (For my discussion of my favorite Maupassant stories and for summaries, visit here.)  Particularly, read “The Horla,” “Was it a Dream?”, and “Who Knows?”. I think they are great “crazy-man” stories. I personally think Maupassant did a better job at capturing the personality of a madman so that I had sympathy. I actually liked the narrators in Maupassant’s stories, while I can’t say the same about Poe’s.

If you like the gothic elements of “The Gold-Bug,” “Ligeia,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” or others, you may like Washington Irving‘s gothic tales.

If you enjoyed the mysteries in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” you may enjoy G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries.

Also, if you liked “William Wilson” you may like The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which I read in my pre-book blogging days. They have similar themes.

My Conclusions

In summary, I didn’t love reading Edgar Allan Poe, but I do think he deserves a place of respect in the short story cannon. His stories have a quality all their own.

I didn’t find Edgar Allan Poe’s stories “scary,” but rather disturbing. I’m not a huge fan, but I know many people are. I know I’m in the minority on avoiding “horror” or anything remotely scary. But I’m curious why they draw you into them.

Why do you like Poe’s stories? Are they “scary” to you? What brings you back to them time and again?

For the rest of October, I’ll donate 10 cents to World Food Programme for every (non-spam) comment I receive on any post of Rebecca Reads. See most post on Blog Action Day 2008 here. I’m also donating any proceeds (4%) from my Amazon Store.

I’m giving away books! Visit here to enter the contest.

• HTR&W: What Is a Short Story?
• The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman + Happy Halloween
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Caldecott Corner: The House in the Night by Beth Krommes, 2009 Award Winner
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• My RIP List for a Lifetime
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)

Themes

Race and Class

I found the most common theme in Flannery O’Connor’s stories is race and class, looking at conflict between generations. A great example is “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” In this story, a progressive young man must ride the bus with his older mother to the YMCA because she is “afraid” of the blacks on the integrated buses. He wants to teach her a lesson, but in the end he realizes he still needs his mother, as “old-fashioned” as she is.

Race and class often mix in O’Connor’s stories. In “Revelation,” a self-satisfied judgmental woman is baffled when a young girl calls her a rude name; in the end, she (maybe) realizes the folly of her judgments.

Other stories clearly dealing with race and class also include rural versus city conflicts. Some of these stories are “The Artificial Nigger” (a father and son visit Atlanta); “The Displaced Person” (a Jewish refugee family joins the farm); “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” (Grandpa fought in the civil war); and “The Geranium” and “Judgment Day” (an old man, living in New York City with his daughter, longs to return to the South to die; these are essentially the same story, one written at the beginning and one at the end of O’Connor’s career).

Isolated, Lonely People

Some of my favorite stories were about lonely, isolated individuals seeking for a place. In “The Crop,” a lonely woman sits down to write a short story-and forgets where she is. I love this story because I can relate to this writer: she can’t figure out how to get the story from her head to paper. In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” the woman ponders a fortune teller’s message, and the reader, following her thoughts, knows what it is. I loved how clueless she was as I followed her thought process.

While others weren’t favorites, they were also about lonely, isolated people: “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead” (14-year-old must bury his grandfather);  “Good Country People” (a lonely girl with a wooden leg finally trusts someone, the good country man selling bibles); “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (mother gets her mute daughter married to a nice, good country man); “A View of the Woods” (a lonely, selfish grandfather idolizes his granddaughter); and “The Enduring Chill” (a lonely, unsuccessful writer returns to Georgia to die).

Christianity (Good versus Evil)

Flannery O’Connor’s stories also deal with Christianity and good versus evil in general. Her view of good and evil in the face of Christianity is intriguing.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is probably the most familiar O’Connor story, but I really don’t like it. Grandma gets her family lost on a side road. They meet a murderer, who Grandma is sure she recognizes as a good man. I think it’s a look at how everyone has good, and yet, we’re all missing good too; we’re all condemned. I find it a bit disturbing.

In other stories, people try to save each other through religion and because of religious training. In “The River,” the boy’s caretaker, Mrs. Conin, wants to “save” him with religion. In “Parker’s Back,” Parker gets one more tattoo that he thinks his religious wife will appreciate. In “The Comforts of Home,” Thomas’s mother thinks she can save a loose woman from corruption. In “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Sheppard thinks he can redeem a criminal boy who shows more promise than his own son.

Compared to the Others

I found Flannery O’Connor’s stories to be completely unlike the others I’ve read in the past few months. And yet, I still try to compare and contrast.

As did Chekhov, O’Connor focuses on specific characters in a specific setting, keeping the scenarios tight. Somewhat like Maupassant, O’Connor’s stories focus on base human desires and situations. In contrast to James Joyce, who was careful to develop a scene, O’Connor throws us into it to a scene and we must feel our way until we understand the setting (and yet it is still marvelously developed). Also, while Hemingway captured scenes mostly through dialog, O’Connor captures her scenes through incredibly realistic thought processes.

Unlike O. Henry, her stories are not “feel good.” In fact, I almost hated reading some of the stories, because I knew, following her style, that just before the character finds redemption, something would go wrong and they’d be damned, or killed, or otherwise without hope. In subject matter, then, I think her stories most closely resemble Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies, which capture the isolation immigrants feel. While O’Connor’s characters aren’t immigrants to the United States, they seem similarly confused by their loneliness in a changing Southern environment.

HTR&W

I didn’t agree with a lot of Harold Bloom’s comments in How to Read and Why on the specific stories he discusses, but his general comments on O’Connor’s style are interesting. He focuses on the religious aspect of her work, how everyone ends up damned as I mentioned above, and how O’Connor doesn’t expect anyone to be redeemed.

…the best way to read her stories is to begin by acknowledging that one is among her damned, and then go on from there to enjoy her grotesque and unforgettable art of telling.

Harold Bloom captures what my main gripe was with O’Connor’s stories, although he thinks it’s a beautiful trait. It is, but it’s still a bit annoying in bulk:

…readers need to be wary of her tendentiousness: she has too palpable a design upon us, to shock us by violence into a need for traditional faith.

I sometimes didn’t like the violent shock at the end of each story: but that may be because I was reading all of her short stories in the same week. If you read Flannery O’Connor, read her in installments.

In the end, Flannery O’Connor certainly has a marvelous but morbid story telling ability.

Have you read Flannery O’Connor? What do you think of her stories? Did you like “A Good Man is Hard to Find”?

• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Great Short Stories by American Women + Thoughts on A Few Other Great Stories
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• A Stop in South Africa (Two Novels by Alan Paton) + Giveaway
• Personal History by Katharine Graham + Why I Love a Great Biography
• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi
• Stories by Anton Chekhov

In the introduction to my 1960′s book, Washington Irving is called the “Father of American Literature” and the “First American Man of Letters.” While I don’t know enough about his contemporaries to know if that’s accurate, I do know that many of his stories have a distinct American feel to them, as the setting is clearly the “new world.” The rustic and spacious American setting feels refreshing when I approach Irving’s writing; it’s as if that rural Connecticut community still exists. It also seems Irving’s world has seeped down into our modern culture: how many American communities today have a Sleepy Hollow street, neighborhood, or town somewhere near?

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” probably Irving’s most well-known story, illustrates a quaint, rural, new American community. Sleepy Hollow is “sleepy,” but it does have one claim to fame: the local haunt, the headless horseman. In the story, scrawny Ichabod Crane and burly Brom Bones vie for the attentions of the local beauty, and the headless horseman visits Ichabod Crane late one night. As I said, Irving’s story is predictable, but I still enjoyed it.

“Rip Van Winkle” occurs in a similar community. Rip Van Winkle is a good-for-nothing married to a nagging woman. One night, he meets some gnomes in the wood, who offer him alcoholic refreshment. When he wakes up the next morning, something isn’t quite right. Again, this is a somewhat predictable story, but I still enjoyed it, odd as it was.

“The Specter Bridegroom,” on the other hand, takes place in a castle in Germany, where a bride is awaiting her groom for their wedding. Though he arrives in time, he insists on leaving before the wedding, for he has a date with the grave. I was annoyed with Irving for giving up the ending a few pages too soon; I suspect it would never have been published that way today, and I thought it could have used some reorganization. That said, I still enjoyed the amusing story.

“The Adventure of the German Student” also occured in Europe, this time in creepy Revolutionary Paris, a place with ghosts, apparently.

“The Devil and Tom Walker” returns to the New England setting. This time, another good-for-nothing man married to another nagging wife (seems to be a theme in Irving) happens upon the Devil in the wood and strikes a bargain with him. Lest you might be thinking of doing the same thing, you should read this warning-story! Tom’s ultimate end is quite amusing.

I did read a few other stories, but these were the most entertaining. Irving’s style is not for everyone: as I said before, he is very wordy and tends to detail everything. I liked that, but you might not.

These stories happened to be Irving’s most “gothic.” I don’t normally like ghost stories, but these were just to my liking: a somewhat real feel to them, and yet also a somewhat “fantastic” story behind them.

Have you read Washington Irving? What do you think of his stories?

I read Washington Irving’s stories in honor of Halloween this month. Also, an upcoming Bookworms Carnival is themed “gothic literature,” and I thought I’d read Irving’s stories to fit that. I may try to get some Edgar Allan Poe read by Halloween as well. Which is your favorite Poe story?

• Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman + Happy Halloween
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• My RIP List for a Lifetime
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Great Short Stories by American Women + Thoughts on A Few Other Great Stories
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Four Christmas Novellas by Charles Dickens
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)

After reading, in the past months, the short stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce, and Hemingway, I found O. Henry‘s stories to be remarkably different. They were refreshingly delightful, poignant, and easy to read, and yet, I was struck by the inferiority of O. Henry’s actual writing in comparison to the others. In the end, though, I think everyone should read some of O. Henry’s stories: they are enjoyable.

O.  Henry’s stories are full of irony. Like Maupassant‘s stories, his stories focus on the base aspects of human nature: poverty, crime, dying. However, while Maupassant’s stories focus on self-interest, O. Henry’s stories focus on self-improvement and the “love your neighbor” aspects of human nature. The characters in O. Henry’s stories were loving, and the endings were poignant and “tender.” On the other hand, as I mentioned when I read Maupassant’s stories, some of those characters were cruel and uncompassionate. Both writers seemed to accurately portray human nature, but I must say that Maupassant’s take was more amusing!

O. Henry was born William Sidney Porter and became O. Henry after a few years in prison, during which time he turned to his writing. I’m glad he did write because I really enjoyed his stories! My favorites were these (links to public domain etexts):

• The Gift of the Magi. $1.87 is all she had on Christmas Eve, and yet she wanted to buy her husband a Christmas gift.
• The Cop and the Anthem. A homeless man wants to be arrested so he can be in jail all winter.
• The Last Leaf. She knows she will die when the last leaf falls from the vine.
• The Ransom of Red Chief. Two criminals need $2,000, so they determine to kidnap the son of the richest man in town and hold him for ransom.

The Writing

Reading James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway before reading O. Henry may have been a mistake, simply because I was distracted by O. Henry’s writing. His writing is perfectly acceptable: it’s probably a style issue for me. O. Henry is a down-to-earth writer, and his writing seemed to have a more conversational aspect. For example, in “The Gift of the Magi,” the woman begins to cry in the first paragraphs. Then,

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage [sobs] to the second [sniffles], take a look at the home.

Now, there is technically nothing wrong with addressing the reader. But James Joyce was careful to develop a scene and Ernest Hemingway never would use so many words to describe something, so for me it was just a surprising, jarring sentence to read.

Also, along the same line, O. Henry told his stories, but none of the characters seemed developed. Even after finishing “The Ransom of Red Chief,” for example, I barely know about the two kidnappers and the young boy; they remained stereotypes in a clever story. On the other hand, while Joyce seemed long-winded in some respects and his stories were somewhat depressing, the characters and settings were so beautifully created that I didn’t mind reading it.

Has reading Joyce and Hemingway and the other authors recommended in HTR&W made me a “snob” for concise yet beautiful descriptions and carefully developed characters? I don’t know. Maybe if I’d waited a few days after Hemingway, O. Henry’s writing style wouldn’t have seemed inferior.

I suppose noticing writing, instead of just stories, is progress. After all, one of my goals in attacking a reading list like HTR&W is to learn to read well, instead of just turning pages. The other night, I picked up a less-than-100-page collection of O. Henry to read and I read it one setting: wouldn’t that be reading to “just turn pages”?

But, as I said, I really enjoyed O. Henry’s stories, and after my disappointment in Hemingway, I really needed to “just turn pages.”

Have you read O. Henry? What was your favorite story? What have you read lately when you just wanted to “turn pages”?

If you want to read some “tender” (and, yes, I admit, somewhat cheesy) “love your neighbor” stories, you should really give O. Henry a try. Read his stories online in the public domain at Project Gutenberg; most are fairly short.

If you don’t want to read online, I’d love to send you my collection as a BBAW giveaway! It’s The Gift of the Magi and Other Short Stories by O. Henry, a Dover Thrift Edition in good shape. If you’d like it, please let me know in the comments. I’ll send anywhere in the world, and I’ll select a winner Sunday.

• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Ernest Hemingway
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
• Aesop’s Fables with Introduction by G.K. Chesterton
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Hemingway’s stories are poetry: that is my first and lasting impression of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. In his short stories, Hemingway treats words as sparsely as do poets.

I don’t usually understand or enjoy poetry because it feels so much must be inferred or interpreted. (After I finish reading the HTR&W short stories, I’m reading a number of poets for my HTR&W personal challenge. I’m a bit nervous.) While reading Ernest Hemingway’s stories, I likewise felt the need to infer and interpret beyond my comfort zone: I didn’t “get” them and I certainly didn’t enjoy reading the few stories I read. While I’ve only read a dozen of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, I’m finished.

That, however, doesn’t mean you should avoid Hemingway’s stories: they may resonate with you, and you may love his writing style. He does a magnificent job of capturing a scene through dialog. Hemingway is worth reading.

Two Stories to Read

While I didn’t love any of the stories, there are two I would recommend others read. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” follows an unsuccessful writer as he dies of gangrene in the middle of an African hunting camp, stranded after his vehicle broke down. It is a story with two aspects: one part follows the dialog he has with his wife, and one part follows what he is thinking and all the stories he wished he had written.

The second story I’d recommend is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which I’d read before and is probably the most well-known of his stories. In that story, a deaf, widowed old man who has recently attempted suicide sits and drinks late into the night in a café. One waiter essentially kicks out the old man because he wants to go home, while the other waiter contemplates on how the café is a nice place to sit, and everyone needs a place.

I like the stories behind these, and I like the summary of them as I write them up now (although I know I did a poor job, since there is lots of symbolism in them that I’ve missed). What I disliked about Hemingway’s stories was the writing style. The stories were dialog driven, and the parts that were not dialog (such as the writer’s thoughts in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”), felt like run-on sentences (although all were grammatically correct). His stories also end abruptly, as did James Joyce’s stories that I read last week. Hemingway was not a bad writer; he is brilliant at controlling each tight scene. For me, however, the style was irritating: I’ve decided that Hemingway is just not for me.

HTR&W

When I picked up How to Read and Why to see what Harold Bloom had to say about Ernest Hemingway, I found that he began by discussing how Hemingway’s stories are poetry. At least I was “right” in noticing that aspect. Bloom points out all the symbolism in his favorite stories, a lot of which I missed, despite having read the stories a few times. As I mentioned, I did like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which he discussed. But I really disliked “Hills Like White Elephants.” The other two stories he recommends are “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” and “A Sea Change,” which I similarly disliked, though not as much.

The Finest American Short Story Writer?

Apparently, Ernest Hemingway is the definitive American short story writer. I hope not; I really didn’t enjoy his stories. You might love them, though. Don’t take my word for it!

Have you read Hemingway’s short stories? Which was your favorite? My volume of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway isn’t due at the library for a few weeks yet; tell me your favorites and I’ll give him another chance.

• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Abandoned Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• HTR&W: What Is a Short Story?
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• Two Stories by Turgenev

Joyce’s ability to capture the world through his words greatly impressed me. Each story is incredibly realistic and amazingly readable. However, I was not impressed with the plots behind each story; Joyce seems to hint at the issues and sometimes I felt too much was left for me to guess at. But while I didn’t love the stories themselves, I would highly recommend reading Joyce’s stories solely for the beautiful writing and careful character development. Reading the stories in Dubliners is an example to me that plot doesn’t necessarily make something I read “great”; good writing makes it great.

Could good writing make something great for you or does the plot also have to grab you? Would you read something just for the great character development and beautiful writing?

Until I picked up his volume of short-stories, I hadn’t thought I’d ever read James Joyce. He’s always intimidated me. To my surprise, I’d read one story, “Araby,” which had been assigned reading in my ninth-grade English class. It remains my favorite of Joyce’s stories because, just as at age 14, the main character’s frustrations and “unrequited crush” resonated with me. If you choose one of Joyce’s stories to read, I’d recommend “Araby.” As I said, much in the underlying plot is left to the reader to untangle, and yet, the characters, setting, and emotions are perfectly captured.

Have you read something as a teenager that still resonates with you today?

If you have reviewed Dubliners on your own site, leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Stories by Ernest Hemingway
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Two Stories by Turgenev
• Painting a Novel: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story

His stories capture greed (a woman wanting to look elegant for a party, no matter the cost; a man in need of money selling his wife; a parent in need of money selling his child; etc.), self-interest (a young man escaping from his pregnant girlfriend; society shunning prostitutes while yet accepting them; a family having the funeral before the loved one died for convenience), desire for power (a man lusting after a woman; a man trying to politically overtake a city), and so forth.

For a specific example, in “The Devil,” Maupassant captures our natural impatience. The son of a dying woman needs to plant his crop, so he hires a peasant woman to sit with his dying mother. But as the hired woman has been hired for a set pay, she doesn’t feel like waiting for the woman to die. I won’t tell you how this is resolved, but I will tell you I laughed out loud, horrid as it was! Humans are impatient by nature, and Maupassant wonderfully captured us.

I’ve now read between 80 and 100 stories (probably about 400 pages, skipping around the huge volume I have). As I’m moving this weekend, I had to return the book to the library.

I think I’ve had a good taste of Maupassant’s great stories. I’m sure there are other great ones out there. Tell me if I missed your favorite! (Links below are to the stories on the web; all are in the public domain.)

Stories I Would Reread

• The Necklace: A middle-class woman really wants to look nice at a social gathering so she borrows a diamond necklace from her friend….and loses it.
• The Piece of String: A stingy man finds a piece of string in the middle of the town square and stops to pick it up, changing his life.
• The False Gems: When his beloved wife dies, the man eventually must sell her cherished-but-false jewels.
• The Horla: An invisible creature follows a man, driving him crazy.
• Was it a Dream?: A man’s beloved wife died, and he morns over her grave, only to be “haunted.”
• The Father: A man abandons his girlfriend once she becomes pregnant; only later does he realize what that meant for him.
• The Devil: A peasant woman is hired to sit with a dying woman and gets impatient for her to die.
• A Sale: Why did he dump his wife in a barrel of water? The judge wants to know.
• Simon’s Papa: Simon doesn’t have a papa, and the boys in the school yard are making fun of him. He is determined to find a papa.
• Clair de Lune: A priest hates women because they are only temptresses, and nothing good can come from women. And then he learns something.

Other Good Stories

• Boule de Suif: A group of citizens, including Boule de Suif (a local prostitute), travel in a carriage together during a heavy snowstorm in the midst of the Franco-Prussian war.
• Yvette: Yvette is the daughter of a high-class prostitute, but she wants to find love and marriage in her life. (I cannot find this online; the Yvette story credited to Maupassant that I find online is different!)
• Mouche – A Boating Man’s Reminiscence: Mouche is the only woman on the boating crew and they all love her.
• A Family: A bachelor visits a long-unvisited friend whose life now “disgusts” him (he has a wife and children and certainly must be miserable).
• Moonlight: A woman has the beginning of an affair.
• In the Wood: A couple is discovered making love in a forest…
• The Kiss: An old aunt sends a young girl a letter about why kisses are so important.

HTR&W

Harold Bloom selected as his favorites “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” and “The Horla.”

While I didn’t really love reading “Madame Tellier’s Establishment,” it did fit in to the pattern of Maupassant’s stories that I mention above in terms of addressing aspects of human’s carnal desires. Madame Tellier’s “establishment” is a whorehouse. They all take a holiday to visit Madame Tellier’s niece’s first communion. I had an odd sense as I read it that the prostitutes weren’t really people in the society, and yet we find that they were.

“The Horla,” on the other hand, was wonderfully weird. It was written during Maupassant’s own “going crazy” stage, as were a few of his stories. As I mention above, it is about a man being followed by an invisible man, and slowing going crazy. There were some great passages in it, and I really enjoyed the sense of “is this really happening?”.

In How to Read and Why, Bloom compares and contrasts Maupassant and Chekhov, much as I did in my previous post. He has some interesting comments. (Again, he has no respect for Poe, which makes me want to go read Poe again just to prove him wrong.) He concludes with this:

Why read Maupassant? At his best, he will hold you as few others do.

Yes, Maupassant really does capture your attention!

What are you waiting for? Many Maupassant stories are very short. Read some of his stories online right now (links to specific stories above):

• Project Gutenberg
• classiclit.about.com
• Read Print
• online-literature.com

• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi
• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Kipling’s Jungle Books are collections of stories about animals and people from around the world. Each story seems to be rooted in traditional facts about the animals and/or traditions, so they make for an interesting read. Some stories have fantastic, speaking animals; others are about people and superstition. Some stories take place in the Indian Jungle; others are in Eskimo North America or the deep seas of the Atlantic Ocean. As with his Just So Stories, Kipling has interspersed a poem or two before or after each story.

I was not as impressed with these stories by the Nobel Prize-winning author as I was with his Just So Stories. While they were interesting, they were not as creative nor as well-written as the Just So Stories, which were written ten years after these. Many of the non-Mowgli stories especially were slow to develop and involved lots of dull discussion or description. One exceptional non-Mowgli story was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which is about a mongoose that saves a boy’s life. I did find it fun and I will look for a nicely illustrated version for my son.

I did like the Mowgli stories, and wish those were in a separate volume, in a more chronological, novel-like format from the other, more mediocre stories. Mowgli and his animal friends (Baloo the bear, Kaa the serpent, Bagheera the panther, Hathi the elephant, and others) reminded me slightly of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends. When Mowgli left the Jungle the last time at age 17 to live in a village with the other humans, his good-byes made me sad, just as saying good-bye to Winnie-the-Pooh made me sad.

However, in contrast to A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, Kipling’s jungle is quite violent. Also, while in Winnie-the-Pooh Christopher Robin was saying good-bye to his imaginary animal friends, in Mowgli’s tales, Mowgli is giving up a “real” life of hunting and killing in the jungle for a more “normal” human life. In Mowgli’s stories, Mowgli hunts, the tiger Shere Khan tries to kill and eat him, the human villagers try to stone him to death, and Mowgli encourages the jungle animals to overrun a town, killing a few villagers in the process. The Mowgli stories are excellent, all the same, although they feel somewhat dated, maybe because I’m not familiar with the setting.

Overall, I felt that The Jungle Book(s) by Rudyard Kipling contained somewhat mediocre and dated stories, especially in comparison to his later writing. Kipling’s writing improved in Just So Stories. While I’ll read those stories again and I may revisit select jungle stories, I can’t imagine reading all of The Jungle Book or The Second Jungle Book again.

But I’m not a ten-year-old boy. Maybe, in nine years, I’ll let my son be the real judge.

Have you or your children read Kipling’s jungle stories?

Have you reviewed The Jungle Book or The Second Jungle Book? Leave a link in the comments and I’ll add it here.

(Note: Most recent publications called The Jungle Book contain both The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book.)

I am in New Zealand for nine days, so I may not be visiting your sites or responding to your comments while I am gone, but I’ll make up for it when I return!

• Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
• Poetry Friday: If by Rudyard Kipling
• Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne (Revisited in Poetry)
• Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• Bookworms Carnival: You Are Never Too Old
• The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter
• The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
• Kids Corner: Winnie-the-Pooh Books Inspired by Milne and Shepard
• Consistency Errors in Goodnight Moon and Other Book Issues for an Obsessive One-Year-Old

Image via Wikipedia

If Guy de Maupassant lived and wrote stories or novels today, his name would appear on The New York Times best-seller lists many weeks out of a year.

As it was, in the late 1800s, his stories were best-sellers from the time the first one, “Boule de Suif,” appeared in a collection with five other previously unknown authors, until he died, mentally ill, at the young age of 42 in 1893.

But don’t let the best-seller title sway you from reading Maupassant. I tend to avoid modern-day best-sellers because, in my mind, they are (stereotypically) not written very well. But that’s not the case with Guy de Maupassant’s stories: he writes incredibly well.

Maupassant’s Style

I’ve only read about 40 of Maupassant’s stories thus far (out of a book with 270), so these are all preliminary thoughts. As I’m still reading his stories, I’ll share my favorites by Maupassant and my HTR&W thoughts in a subsequent post.

Since I recently read Chekhov’s stories, I can’t help but compare the two writers. Apparently, most people compare them. In the introduction to the volume I’m reading, Dr. Artine Artinian discusses at length why Maupassant is better than Chekhov. I don’t think I can assign one as better than the other; they are just very different.

Maupassant’s writing style is a stark contrast to Chekhov’s (read my discussion of Chekhov’s stories here). I loved Chekhov’s writing and style: it was thoughtful despite being (I suppose you could say) verbose. He explores the characters’ emotional states and their thoughts. Maupassant is much more concise. He also relies on dialog more than Chekhov seemed to, so his stories moved more quickly. But Maupassant’s stories are still beautifully written. He captures the essence of the setting in few words and makes it complete.

Maupassant’s subject matter is also a stark contrast to Chekhov. Both writers focus on the lives of everyday people, focusing on everyday matters. But while Chekhov wrote his stories with the ever-present political situation of various classes of people (money and station seemed to be a theme), Maupassant wrote with under-lying carnal desires in mind. In other words, he wrote about sex, greed, love, misunderstandings, and lying, among other things. The characters in his stories care most about themselves. Chekhov’s stories were more concerned with how people relate with each other.  In a sense, Chekhov’s characters felt more sensitive. Maupassant’s characters are more “human.”

In searching for a recommended translation, I stumbled upon an Amazon reviewer who wasn’t too impressed with Maupassant. He/she says:

The real reason that everyone makes such a big deal about Maupassant is because he mostly wrote about sex. His stories are entertaining but not extraordinary…

He’s right, and he’s wrong. Yes, Maupassant mostly wrote about sex. But I believe that Maupassant’s writing has a hint of extraordinary. Some stories are simply masterpieces. I believe Maupassant deserves the credit he received.

The Verdict

As I said, I haven’t read every story in this collection of stories by Maupassant. But when I read stories like these I am glad that I don’t have a rating system on my blog. How could I assign a “score” to these painfully beautiful stories after I assigned a “score” to Chekhov’s painfully beautiful stories? I am glad I read both authors, but I can’t begin to “grade” them.

If there is one author I’d read again someday, it would probably be Chekhov and not Maupassant. But that doesn’t mean that Maupassant isn’t as good or that I find his stories “worse.” Also, don’t judge a book by it’s cover: I’m liking Maupassant despite its stench.

In the end, Maupassant’s stories feel modern in writing style and subject matter. Therefore, you (personally) may relate to them more than you would to the under-lying politics in Chekhov’s peasant Russia. I guess you could say that Maupassant is the average “Guy.” That helped him become the best-seller he deservedly was.

Questions for you:

1. Which writing style do you prefer to read: verbose beauty or concise beauty?
2. If you’ve read Maupassant’s stories, do you think they’re “all about sex” or is there something else deeper in them?
3. Do you assign “scores” or ratings to books or stories you read? Why do you assign ratings? How do you determine which rating to assign?

• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• Stories by Vladimir Nabokov
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• The John Cheever Audio Collection
• Two Stories by Turgenev

My favorite stories tended to be the shorter ones that focused on one character or one couple. They each had a sad, poignant ending, and yet I loved the beauty in them. Chekhov didn’t try to say too much in each story, and I finished each one with a sigh, wanting to let my emotions simmer before I went on to the next story. Many of them reminded me that life is challenging and full of depressing things, and yet we all still go on day by day. Explaining Chekhov in those words makes his stories sound depressing, and they were in a sense, but overall, they were beautiful at the same time.

My favorites were these:

• “The Student.” I discussed last week how and why the student’s transformation from sadness to joy touched me.
• “The Kiss.” A shy and unpopular army officer receives an unexpected kiss from an unknown woman; his life is transformed by the experience in two ways.
• “Peasant Women.” The story of a peasant woman inspires other peasant women who feel trapped in their lives.
• “The Fidget.” A flighty woman marries a renowned doctor and realizes too late that her lifestyle is unfulfilling: her husband’s love could have brought her true happiness.
• “Anna on the Neck.” When her impoverished father marries Anna to a rich man, her family believes their financial trials are over; Anna finds her place in her new life.
• “The Lady with the Little Dog.” While on holiday, a man instigates an affair; at the end of the holiday, he and she agree to return to their spouses without further contact, but neither can forget the other.

HTR&W

Harold Bloom summarizes “The Kiss,” “The Student,” and “The Lady with the Little Dog” in How to Read and Why. He claims that Chekhov’s stories are great because of

[T]he formal delicacy and somber reflectiveness … make him the indispensable artist of the unlived life. … One should write, Chekhov said, so that the reader needs no explanations from the author. The actions, conversations, and meditations of the characters had to be sufficient… (page 37)

That is exactly why I loved reading Chekhov: the action and thoughts of the characters told the story, rather than the descriptions of the author.

I appreciate the rest of Bloom’s remarks on these stories. Although I felt differently than Bloom did on reading the stories, I still appreciated reading what grabbed his attention.

What grabs your attention in Chekhov? Do you have a favorite story I may have missed?

• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Two Stories by Turgenev
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Decide for yourself by reading it at Project Gutenberg (1,500 words) or listening to it at LibriVox (10 minutes). Note that I read a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Here are some elements that make it perfect for me.

It is short

I mentioned that according to Harold Bloom, Edgar Allan Poe’s definition of short story is “read in one sitting.” But that’s not what I mean when I say “short” makes “The Student” a perfect short story. What I mean by “short” is that “The Student” captures an instant, not a lifetime. It doesn’t give too much back story; it doesn’t give too many details. It is concise and yet complete. And to me, it’s amazing to be able to create something so cohesive and powerful in so few words. (As I said when I reviewed On Writing, I don’t believe that length or quantity is a necessary measure of “good writing.”)

It captures one main character in one moment/subject

Sometimes a short story has two characters that act as one (a couple in a relationship, for example) but I think short stories that try to capture too many characters (as do some of Chekhov’s in the volume I’m reading) lack the pleasing organization or the “short and sweet” element that I like in a story. By nature, I think a short story needs to focus on one character/subject in either one moment or in one series of moments that relate (like a couple developing a relationship or a woman learning to respect her husband or a group of peasant women discussing how they will never love their husbands). “The Student” focuses on a young man, Ivan, on one wintery evening.

The character’s emotions are foremost

“The Student” follows the young man’s emotions as he walks in the wintery night, sits by the fire at the widows’ home, and then walks home. While Chekhov describes what happens and what people say, the young man’s emotions are the driving factor of the story.

Something happens, emotionally

While something physically happened in Turgenev’s stories, I didn’t feel any emotional draw to the characters. I am realizing that I approach literature through my emotions. For me, I loved the emotional draw in “The Student.” Ivan feels one way at the beginning of the story, has a very simple experience, and walks home at the end of the story feeling differently about his role in the world: past, present, and future. I think it is beautiful. Note that I don’t believe all stories necessarily need to have a positive emotional change for a story to be beautiful. But for every story that I like in the Chekhov volume I’m reading, there is some emotional realization at the end, whether that is happy or sad: I finish a story and sigh, wanting to let myself dwell on the emotion for a few moments before beginning the next story.

HTR&W

I wrote this post before reading Harold Bloom’s opinions in How to Read and Why. I may not even need to read what he says for some of these HTR&W works: I am loving Chekhov. If you don’t like Turgenev, don’t give up on the HTR&W list! These stories are better in my opinion. I’m really enjoying Chekhov’s stories, and I’ll write about Bloom’s comments and about the rest of the volume of Chekhov’s stories when I finish it.

Questions for you

Harold Bloom especially emphasized in his prologue that reading is an individual experience; what I like and am inspired by may not touch you in a similar manner. So I want to hear from you.

• What makes a short story “good” for you? Was “The Student” a “good” story for you?
• The back cover of my book calls “The Student” a “moving piece about the importance of religious tradition.” However, to me, I thought the religious story Ivan shares with the widows is not as important as the emotions explored. The introduction to my volume of Chekhov’s stories even admits that Chekhov, although familiar with the Christian traditions, was not a religious man. I believe “The Student” was about a young man understanding that his life can have an impact on others; his life has meaning. But what do you think? Is “The Student” a story about religious tradition?

Other thoughts:

• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• HTR&W: What Is a Short Story?
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
• Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Love in a Fallen City and Other Stories by Eileen Chang
• A Selection of Poetry by John Donne
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)

Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (also called A Sportman’s Sketches) contains more than 25 stories about a hunter (assumed to be Turgenev) relating his experiences among the people he meets. The two “sketches” I read were beautifully written.

In “Bezhin Lea” (or “Bezhin Meadow” or “Bezhin Prairie”), the hunter gets lost after a long day of hunting. In the darkening twilight, he comes across a group of young peasant boys, with whom he spends the evening. Feigning sleep, the hunter overhears the conversation among the boys, which is about superstition and life and death. Bloom opines that we should read this story

to know better our own reality, our vulnerability to fate, while learning also to appreciate aesthetically Turgenev’s tact and only apparent detachment as a storyteller. (page 33)

I struggled to find my “own reality” in “Bezhin Lea.” After reading Bloom’s comments, I reread the story. Upon second reading I could sense what Bloom means: because the narrator was detached, the other characters are developed objectively to some extent. I suppose not “getting it” is just an example of how poorly I read the story the first time, but I also remember that Bloom expressed in his prologue that reading is intensely personal, and what he gets out of a story is not necessarily what I get out of the story. Maybe that is the case with Turgenev.

In “Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands” (or “Kasyan of Fair Springs”), the hunter is returning home from hunting when the axle breaks on his coach. He and his driver stop in a peasant village to have it repaired. While waiting, the hunter meets a strange peasant man, a dwarf named Kasyan. The hunter stays with Kasyan and goes hunting for grouse. The character of Kasyan was interesting to me and the writing was again beautiful, but again it took me two readings to really like him and the careful development of his character. Only after my second reading did I realize what Bloom meant:

[The hunter's] thoughts on Kasyan remain unexpressed, but do we need them? … One need not idealize Kasyan; his peasant shrewdness and perceptions exclude a great deal of value, but he incarnates truths of folklore that he himself may scarcely know that he knows. (page 35)

I think Turgenev has a superb ability to capture the individuals in peasant society within the context of a story. In “Bezhin Lea” and “Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands,” Turgenev captured the different superstitions and philosophies of the peasants without lecturing us or rehearsing it before us. While I’m not in love with his writing, I think that is a reflection on my own ingrained reading habits. I can sense the quality of his writing, and I look forward, at some point in my life and not right now, revisiting Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album.

Note that I read these two stories by Turgenev via the public domain project at Project Gutenberg, where the translator was different from Bloom’s. Also, if you haven’t yet read the stories and were planning on reading Bloom’s How to Read and Why, please note that Bloom does reveal spoilers: Bloom assumes that we, as readers, have already read these stories. I suspect that is how he will treat all of the works on his list. I’ve decided that I’m going to hesitate to read Bloom’s overview until I’ve read the work myself. I’m still intending to read his works in order; we’ll see if that lasts as well.

Do you consider Turgenev’s stories to be superior? Why or why not?

If you’ve read and reviewed Turgenev’s stories on your site, leave a link and I’ll post it here.

• Stories by Anton Chekhov
• The Student by Anton Chekhov: A Perfect Short Story
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Introductory Thoughts)
• Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Favorites)
• Stories by Ernest Hemingway
• Stories by O. Henry (and Another BBAW Giveaway)
• How to Read and Why: Short Stories Retrospective
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• Stories by Tommaso Landolfi