Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

I don't keep books after reading them, as a rule, unless they are books that I love so much that I want to lend them to everyone.  However, I do hold on to them until I've reviewed them.  Now, you may have noticed that in 2016 I didn't review a whole of heck of a lot of books.  Good news!  (Er, nope) That's in part because I didn't read a heck of a lot of books! 

That said, the ones I did read are still on my desk, and it's time to take action.  We'll start, in no particular order, with the one that comes most immediately to hand, and that is....Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Unaccustomed Earth was, as most books that aren't expressly sent me for review, was chosen from my shelves at random.  It has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first whole book of short stories by a single author I have read in my entire life.

If this isn't your first time at my blog, you probably know that short story collections are something that I desperately want to like, but the sad reality of the matter is that I all too often find them uneven and unsatisfying.  I am happy to report that Unaccustomed Earth broke the mold.  Despite my being at the peak of distraction with a tizzy of unwilling workaholism and frantic international vacation planning at the time of my reading, I found each and every one of Lahiri's stories compelling, populated with characters split between cultures, the children of Bengali parents who carve out their identities in places that aren't exactly foreign and aren't exactly home - Seattle or New England or Rome.

Just picking up the book again reminds me of Ruma welcoming her father to stay at her new house in Seattle, for the first time without her mother, and agonizing over whether she should invite him to live out his days with her and her family.  There's Sang who daily fields phone calls from Bengali suitors wishing to marry her but who is in love with a philandering Egyptian professor.  Usha is captivated by a friend of her parents' who became like family when he sought out his Bengali roots in Boston but who broke her mother's heart when he married an American girl and embraced a new culture.  Finally, the collection finishes with a few interlinked stories of Hema and Kaushik, whose parents' friendship brings them into each other's orbits only occasionally during their childhoods in Massachusetts and who are surprised to find a home in each other as adults in Rome, a place that is hardly home to either. 

In Unaccustomed Earth, while the characters themselves may still be striving to carve out a place for themselves between generations, readers are treated to fully realized people whose lives and struggles are distilled into only a few powerful pages that leave a lasting impact. 

I think I might be able to get into this whole short story thing after all.  

Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre

I am on a book reviewing tear.  I know, it doesn't look like it.  Probably because I haven't exactly been on a book reading tear.  The upshot of that unfortunate fact, however, is that it makes it easier to boost my book reviewing ego when I am essentially keeping up with reviews of the books that I am reading instead of 10 books behind. 

Lately, I have made another attempt at short stories.  Short stories and I have a checkered past.  I don't really like them on the whole, but occasionally I come across one or two that I really like.  Reader, I Married Him seemed like a natural choice since I once had Jane Eyre as required reading and actually liked it (When does that happen?), so stories inspired by that famous novel seemed an obvious place to look for a short story hit.

Reader, I Married Him is a collection of short stories by female writers inspired by the famous line from Jane Eyre.  The collection brims over with works by numerous well-known authors of literary fiction including Jane Gardam, Emma Donoghue, Salley Vickers, Lionel Shriver, and a good many more authors that you've undoubtedly heard of.  Some stories share a direct and obvious connection to Jane Eyre while others simply use marriage as a jumping off point to head in a different direction.  Like many short story collections, this one is a bit uneven, but definitely worth a read for some of the highlights.

My reaction to Reader, I Married Him covered the usual bases of my reaction to short story collections.  A little, "What was the point of that?" with a side of, "I don't get it..."  Some, "This is good, but I wish it was a whole book." And, of course, even a bit of "This is really good/clever.  Why have I never heard of this author?"  Oddly enough, yet somehow par for the course (I am going to mostly unwittingly get *all* the sports analogies into this review, just you watch.), despite this collection running over with big name female authors, the stories I found myself the most taken with were by authors that were unfamiliar to me. 

In Kirsty Gunn's selection, "Dangerous Dog," a chance encounter with a few boys and a dog whose bark is much worse than his bite changes the life of a fitness trainer taking a writing class.  In it, Gunn cleverly re-imagines Mr. Rochester as a dog, and somehow manages to weave together what seem like three stories in just over ten pages.  The other story that really captured me was "The China from Buenos Aires" by Patricia Park, about a Korean girl who leaves her Buenos Aires home to go to college in New York City,  There she feels homesick and isolated until she happens upon a boy she knew from home, but is ordinary Juan enough to bind her to a place where she never felt at home?  (Both of these stories were slam dunks.  Please, somebody stop me.)

All in all, I found this to be an enjoyable collection.  While I may not have been satisfied by each story, since I often find myself unsatisfied by the medium, I was impressed with each author's ability to evoke places and characters so fully in only a few pages.  A word to the wise, many of the stories in the collection have, at best, the faintest of connections to Jane Eyre, so if you're seeking mostly obvious parallels, I would advise adjusting your expectations before picking up Reader, I Married Him.  However, if you're looking for a solid collection by some well known female authors that is admirably diverse, definitely give this one a try!

(Thanks to William Morrow Paperbacks for providing a copy in exchange for review consideration.)

Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions ed. by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong

July was the month of weird reads.  Honestly, I was moving and terribly busy and stressed both at home and at work and the usual things that have no problem holding my attention were well beyond my mental capacity for most of July.  Happily, a couple of books rose to the challenge of keeping my over-stressed mind from melting all over the floor while still serving as a good distraction from the madness.  One was Enthralled, a book of YA paranormal short stories that I picked up at my first BEA (which was ever so long ago now).  It's sat patiently on my shelves waiting for one of those moments when I decide I'm into short stories again.  Short stories, especially of the YA variety, were just the ticket for this crazy summer.

Enthralled features a wide variety of paranormal situations from a bunch of pretty big name YA authors.  Obviously, some stories were more to my taste and others less, but overall I found Enthralled to be an enjoyable collection.  Some of the authors' pieces were supplemental to their other published works and offered up a good enticement to dig into the authors' novels.  Melissa Marr's piece about the fairy Winter Queen taking a vacation with her (now mortal) beloved promises to lure me back to finish her Wicked Lovely series, for one.  Jeri Smith-Ready's selection drew on her characters from the Shade series and convinced me that I should give that series another shot since the short story, "Bridge," was among my favorites.  Another of my favorites was Carrie Ryan's "Scenic Route" which is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as her Forest of Hands and Teeth series, a world that I'm now ready to dig into sooner rather than later. 

Other stories stood alone, and I was sad to see them end and disappointed to find there wasn't more fiction out there with the same worlds and subjects that I could dash out and buy.  Ally Condie's selection, "Leaving" was one.  In just a few short pages she managed to create a captivating dystopian world and a couple of characters that made me hunger for more of their story.  "The Third Kind" by Jennifer Lynn Barnes was another great story about a pair of sisters unwittingly being swept into an otherworldly war that I'm certain would make a compelling novel.

A few of the stories left me cold, particularly the ones that were looking on the "lighter" side of paranormal but came off more ridiculous than funny. However, by and large, Enthralled was an excellent collection of diversions that proved to be the perfect opportunity for me to dip back into the waters of paranormal YA that I'd been missing without realizing it.

(Thanks to the publisher for giving away copies at that long ago BEA.)

Life in Short

If you've been reading Leafing Through Life for anything length of time, you may know something of my love/hate relationship with short stories made worse by the fact that rather than actually liking them, I have more of a propensity to just believe that I like them because other people seem to like them quite a lot. For the appallingly slow reader in me, short stories should be a nice break in the inaction, something I can swallow whole in an hour instead of nibbling at over the course of days, weeks, or, dare I say, months. Oftentimes they're even written by the same authors whose lengthy novels I crave. All the same, more often than not I find that they're either completely impenetrable to my lazy mind which doesn't want to dig deep to discover the (possible) meaning of something that's only a few pages long or like I've turned up at a five course dinner only to be given a salad with no dressing. Given this, I haven't been reading many lately, and the few I have, have been woefully disappointing featuring irritating or confusing characters and never reaching any satisfying conclusion or eliciting any sort of response in me whatsoever.

Then...then, I tell you, I read two of the shortest stories I've read in a long time, perhaps ever. So short, in fact, that it seemed less likely than ever that I would be able to glean any sort of meaning or enjoy any personal response to them at all. Thankfully, I was wrong, and just on the point of walking away from short fiction yet again, I find my faith restored in the potential power of saying something creatively in few words.

As usual, the two stories come from the gads of issues of the New Yorker that I keep lying around my house in the offhand chance I might want to make an attempt at enjoying a short story or desire to create the sort of educated, cultured facade that flipping through the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly simply cannot provide.

The first one was "The TV" by Ben Loory from the April 12 (2010!) issue, the other "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" by Jonathan Safran Foer (whose books I own but have, as yet, failed to read) from the recent summer fiction issue. "The TV" is a surreal tale about a man who doesn't feel like going to work and stays home one day. He doesn't usually take the time to watch TV, but on this day, he sits down to seek out something to watch, and oddly, he finds a show about himself. Not a show that he can relate to or is similar to his life, but a show about him going about his daily life. Soon he is watching himself on TV frequently and what originally appears to be a show just about his daily grind suddenly begins to change until all sorts of versions of himself are doing all sorts of things on TV. I don't usually go in for anything too surreal, but I found "The TV" to be oddly compelling.

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly," a mere one and a half New Yorker pages long, is terribly difficult to summarize. There is no dialogue, there is no real action, and there hardly seems to be a plot of any sort, and yet it's powerful. They style is unique. The piece is rather a litany of seemingly unrelated observations, characteristics, and actions that make up the people and events that make up a life.

I would hesitate to go any further in describing either story, but I will say that both of these tiny stories are absolutely striking in their ability to creatively and uniquely distil the big things in life; hopes, regrets, love, hate, possibilities, disappointments, and everything in between; into just a few words. They are both stories which have meanings that are immediately apparent, but also leave you questioning whether they might mean something different on a second reading, or have some totally different meaning for another person, in different circumstances, reading the same story. Regardless, it seems that both stories have the potential to elicit an intensely personal reaction in its readers that doesn't seem possible in so short a piece.

And I like it.

If you like, you can read "The TV" here. Unfortunately, my favorite of the two can only be viewed by New Yorker subscribers, but if you are one, check out "Here We Aren't, So Quickly".

Megan Vs. Short Story: Round 3

Listen! Do you hear that? It's the sound of silence. The parents are grocery shopping. The 10 year old cousin with the new cell phone has departed for home. The dogs aren't barking. It's like a tiny miracle - which is accompanied by another little tiny miracle, I think I've read another short story I liked. Can it be? Especially, since, again instead of taking peoples' excellent recommendations, I've struck out on my own.

I decided to try another short story from the New Yorker on the train on my way to New York. It's only fitting, no? This one's from the July 27th issue (this year again!), and is entitled "The Five Wounds" by Kirstin Valdez Quade. P.S. If you don't know why it is that I'm "fighting" short stories - you can read the origins of this feature here.

The story opens on Holy Tuesday and finds thirty-three year old Amadeo Padilla preparing to be Jesus in an all too realistic re-enactment of the crucifixion. Amadeo has big shoes to fill because the last "Jesus" actually went so far as to have himself nailed to the cross. Amadeo is certain that if only he can suffer enough and focus enough on Christ and getting it all just right, he will be able to redeem himself from the mistakes in his life that land him with an ex-wife, a house he still shares with his mother, not to mention an eight months pregnant teenage daughter. A teenage daughter who happens to turn up on his doorstep on the very week when he's determined to be the best Jesus he can be. As the day of his "crucifixion" draws nearer and he struggles to come to terms with the way his life turned out and relate to a daughter who is nearly a stranger to him, Amadeo has a lot to learn about where the true path to redemption lies.

I was totally absorbed in this story. The train stops disappeared for me as I stepped into Amadeo's life if only for a few pages. He's not exactly a lovable character, and crucifixion re-enactment is a bit disturbing (as well it should be), but it's easy to understand the regrets he has in his life and how he wishes that this one thing would set things right. He and his daughter, Angel, are beautifully fleshed out in such a short time. She is endearing in her half-child, half-woman way, and it's actually suspenseful wondering if the pair's father-daughter relationship can really be restored even in the most inconvenient of circumstances. Quade even leads the reader to a conlusion which isn't spelled out to the letter, but isn't so veiled as to make the story feel totally unfulfilling.

Maybe there's hope for me and short stories yet.

P.S. You can read this one online.

(Oh, and by popular demand, I've decided to give myself the full point for the last one. Thanks guys.)

Megan: 2, Short Stories: 1

Megan Vs. Short Story: Round 2

Speaking of rarely recurring features, it's time for the bi-yearly return of "Megan Vs. Short Story" the origins of which you can read about here. In a nutshell, it's me, the self-confessed non-lover of short stories, occasionally attempting to read and review short stories to see if I can "beat" them...AKA like them.

Needing a break from the densely packed parts of Updike's chunkster, In the Beauty of the Lilies and a break from the far-fetched ramblings of Bob Moore in Don't Call Me a Crook!, I picked up the New Yorker's fiction issue (June 8 & 15, of this year, no less), and delved into the first story I happened upon therein. The story is "The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht, and I'm happy to report that I actually liked it. The story begins with a caged tiger near death during the chaos of a World War II bombing. Instead of dying however, the tiger is loosed upon the countryside of some unnamed Eastern European country (the former Yugoslavia, perhaps?) where he soon becomes an object of myth and superstition as well as some unfortunate realities among the local villagers.


Now, this, in my humble opinion was a good short story. Starting off with the thoughts of the tiger rendered starkly against the destroyed city as seen through his eyes, the story progresses to a village where the tiger serves as the centerpiece of a puzzle. In only a few pages, Obreht introduces a full cast of characters and gives us a tantalizing little taste of each one's nature. Obreht skillfully uses the tiger to reveal the heart of the village with its gossip and its social outcasts, with its superstitions, struggles, and dreams. The writing has a strikingly vivid quality, and Obreht skillfully weaves together several important themes.

Now, I was all set to award myself a point in the Megan vs. Short Story game, but my curiosity about this author who, I think, must have a promising future prompted me to seek out some further information about her. Imagine my excitement, mixed with disappointment when it comes to the game, to visit Tea Obreht's website to find that what I've read is but an excerpt of her debut novel of the same name, to be published in 2010. Methinks this may call into question my point considering this isn't quite a short story after all, but I'll give myself a 1/2 point because it could be and console myself with thoughts of this future novel which I am already looking forward to reading.

Oh, by the way, I did look to see if this was available among the New Yorker's many free online options, and it does not appear to be. Just so you don't think I'm holding out on you - I totally wish I could link it for all five of you loyal readers of my blog and further share my joy at having enjoyed short fiction for a change. ;-)

Short Stories: 1, Megan: .5

Megan Vs. Short Story Round 1

Once upon a time not so very long ago, I decided I would like short stories. Not that I did like short stories, that I would like short stories. This is rather a bizarre decision because but for a few in high school that survived rigorous overanalyzation and still came out on top, I don't have much of a track record with the things. I either don't read them, or read them and don't understand or very much enjoy them. I get a brief peak into some situation or characters and it's not enough to answer all the questions burning in my mind, which is also startlingly ironic considering I don't have an inquiring mind at all. It's why I don't do author interviews. It's why I'm no good at keeping small talk going. It's probably why I do such a dismal job at interviewing for jobs. Questions just don't burn in my mind begging for answers. At least, not at the right times.

Nonetheless, I saw all the bloggers reading the short stories and loving them and figured I was missing out on some crucial reading experience (or, my childish mind at that moment whined, "I want to be like the cool kids!"). They were stories, they were short, other people liked them, and they make for an easy blog post for your local lit blogger, no? "What's not to like?" my easily rationalized mind asked, and so I set about acquiring them. I bought authors' collections of short stories. I stretched out my hand for an anthology or two. I won one in a blog contest. I grabbed a review copy of one. When I saw that my mom was being offered a great price, I even subscribed to a year of the New Yorker ("Oooh, cheap! And they have short stories!")...and then another. Having done all this, I think in the year and maybe a half that I've been blogging I have read a grand total of two, both compliments of the only two New Yorkers I've managed to read cover to cover, and it does demand to be read cover to cover, you know. The first was a selection by Louise Erdrich, of whose books I have read two. One which was excellent, one of my favorites, and one which left me oh so cold. The short story followed in the trail of the latter. I didn't understand it or think it had enough of a point to even make a blog post about it.

Now I've read this second one, and I didn't particularly like it either, but I do like to think that maybe I understood it. So, I thought, why not start a totally irregular blog feature wherein I duel with short stories (*ahem* comment on them and announce whether or not the story "beat" me or not)? You can expect to see this feature maybe twice in the next year if I keep up with my dismal track record. Keep in mind, of course, that my viewpoint may be slightly skewed considering the fact that there is no evidence on record to suggest that I might actually like any short story.

But anyway, the short story.

Having read the rest of the March 24, 2008 issue (yes, I know, almost a year old, Megan) complete with charming essay about getting a little too friendly with spiders by David Sedaris and a mildly intriguing story about a chef opening up a new restaurant, I found "The Region of Unlikeness" by Rivka Galchen whose debut novel is apparently forthcoming.

"...In Augustine's view, we live in what he calls the region of unlikeness, and what we're unlike is God. We are apart from God, who is pure being, who is himself, who is outside of time. And time is our tragedy, the substance we have to wade through as we try to move closer to God. Rivers flowing to the sea, a flame reaching upward, a bird homing: these movements represent objects yearning to be their true selves, to achieve their true states. For humans, the motion reflects the yearning for God, and everything we do through time comes from moving - or at least trying to move - toward God. So that we can be...our true selves. So there's a paradox there again, that we must submit to God - which feels deceptively like not being ourselves - in order to become ourselves..."

The story is about an unnamed female narrator who by chance (or is it?) happens upon a pair of men having an intellectually pompous discussion about Wuthering Heights in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side. Having thus encountered the two men, Jacob and Ilan, the narrator is drawn into their society despite her dislike for Jacob who is rather a boor (or is it bore?). Something like love develops between the narrator and Ilan, but then the latter disappears all of a sudden. Despite efforts to pin down Jacob, the narrator can't seem to get a straight answer out of him as to Ilan's whereabouts. As the narrator goes about trying to convince herself that she shouldn't need to find Ilan yet can't stop herself from wondering and looking, a sense of unreality prevails.

As it turns out, the narrator's relationship with the two men is more complex than she can imagine. I won't ruin the surprise, but it involves time travel, the grandfather paradox, and inescapable fate a la Oedipus. In other words, I'll admit that it was rather intriguing and thought-provoking, but as usual when it comes to my reading of short stories, even after thinking it through and arriving at what may actually be the "right" conclusion about the events that transpired in the story, I still feel like I very well might have missed something crucial and am thus left feeling vaguely unsatisfied.

So, then...

Short stories: 1, Megan: 0

A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi (As always, with brief personal interlude)

Argh, the book reviews that need writing are piling up. The working full time is going...well, I wish I could say that it was going pretty well, but as it happens, last week wasn't what I would call the best. But, I should be getting a pretty decent paycheck, I have today off for the holiday, and this week is a new week, right? I spent most of the weekend down in Hershey, PA on an unexpectedly vacationish vacation after plans to go visit a friend fell through. So, I had a jolly good time riding ridiculously ridiculous roller coasters, devouring chocolate and other choice food items, perusing ginormous gardens, and shopping. My college roommate and I survived and enjoyed our vacation quite a lot, especially given its impromptu nature and our sometimes inability to do things that other functional grown-ups seem to do with relative ease. I'm quite proud of us, as a matter of fact.

Well, now, I've got a Penguin classic for you. Blog a Penguin Classic sent me A Tranquil Star to read and review, and I'll admit that I had a moment of book review stage fright as I sat down to write this. I mean, it's not just going to be here on my humble blog, it's going to be on their site, too. So, I went to read a few of the other reviews. Suffice it to say, that I now feel a little better about it.

A Tranquil Star is a collection of some of Primo Levi's unpublished or lesser known short works. Having only read a bit of Levi's more notable Holocaust-related writing, I was surprised at these clever and occasionally downright funny pieces of fiction with a satirical bent. The stories in this collection range from the macabre "The Death of Marinese" in which a prisoner of war conspires to sabotage his truck full of captors if he is to die anyway to "Buffet Dinner" an offbeat piece in which a kangaroo attends a dinner party.

Levi's stories are populated with unlikely and imaginative scenarios from a world in which book characters exist only for as long as they are remembered; to a world in which higher level office workers are charged with inventing causes of death for people whose dates of death have been randomly pre-determined; to a fictional country struggling under the burden of censoring its writers and artists that eventually finds that those best suited to the work of censorship are animals, most notably, chickens.

In the introduction, Ann Goldstein quotes Levi as writing, "In my opinion, a story has as many meanings as there are keys in which it can be read, and so all interpretations are true, in fact the more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is. I insist on this word, 'ambiguous': a story must be ambiguous or else it is a news story." This collection is a mere 162 pages long, but ideally should be read slowly to realize the many layers of meaning with which Levi has imbued even the shortest story. Each story is only a few pages in length, but Levi's writing leaves endless possibility for contemplation and interpretations of all kinds. To those who take their time with it, Levi's writing will reveal its rich humor, its deft social commentary, and its keen insight into human nature itself.