Steven Beattie is a Toronto-based writer, editor and short story lover. For the last several years he's spent a month commenting on excellent short stories from around the world. This year, he started out on May 1, and it's definitely worth checking out.
He writes: "One of the reasons I keep returning to this project is that it has yet to bore me. Another is that after six years, I still delight in the process of revisiting stories I’ve already read, and discovering new ones. The intent when I began the 31 Days was to cast a light on the breadth of short fiction globally. ... This is the spirit that drives the project forward. It is a constant process of discovery for me and, I hope, perhaps also for those who stumble across the posts."
I have not read any of the three stories he's discussed so far this year: Ray Bradbury's "Skeleton," (although at one time I thought I'd read everything that Bradbury had written) "More Sex" by Lynne Tillman and "My Creator, My Creation" by Finnish writer Tiina Raevaara. Next time I go to the library, though, I'll be looking for them. It would be very interesting if some publisher came out with a collection for the year's crop, although I imagine getting the rights to all of them would be so big a hassle that publishers would run the other way.
Not so with the stories found in the various Best American Short Stories anthologies, apparently. I look forward to them every year, a fact which my family well aware of so the current year is always under the Christmas tree. The 2011 collection, chosen by guest editor Geraldine Brooks, was one of the best ones, I think, but I was quite disappointed by the 2012 version. Guest editor Tom Perotta's choices are full of bling and video games, which reflects a desire to be on the edge of the next big thing, I think.
Many of the point of view characters are boys, and perhaps my cool reaction to the stories reflects that fact that I never was a boy and haven't been a kid in a long, long time.
But there are others that seem to have been chosen simply because of their element of surprise. An example is "What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander, which is both precious and false, it seems to me. The author says in a note at the end of the volume that the story has it roots in two things: games that he and his sister played that explored their fears of what might happen to them in a pogrom, and in Raymond Carver's story "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love."
In Englander's story two couples, one "culturally" Jewish and the other Hasidic get to together for an evening of catching up. They drink and the wives, who'd been great friends in adolesence, wonder at their different paths. Then the Hasidic couple bring out some marijuana and the four of them continue talking, getting higher and higher.. The denoument comes when the Hasidic wife realizes that she doesn't think her husband would hide her in a pogrom.
Whoof! That's one heck of a discovery, and I'm not saying that it might not happen. But I just can't see any very Orthodox couple smoking dope together with friends. I have at least four varieties of Hasidim as neighbors. and I simply cannot imagine any of them doing that, although the men quite clearly drink a lot on festive occasions. For a while Nathan Englander had a website where he promised to answer questions about his work, but he didn't reply when I asked if he really thought that part of the story was plausible.
Englander's short story collection by the same name has recently been published to glowing reviews. Good for him. But I think that both he and Perotta care far too much about surprise and shock in their stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment