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I am slowly but surely catching up — in the meantime, please keep the discussion going.

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Just as I was crawling out of the hole I was in, my blog gets hacked!  Things are back up, and I will finally start catching up on my reading of The New Yorker.  I will have thoughts here soon.

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I can’t wait to get caught up and read this one.  Feel free to leave any comments while I get back on my feet.

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 As you can see from my complete lack of posts and commentary, I’ve still been under the work bus.  I’ll get caught up eventually — I promise!

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I am, obviously, getting behind here.  The culprit is work.  I have been at the office from the wee hours of the morning until the wee hours of the morning for some time now, and I haven’t had a second to catch up.  While there are a few more days that promise to be just as bad this week, there should still be some time to catch up on sleep and on my reading/reviewing.  Until then . . .

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This is an incredibly short story — only four columns — and for me it succeeded in presenting a troubled marriage very well in that short space.  Aviad and Maya  are not troubled by thoughts of infidelity, and there is nothing to suggest they are not in love.  Rather, they’ve just experienced the trauma of a miscarriage, and they haven’t found a way to deal with this together.  Aviad, for his part, “could always bury himself in work, but since the miscarriage, she never left the house.” 

Maya is encouraged to take a creative writing class.  Here is how “Creative Writing” begins:

The first story Maya wrote was about a world in which people split themselves in two instead of reproducing.  In that world, every person could, at any given moment, turn into two beings, each one half his/her age.  Some chose to do this when they were young; for instance, an eighteen-year-old might split into two nine-year-olds.  Others would wait until they’d established themselves professionally and financially and go for it only in middle age.  The heroine of Maya’s story was splitless.  She had reached the age of eighty and, despite constant social pressure, insisted on not splitting.  At the end of the story, she died.

As Maya is writing the story, Aviad gives his input.  He doesn’t really get the story and thinks the ending needs a lot of work.  Maya is thrilled, though, when at class she is complimented by everyone, including — particularly — the professor.  This is the first sign that Aviad and Maya are dealing with things in different ways and that Aviad cannot comprehend what Maya is saying.  That some professor got it only infuriates Aviad more.  It infuriates him, in fact, to the point that he goes and buys the professor’s book of short stories (the novel was too long) and even signs up for a creative writing class himself.

As I said, the story is very short.  It’s made even shorter due to the fact that there are summaries of thee of Maya’s stories and one of Aviad’s.  Consequently, it’s a story of emotion much more than plot.  And it worked very well for me.

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I used to like Margaret Atwood, but I’ve done an about-face over the past decade.  Possibly the most negative review on this blog is my review of The Year of the Flood (click here for my review).  And I don’t fully believe this is due to her focus on “speculative fiction” — I just don’t think she’s as good a writer as she once was.  Adding to that is the self-orchestrated fanfare that comes with her releases, and I’ve been really turned off.

I found it hard to approach this story, consequently — and unfortunately.  I was interested in what was coming as the story progressed, but  I haven’t revised my opinion of Atwood.  From her “The Bookbench” interview (see it here), the story comes from a bit of indulgence: Atwood was on an Arctic cruise with some friends, and they began wondering if you could get away with murder on such a trip.  Atwood supplied the tale.  Here’s how it begins:

At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.

Verna convinces herself that she was only looking for a peaceful vacation in the Arctic.  She’s getting older now (she’s had at least four husbands), but she knows she still has some sex appeal — particularly if she’s in a sweater rather than a bathing suit.  At the beginning of the trip, the passengers hold a mix-’n-mingle.  Of course, there are several Bobs in the group, but one in particular stuns Verna:

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My first experience with Nathan Englander’s fiction was forgettable.  In 2009 he published “Free Fruit for Y0ung Widows” in The New Yorker, and all I really know is that I didn’t really like it.  Knowing this, when I read the title of his new story I was wary to begin.  An obvious call back to Raymond Carver’s 1981 classic, I figured Englander’s story wouldn’t be able to support the weight of all of the comparisons it begged for.  Though I’m still trying to figure out whether I actually liked this story, I’m glad to say that it was interesting and the connections to Carver’s story do it no harm — in fact, I stopped thinking of Carver’s story very early on, for better or for worse.

Just like “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” this story involves two couples sitting around a table, drinking.  Our narrator is a middle-aged husband and father.  He and his wife Deb are hosting Lauren, Deb’s friend from childhood, and her husband, Mark.  Only now Lauren goes by Shoshana and Mark goes by Yerucham since they moved to Jerusalem some twenty years ago “and shifted from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox.”  Lauren and Mark have ten children.  The narrator and Deb have just one, Trevor, a sixteen-year-old who stumbles out barely awake at three in the afternoon on this particular Sunday.

Much of the conversation circles around Jewish identity.  Deb is, the narrator says, obsessed with the Holocaust, though her family had been in America for generations.  Mark doesn’t particularly think her interest is admirable, and he shoots it down by relating a story about his father, a survivor.

Deb looks crestfallen.  She was expecting something empowering.  Some story with which to educate Trevor, to reaffirm her belief in the humanity that, from inhumanity, forms.

Discussions of Jewish identity continue.  Mark is certainly the more opinionated and bold of the “ultra-Orthodox” and doesn’t mind suggesting that Trevor is not really Jewish.  The narrator doesn’t really care and even seems to agree, enjoying the course of the conversation, but Deb gets frustrated and makes claims to Jewish culture.  Such a thing does not exist, according to Mark.

“Wow, that’s offensive,” Deb says.  “And close-minded.  There is such a thing as Jewish culture.  One can live a culturally rich life.”

“Not if it’s supposed to be a Jewish life.  Judaism is a religion.  and with religion comes ritual.  Culture is nothing.  Culture is some construction of the modern world.  It is not fixed; it is ever changing, and a weak way to bind generations.  It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld you hold them together with glue.”

The afternoon proceeds at a hazy pace, which is made all the more so when the couples begin smoking Trevor’s pot that Deb recently discovered.  Finally, the couples play the “Anne Frank game,” where they think of people, reflect on their character, and determine whether they think that person would protect them were there another Holocaust.  This leads to an epiphany ending, one that we drift away from quietly.

While I remained interested in the story the whole time, taking in the back-and-forth between the spouses and between couples, I am still not certain whether I liked the story or not.  I’m not sure, for one thing, how it all adds up to the ending, which I liked but am not sure follows the story.  On the other hand, the ending succeeds in making the whole story even more hazy than the pot-smoking. 

I will have to think more, and, as always, will appreciate any comments you may have.

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This is fantastic!  I never believed that Aira, one of my favorite authors, would have a short story published in The New Yorker — and certainly The New Yorker is that much better for it.  Hopefully it will bring him many more readers from the United States.

I’m very interested in what people think of this story.  For me, it very much resembled some of his longer works: it begins in one place, setting up our expectations, and then proceeds to take strange detour after strange detour, finally concluding in a single bizarre episode that is completely unexpected, despite any clues we might have.  Indeed, I felt ”The Musical Brain” matches and sometimes exceeds the crazed meanderings in some of Aira’s books.  Because of this, it’s a fairly good introduction to Aira’s stranger works, like the hilarious The Literary Conference (my review here) and (the to me slightly less enjoyable) The Seamstress in the Wind (my review here).  For those who are perhaps attracted to Aira’s prose but don’t find the strangeness appealing, I still heartily recommend reading Ghosts (my review here) or An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (my review here); while strange, these two are not quite as strange and are a bit more serious.  As a sneak peak, the next title New Directions is publishing is Varamo, which I’ll review closer to its publication date early next year; to me Varamo was a bit of a balance between the bizarre and the serious.

“The Musical Brain” — where to begin?  As in some of his other books, the narrator here is Aira himself as he looks back on a strange sequnce of events from his youth in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in the 1950s (no, this similarity in no way makes this story predictable).  Early on, we understand that Aira has a faulty memory.  He looks back and remembers a time when his parents broke routine by taking him and his little sister to a dining event.  They never ate out, for reasons Aira explains, but on this one particular night – and he’ll come up with a few possible reasons for breaking routine – he finds his memory taking him to an evening out, everyone dressed up.  In a corner of the room he remembers seeing the librarian, and his high school headmistress, Sarita Subercaseaux rumaging through a bunch of boxes of books.  Ah, he thinks, probably his family went out to this particular special dinner to help establish the public library.  However, as reasonable as this sounds, apparently this cannot be exactly true:

During my last visit to Pringles, hoping to confirm my memories I asked my mother if Sarita Subercaseaux was still alive.  She burst out laughing.

“She died years and years ago!”  Mom said.  “She died before you were born.  She was already old when I was a girl.”

“That’s impossible!” I exclaimed.  “I remember her very clearly.  In the library, at school . . .”

“Yes, she worked at the library and the high school, but before I was married.  You must be getting mixed up, remembering things I told you.”

That’s strange, yes, but not the kind of strangeness I referred to above.  Because, at this point, we leave the issue that would seem to take center stage in a piece about the mystery of childhood and memories (I quite like these kinds of books; see William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (my reviews here, here, and here, respectively)).  Instead of following on this line directly, the family gets up from the dinner, and Aira takes us to a room by the theater where the mysterious Musical Brain is on display (I’ll let you find out what this is when you read it, though you’re probably imagining it correctly).  And, before we get settled, the family is driving somewhere else; Aira took his seat in the back of the vehicle, his favorite place to sit, and while explaining why he so much liked the back seat also briefly describes his literary technique:

There was also a more arcane reason that I liked to travel in the back: since I couldn’t hear what they were saying in front, it meant I didn’t know where we were going, and so the itinerary would take on an unpredictable air of adventure.

Of course, this is exactly what we readers are feeling by this point:  Where on earth is he taking us.  Hopefully, we are enjoying the ride and are not too concerned with the ultimate destination.  There is another reason for these detours, though, both for the family and for Aira the writer:

[I]nstead of going a few hundred yards in a straight line we’d often end up driving five miles, following a tortuous, labyrinthine route.  For my mother, who had never left Pringles, it was a way of expanding the town from within.

“The Musical Brain” expands the town from within beautifullly.  It’s not that this is a small town portrait (because surely this stuff did not happen in Coronel Pringles or anywhere else), it’s that in a such a short space Aira reproduces the expansiveness of life as it is lived, complete with false starts, lingering questions, inconsistencies, and expanded by the intrusion of something completely unexpected (like a love triangle among dwarves threatening the town — maybe fear of a dwarf with a gun is why they were at that unexplained public dinner), something that makes no sense (well, you’ll get this in the story).

There’s a great Book Bench interview with translator Chris Andrews, who translated this story and several other books by Aira (click here).  Here is a good take-away line:

But as anyone who has read [Aira] knows, the “correctness” is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well . . . deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in “The Musical Brain”.

I do recommend reading and rereading this story.  Also, if you’re interested, a few years ago I interviewed Chris Andrews for this blog (click here), and it’s still one of my favorite posts.

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Even in retirement, Alice Munro remains prolific.  This is her third short story to appear in The New Yorker this year.  If we throw in October 2010, it is her fourth in a short time.  Before that, her most recent story in the magazine was December of 2008, a year when she publisehd four in the magazine.

One thing I enjoy about Munro’s stories is how detailed she can be while covering a vast amount of time in a short space.  “Leaving Maverley” was no exception.  The story begins with a fairly detailed column about an old movie theater named the Capital, “as such theatres often were.”  We learn about Morgan Holly, the owner, and how upset he was when his single employee told he she had to quite because she was going to have a baby.  Here is the detail I’m talking about:

He might have expected this — she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show — but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.

Those details — the pregnancy and how “those days” dealt with such matters, the private life, change — are important.  But, interestingly, though the story is set up in a way that we might expect it, Morgan Holly and this employee are not particularly important to this story. 

The newly pregnant employee has a recommendation for a replacement named Leah, a quiet girl Morgan quite liked because he didn’t want someone gabbing with the customers.  Further, due to her strict father’s command, she was not allowed to watch (or hear) the movies, so Morgan was even happier because that meant less distractions.  The one problem with this employment is that Leah’s father would not allow her to walk home alone so late on a Saturday night.  The solution: the local police officer, Ray Elliot, “who often broke his rounds to watch a little of the movie,” would walk her home those weekend nights.

After a section break, Munro proceeds to give us Ray Elliot’s back story.  A veteran, “[h]e came home with a vague idea that he had to do something meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him, but he didn’t know what.”  At school, he met Isabel, his teacher, who was married and thirty years old.  She’s beautiful and Ray’s fellow classmates often jest in private that “some guyes got all the luck.”  Here is how economically Munro develops Ray and Isabel’s relationship:

Ray disliked hearing that kind of talk, and the reason was that he had fallen in love with her.  And she with him, which seemed infinitely more surprising.  Itw as preposterous to everybody except themselves.  There was a divorce — a scandal to her well-connected family and a shock to her husband, who had wanted to marry her since they were children.  Ray had an easier time of it than she did, because he had little family to speak of, and those he did have announced that they supposed they wouldn’t be good enough for him now that he was marrying so high up, and they would just stay out of his way in the future.  If they expected any denial or reassurance in response to this, they did not get it.

The story circles back to Leah in the most peculiar way.  It turns out that Isabel has a disease and is unable to have children.  She and Ray never talked about whether they were disappointed by this, but Ray wonders if disappointment weren’t in some way connected to the fact that Isabel wanted to hear all about Leah, the girl Ray walked home on Saturday nights.

I don’t really want to go on here because the story is filled with twists and turns as Ray, Isabel, and Leah live out their lives, for better or for worse.  There is a lot of disappointment, more betrayal, more pregnancies, more loss, and in the end we are left with an incredibly deep portrait of a few complex relationships, and I don’t believe anything turns out as we might predict, though it seems very true to life. 

All this in just a few pages, where the pace is swift, matching the inexplicably sudden passing of life.  Yet, despite the brevity, there is enough detail, often in just a phrase, that we can imagine volumes about even the side relationships, like the one between Isabel and her first husband — really all we know is that he was a veteran himself and he had wanted to marry Isabel since they were children, yet how much that says.