Short Stories - Nov
Mark Twain once said "I never let my schooling interfere with my education". I read that quote many years ago and it has been stuck in my mind ever since. It's unrealistic to think you'd learn everything you ever wanted to learn in four years of college or 2-5 yrs of graduate school.
Assuming that life is not that short and that polymaths exist in today's age, you can savor a taste of a specific topic/field/skill with a little bit of structured approach. In my opinion, you can only do that well if you do not outsource your learning and your thinking to mainstream media, some partisan hack on Substack or LLMs.
This makes the whole learning thing rather arduous but all worthwhile things are. Don't listen to the naysayers saying you can't learn a new thing past 23. Put down that Sylvia Plath-esque book whose whole bit is trying to poeticize a stick-in-a-mud life. In my case, it bothered me that my familiarity with many authors was restricted to their most famous quotes or interviews. I wanted to mitigate that.
Switching lanes from all the armchair philosophizing, here are the notes on the 21 stories from this month.
The Last Night of the World - Ray Bradbury
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Great read and gave me a lot of feels in just a few minutes. Basically some people in some nameless part of the world had the same dream that the world is ending. They wake up and surprisingly every single one of them remembers the dream. Then they go about their lives but discuss the dream with their colleagues at work and with their spouses at home. Beautifully written, not a moment wasted and reminded me of this scene from the movie, The Source Code.
Summary: The world is ending and you found out a few days early.
Year Published: 1951
Recommend? Yes
A Dead Body - Anton Chekov
⭐⭐⭐⭐
The story is about two peasants guarding a dead body under an oak tree in the middle of the night. They're soon joined by a monk who is travelling alone on his way to a monastery. The monk doesn't wanna stay around the corpse and offers the peasants some money if they can show him the way in what I assume to be a nearby forest. The story finishes on an open-ended note and had me guessing all sorts of doomsday scenarios. Love Chekov and was pleased that this one also didn't disappoint.
Summary: It's as if a trick question manifested itself as a real life situation.
Year Published: 1885
Recommend? Yes
The Queen of Spades - Alexander Pushkin
⭐⭐⭐⭐
This is a great story with some supernatural elements. Our protagonist, Hermann, hears about an old Countess who knows the secret to winning a game of faro (an old card game) but hasn't shared the secret with anyone for years. When Hermann hears the story, he can't believe his ears and goes out in search of her. He finally succeeds in securing a private meeting with her but things don't go quite as planned.
Throughout the story, there's this air of uncertainty: is Hermann ever going to find the secret order of cards that could help him win potentially thousands of rubles in a game of cards? or is the Countess's secret just a farce? Only one way to find out.
Summary: Gambling, a game of cards and a neurotic man adamant to find a secret winning move.
Year Published: 1834
Recommend? Yes
Distant Star - Roberto Bolano
⭐⭐⭐
The narrator is a middle aged Chilean man living in Barcelona who is remembering his teenage days of taking a writers workshop before the country succumbed to a coup. The story is about one of the attendees from that workshop called Ruiz-Tagle who later goes by the name of Carlos Weider.
Weider is a charismatic loner; very good with women, very good with words, and very good with flying planes except that he is a sociopath. The narrator and his friend keep in touch via letters and sometimes talk about Weider though they both dislike him. As the story progresses, it looks like the ascendant star of the aviator-poet would never face the music. Then the gods spit in his face.
For me, the most interesting part was the last 1/4 of the story where a detective gets in touch with the narrator when they are trying to find Weider whose whereabouts are now unknown. The prose is good, very Milan Kundera-like. Agree with my friends who warned me to start with one of RB's novels rather than a novella as a first-timer.
Summary: It's like a detective story but with a Chilean American-Psycho as the main character.
Year Published: 1996
Recommend? Yes
Eight Bites - Carmen Maria Machados
⭐⭐⭐
Carmen's The Husband Stitch was one of the best magical realism stories I've read this year. This one is also a bit on the weird lit./ fantasy side though not as knock your socks off as the Stitch story. There's this middle aged woman who is tired of seeing herself as overweight and signs up for bariatric surgery. Her sisters have gone through the procedure in the past and her mother had also been a very disciplined eater. All this combined with her childhood memories of being fat puts enormous pressure on her.
Bear in mind that CMM is not some run-of-the-mill woke author. There's a sensitivity and care that she brings to the subject matter. It's less of a commentary on the politics of skinny or the perils of obesity and more of a reminder that one's self image needs to rest on something higher than how much you weigh. Like I KNOW I sound so trite here but this is one of those issues where I refuse to budge. I refuse to say that you can be whatever weight you wanna be and the world can suck it because that's just not true. Appearance is super important. But I also refuse to say that skinny is the highest achievement a woman can have because only mediocre people believe that.
Summary: A woman undergoes bariatric surgery and starts seeing a ghost of her former self around the house.
Year Published: 2017
Recommend? Yes
The Wavemaker Falters - George Saunders
⭐⭐⭐
There's a saying in my native language that goes like "marz barhta gaya joon joon dawa ki" roughly translating to "the more I tried to remedy the situation, the worse it got". Reading this felt like that. Stories, in my experience, fall along three categories: (1) the prose and the premise flow along very well (2) the prose is good but the plot is all sorts of fucked up or meandering (3) the premise is incredible but the prose fails to deliver. In this case, it's the second situation. A man is in charge of a wavemaker at an amusement park whose negligence leads to an accidental death and the story follows his relationship after that incident with the people around in his life — employee, girlfriend, counselor.
The main theme is guilt; how it springs up at weird times, how people offer you imperfect advice to navigate it, how it seeps you into your dealings with others. Actually while writing this, I was suddenly reminded of some parallels between the protagonist and Fleabag. I'm not part of the Saunders' fan club so while this one is good, I wouldn't wanna think it about it too much.
Summary: My honest reaction to this story
Year Published: 1993
Recommend? No
The Housegirl - Okey Chigbo
⭐⭐⭐
This was a sobering read about something that gets brushed under the rug all the time. We're talking unpaid domestic labor of underage boys and girls living with wealthy families but in lieu of getting salary, they're offered food and bedding.
The protagonist is part of that underclass, a teenager living with a wealthy family in Nigeria who is not paid for domestic labor. The god-complex of the modern day slave owners is one part of the story. The other part talks about how underage girls are subjected to unwanted sexual advances that they don't know how to shut down.
It felt like reading the lighter version of 12 Years a Slave but one that takes place in the Global South. I say lighter because it is quite amusing and has less violence. I don't villainize people who keep servants as long as they pay them fairly with holidays/ bonus/ sick leaves — like most types of employment.
Summary: A young domestic worker wants the money she is owed but is denied again and again.
Year Published: ??
Recommend? Yes
2BRO2B - Kurt Vonnegut
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I'm trying to say this in the most neutral way possible: Vonnegut is ultra based. I have not read a single thing from him — be it his literary works or snippets from his life — that didn't make me like him even more. Some people are just like that. The story grapples with population control in a distant future and all the quandaries that come along with it when the practice is enforced as a law. The five stars are because I tend to rate those stories very highly that say more with less and give you lots to mull over. Also couldn't help but was reminded of this scene from season one of The Handmaid's Tale after finishing this.
Summary: Who gets to play God?
Year Published: 1962
Recommend? Yes
Pnin - Vladmir Nabokov
⭐⭐
If you are the type who likes reading about the lives of academic professors at small town colleges, do not read this one. Instead, watch The Holdovers. It's a much better story and has some character overlap with the protagonist here. Pnin is an immigrant professor in the US teaching Russian literature. A bit too sympathetic for his own good, the story offers a glimpse of his life in Europe and the nice and not-so-nice things about moving to the US.
For instance, one of the cultural challenges he faces is the Americans' proclivity to address everyone by their first name. We find out how people sometimes take advantage of him; like his ex-wife trying to dump her problems on him and him being too much of a gentleman about it.
I didn't like this story because it felt like being stuck permanently in a winding showroom with depression-era paintings. It is uninspiring, long, and slow-paced. There's better out there.
Summary: A roundup of the life of a tragicomic Russian lit. professor in 1950s America who is a bit too empathetic.
Year Published: 1957
Recommend? No
A Rose for Ecclesiastes - Roger Zelazny
⭐⭐⭐
This is a very good example of at-first-i-was-mildly-interested-but-now-you-have-my-attention kind of story. Our protagonist is Gallinger, a linguist-poet on Mars with a mission to translate the sacred texts of the Martians. He finds out that the men in the Martian race are sterile and becomes romantically involved with a Martian woman. As expected, things go south soon after and he is forced to leave.
The main question the novella asks is this: if life is characterized by cycles of rise and fall and you stumble across one such cycle at a point when things are going downward, should you become resigned and say it is what it is? or should you throw caution to the wind and say "nah, fuck that fatalism"?
Summary: A linguist goes to study sacred Martian texts on Mars and gets involved with a woman over there.
Year Published: 1963
Recommend? Yes
Eidgah - Munshi Premchand
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Last time I got emotional while reading a story was back in June. This one is the second story to have come dangerously close to starting the waterworks. A young orphan goes to Eid festivities and has to make a decision on what to buy with the small amount of money he has. Both of his parents passed away last year and the only family he has left is his old grandma who is a seamstress making very little. It's a moving story of how people with a very high sense of pride would deny themselves their own wishes or needs just to meet the needs of their family.
Summary: It's like The Gift of the Magi but instead of a husband and a wife, it revolves around a young boy and his grandma.
Year Published: 1938
Recommend? Yes
Lajvanti - Rajinder Singh Bedi
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Riots that erupted between Pakistan and India when the British left in 1947 led to the loss of some two million lives. One of the unfortunate social realities of that time was that women would choose to kill themselves rather than be abducted to preserve their honor. This story is set in that backdrop. The protagonist is a Hindu guy in rural India and is spearheading a social rehabilitation program that aims to settle abducted-but-now-rescued women back in the society.
His own wife was abducted following partition. They didn't have any children yet and the man misses his wife terribly and is haunted by the times he treated her poorly. He keeps thinking of how he'd treat her like a goddess if he ever finds her again. That happens eventually. But now he is faced with a dilemma. See it's always easy to preach something to others and expect them to follow through on it 100% but things get trickier when the same thing happens to you.
The story does an excellent job of portraying how a man would feel conflicted when his wife is returned to him after a few months. Like you don't wanna ask her those kind of questions because you're not a monster and yet there's this feeling of doubt in the back of your head. Call it like the third order effects of nation-wide riots. Everyone wants to be an anarchist, no one wants to think of the aftermath of the storm.
Summary: A man is reunited with his abducted wife after the communal riots of his country's partition and is struggling with doubt vs acceptance.
Year Published: 1966
Recommend? Yes
Anandi - Ghulam Abbas
⭐⭐⭐
It's a social commentary on how people are quick to judge prostitutes but not men who keep them in business. We find ourselves in a town hall meeting where people are complaining about how having a red light district in the middle of a city is bad for the families living in the surroundings. The city council, after listening to a plethora of complaints and arguments, forces the prostitutes to move a few miles outside of the city.
The funniest thing happens next. What was aimed as a measure to alienate the workers of a murky profession achieves the opposite. Since these women have money, they commission architects to build grand houses in the newly allotted area. The presence of construction workers invites all kinds of new small businesses in that locality and before long a new town comes into being. Prostitution may be the oldest business in the world but curiously enough, what keeps them in business conveniently gets overlooked.
Summary: A city council's decision leads to unexpected results.
Year Published: 1948
Recommend? Yes
They're Made of Meat - Terry Bisson
⭐⭐⭐⭐
This one is a classic case of is it foreign because it is different than you or is it foreign because you do not understand it? Two characters are chatting with each other after intercepting radio signals from humans from planet Earth. Only thing is they're not sure if they should reply back or let the humans think that the signal was not received at all. A short-and-sweet note on meet-the-humans. Who doesn't enjoys being perceived once in a while?
Summary: Outsiders from another galaxy are discussing humans and whether they should let the humans know about their existence.
Year Published: 1991
Recommend? Yes
The Algorithms for Love - Ken Liu
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A husband and wife run a business of selling robot AI dolls (not those kind of dolls, you pervert!). These dolls are intelligent, they can converse at length, their vocabulary is remarkable and their faces can pull a whole range of human emotions. Even the woman behind these dolls has an inspiring backstory; losing her child shortly after birth, can't have babies again, is using her programming skills so that other women around the world with the same pain as her don't need to suffer.
All these details imply that she should be extremely happy and proud of what she has achieved. Yet she engages in dangerous self-harm. Something about developing more advanced models of AI dolls has irreversibly changed her views on human behavior/psyche. Kinda relevant to the are-LLM-models-sentient-now discourse that springs up on Twitter every so often.
Summary: A gifted programmer builds life-like robot dolls as a business but the more refined her creations become, the stronger her descent into despair.
Year Published: 2004
Recommend? Yes
Birthday Girl - Haruki Murakami
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
My first reaction: Murakami, you *******! Explain it to me in plain terms right now.
My second reaction after sometime: Ok I may have overreacted. That was very metaphorical, very dream-like.
So it's about this girl working at a Tokyo restaurant. She is waitressing on her 20th birthday and due to an unexpected series of events is asked to deliver dinner to the reclusive restaurant owner who lives a few floors above the restaurant. The girl isn't expecting anything out of the encounter. But she is proved wrong. Because the ending is so ambiguous, it's fun to theorize the character's intent as well as thinking of Murakami in the what-did-he-mean-by-this sense.
Summary: A girl's life is about to change on her 20th birthday.
Year Published: 2002
Recommend? Yes
Eveline - James Joyce
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Eveline is a young 19-ish girl living in Dublin. She comes from a dysfunctional family and is planning to escape from her abusive father with a sailor. Most of the story encompasses the struggle, doubts and nostalgia that grips a person in the last few days before the escape. Be warned: this is not a light read but then again knowing Joyce, has he ever been a light read?
Summary: A girl has to make a choice at the dock.
Year Published: 1904
Recommend? Yes
Babycakes - Neil Gaiman
⭐⭐⭐
Gaiman is a brilliant writer, no contesting that. But this one felt like a short, angry speech without a satisfying conclusion. The premise is that animal testing is bad and people's cold-heartedness on the matter needs to be called out. I agree not only verbally but I put it into practice in not working with any animal models/ behavior experiments throughout my neuroscience degree (worked with stem cells). The problem here is with the association. Neil likens the thought of such experiments as similar to experimenting on human babies. This is a classic case of appeal-to-emotion.
Let me explain: I've seen enough protests against animal testing on my very own uni campus but many of the people protesting this aren't even aware of how stringent the criteria is for working with animals in today's world, especially in the Global North. There is a reason one of the first sections in the methods part of a research paper is getting approval from the Ethics Board. Point being that Gaiman's indirect argument harbors on a strict binary. Real world is a lot more complicated.
Summary: It's an imaginative take on the harms of animal testing.
Year Published: 1990
Recommend? No
Superiority - Arthur C. Clark
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This was such a fun, exhilarating read. It's about a space war between two civilizations where one side is planning to win by deploying sophisticated weapons never seen before. The only problem is that there are some organizational flaws that haven't been tweaked out yet. When you are writing or creating some artwork or shipping software, it's ok if there are minor bugs or imperfections. Most people would not be overly critical about it at the first rollout. But if your entire strategy is to defeat the enemy by the dint of your technological superiority, any technical flaw would be akin to suicide.
Summary: Perfect is the enemy of good.
Year Published: 1951
Recommend? Yes
The Burning Plain - Juan Rulfo
⭐⭐⭐
A group of bandits go around raiding villages and evading authority during the last days of Mexican Revolution. They terrorize the locals, burn their crops and the leader of the bandits claims that they are still fighting for the revolution when in fact they are a bunch of rogues. The narrator is part of that bandit group and is retelling the story during his days of imprisonment. It reminded me somewhat of rebel militias around the world who, once the war ends, don't know what to do with all the free time and acquired training and often get rehired as contract killers and/or part of mercenary groups.
Summary: You either die a revolutionary or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.
Year Published: 1953
Recommend? No
Dream of A Ridiculous Man - Fyodor Dostoevsky
⭐⭐⭐⭐
This one is for philosophy-heads. A man with suicidal thoughts encounters a distressed young girl on the street that he refuses to help. Later that night when he falls asleep, he discovers that he killed himself and is taken to a parallel paradise-like place where humans live in total harmony and bliss. That changes after the protagonist's arrival. He introduces those people to deception and shame and soon after the peaceful climate of that place is gone.
When the man wakes up from that dream, he is transformed. His conviction becomes even stronger that men can create paradise on earth if they love others the same way they love themselves. Obviously a very noble premise but we know that changing others is a hard endeavor and can sometimes take years or decades. Still it's Dostoevsky, I don't need to convince you of how devastating or impactful the prose can be. Make sure that you read this when you have time and mental space. Dense stories like these can't be rushed.
Summary: A man is alarmed by the consequences of his actions in a dream leading him to change for the better in the real world.
Year Published: 1877
Recommend? Yes
Not the audiobook type
Call me old-fashioned but I am not the audiobook type. All the stories I've read this year (or ever really) are on paper — either physical or digital. I would gladly listen to people give interviews or lectures or read Ginsberg's America to me but I feel like reading a story at your own pace feels more apt than have someone pour it in your ears. To each their own.
tutaonana baadaye | خدا حافظ | ¡Hasta luego!