Short Stories - Oct

In a way stories are like people. You either like them immediately or not at all. Exceptions include a small minority where you're undecided at first and come to love or hate them a bit later.

This month's review features some repetitions which means I'll be reading authors whose works have appeared in the past, aside from new ones of course. What's in store are 22 stories encompassing complicated characters; some are having a crisis of faith while others are convinced they're a fraud, some have decided to live as vagabonds in their own city whereas others answer the call of conscience.

Let's get right to it.

Government by Magic Spell - Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A thing you learn soon especially as you live in different countries is that ghost stories and stories about being possessed are far more common in different cultures than you previously anticipated. This one is from an East African author about a young girl believed to be possessed by a young ghost. Only in her case, the village people treat her like a royalty — giving her the lion's share from animal sacrifices and visiting her as if she's a rare art piece on display.

Before long the girl realizes how she can bank on this new-found identity to gain favors not only for herself but also for her family. Education is good because it teaches you disregard these gimmicks. Why pry into something that doesn't concern you?

Summary: A woman realizes she can make being-possessed-by-a-spirit her whole personality.

Year Published: 1992

Recommend? Yes

The Face in The Mirror - Mohsin Hamid

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The British-Pakistani author is famous for his novel, Moth Smoke, and has a knack for commenting on complex familial relationships. The story centers around a man who wakes up one day to find his skin color changed from white to black. He calls in sick to work and is trying to come to terms with this change. Then comes the issue of meeting his father with this new appearance. I liked the author's treatment of sensitive issues like racism, father-son relationship and guilt, especially the kind of guilt when you think you're not doing enough for your parents.

Summary: What would you do if you wake up to find out your skin color has permanently changed?

Year Published: 2022

Recommend? Yes

The Monkey’s Paw - WW Jacobs

⭐⭐⭐⭐

I remember this story being dramatized in a limited series horror TV show, me watching as a child and being traumatized. A man is visited by a friend at his house and the evening is spent narrating stories of his friend's time in India. He shows him a mummified monkey's paw that is a talisman with the ability to grant three wishes to whomever possesses it. The man takes the talisman from his friend but doesn't believes much would come out of it.

As the friend bids farewell, the man's family jokingly say out loud their first wish just to test out the talisman. Nothing happens immediately and they laugh it off but things set into motion the next day and quite unexpectedly. It's an old story so the language is understandably dated but it has an important lesson to impart: what you didn't gain lawfully isn't yours.

Summary: Careful what you wish for.

Year Published: 1902

Recommend? Yes

Good Old Neon - David Foster Wallace

⭐⭐⭐⭐

You know a story is good when it starts with "My whole life I've been a fraud". Then you reach the end of the first paragraph and burst out laughing thinking, "well, how's that for realness?". I first heard about Wallace through his This Is Water speech many years ago. Pleased to report that his writing style is simple, unassuming, and conversational — so much so that you could argue he's gonna make it easily to the final level of the Yap God Tournament.

The protagonist, Neal, is convinced that he's a fraud. He is describing his sessions with the shrink and is trying to find a way to live a life of clarity. This sounds a bit dry but Good Will Hunting has taught us that meetings with the shrink don't have to be that way. Neal has this sinking feeling that no matter whatever he does, these feelings of you're-a-fraud-and-you-know-it won't go away.

I disagreed with him at times the way he chose to look at his life. After all, it's all perspective at the end of the day. But then again you can't coerce someone into living their life the way you want it to be. On a lighter note, be warned before reading this: in David's world, short paragraphs do not exist.

Summary: A guy is burdened by feelings of being a fraud and wants to stop feeling like one.

Year Published: 2001

Recommend? Yes

La noche boca arriba - Julio Cortázar

⭐⭐⭐

The title is Spanish for The Night Face Up. A young man is riding a motorcycle, gets into an accident and is rushed to the hospital. After getting some treatment, he experiences vivid dreams of being hunted and it becomes difficult for him to separate if what he is seeing is actually happening or just another sequence of the dream.

Summary: A man's senses weave in and out of dreaming and reality following an accident.

Year Published: 1956

Recommend? Yes

Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies - Greg Egan

⭐

Egan is an interesting character because it is practically impossible to find any of his pictures online. A remarkable feat for someone who has been online for a long time and writes for a living. While I loved his short story Reasons to be Cheerful (read back in March. review here), this one was a dud.

We have a man who lives like a bum and moves around from one place to another with his gf. It is 2018, life-like robots live among humans and neighborhoods are demarcated by sharp cultural and religious boundaries and are ruled by "attractors". The people living in these areas are entirely influenced by the cultural/religious/intellectual flavor of that place.

Since the man doesn't agrees with any of those demarcations, he lives like a vagabond in his own city and feels like doing so gives him the moral high ground. I could write 10k words on how this idea of living in a world without participating in is reprehensible but for now let's make do with the assertion that this is not Egan's best.

Summary: In a post-apocalyptic world, a bum-ass man hops from area to another so as to avoid being influenced by them.

Year Published: 1992

Recommend? No

The Unicorn in the Garden - James Thurber

⭐⭐⭐

Who among us hasn't yearned to read a fable every now and then? And especially those of us who have read Aesop's Fables and Dr. Seuss and want something new? This one is about a man who spots a unicorn in his garden and rushes to tell his wife about it inside the house who doesn't believes him.

Summary: Don't be hasty.

Year Published: 1939

Recommend? Yes

The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges

⭐⭐⭐

It's kinda cool that Borges's inspiration for this one came from H.G. Wells' The Door in the Wall. Our protagonist is mourning the death of a friend/lover called Beatriz. He meets her first cousin Daneri who is working on a poem that aims to describe all the notable places on earth in detail.

We find out later that Daneri's resolve to write this poem is aided by his conviction in having access to the Aleph in his cellar — a place from where one can see all points and places in the world without any confusion. The protagonist doesn't believe him but his skepticism is partly explained by his dislike for Daneri.

My experience with Borges is that he isn't someone whose work you can just zoom through. You have to mull over his plots. Often times it feels like he is rambling; mixing-and-matching odd details with each other (Zulqarnain? mirrors?? the Kabbala??? and all that in one story????) but somehow it works.

Summary: A jealous man is unconvinced of the poetical prowess of another man and offers him some insincere advice.

Year Published: 1945

Recommend? Yes

The Test - Theodore Thomas

⭐⭐

In a distant past, people are required to pass through a simulation-type scenario to acquire their driver's license. The test checks the driver's resolve to make the right decision under pressure. But who gets to decide if what you did in the simulation was right? And on what grounds?

Summary: You must pass a fucked-up, simulation driving test to get your driver's license.

Year Published: 1962

Recommend? No

Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor - John Cheever

⭐⭐⭐

The title sounds melancholy but the story is not. A man has to work as an elevator operator in an affluent part of New York on Christmas. He uses the 'tis-the-season-of-giving vibe to his advantage and has a prepared story for anyone who greets him in the elevator. Equal parts funny and moving, the story highlights how we can always elevate the happiness and festivity of an occasion by including others in it. That giving is tied not to how deep your pockets are but how big your heart is.

Summary: About an elevator operator who has to work on Christmas but also happens to be a bit of a hustler.

Year Published: 1949

Recommend? Yes

The Star - Arthur C. Clark

⭐⭐⭐

Me jokingly after finishing this: I swear to God if I read one more story about a guy experiencing shock or despair at seeing some harrowing stuff in the outer space, I'm going to lose it.

A group of astrophysicists are in space and discover remains of a destroyed intelligent civilization on a remote star. The person most affected by this search expedition is the leader of the group, an astrophysicist-priest. What he discovers in the remains is that the destroyed civilization resembled humans very closely, that the last of them created a vault-like device to escape their dying planet and that onboard their interplanetary vehicle was a record of their history and culture among other things.

Clark was writing these stories before the advent of email and the world wide web so his idea of advanced aliens precludes these beings from resorting to advanced forms of communication we're familiar with today. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a hater but I'm also old enough not to fall into despair alongside some protagonist's temporary crisis of faith. He'll snap out of it. The alternative — becoming someone like Dr. Mann — would be more depressing.

Summary: A Jesuit-astrophysicist is torn between trying to make sense of the remnants from the destruction of a human-like civilization and reconciling it with his faith.

Year Published: 1955

Recommend? Yes

The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

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Tolstoy's protagonist is a court judge, financially well-off with two kids, a wife and a beautiful home who gets afflicted with a mysterious illness, the details of which are not very clear. The story starts off by detailing Ivan's life on an upward trajectory. By all accounts, he is living a good life in 19th century Russia and the the last thing on his mind are things like death and disease. That changes when the pain symptoms start.

Sometimes life IS harsh and there are no words that can act as a balm to lessen the severity of things. It's not the most joyous read — readers beware there's like 82,757 repetitions of the protagonist's name alone in the prose — but it does asks the reader to think of how we treat our chronically ill, how we can be someone whose presence does not have to be merely tolerated by the sick and most importantly how someone ailing makes peace with the things they spent their life chasing, the cruelty of constant pain and the idea of looming death.

I think the problem with taking on difficult subjects like death is no matter how vivid the writing is, you can only stomach it up to a point. Beyond that, it just becomes unpleasant and becomes more reflective of the writer's inner turmoil. Sometimes a story is good but you don't want to go through or think about it again.

Summary: A court judge gets terminally ill very quick and is forced to take stock of his life and the incessant pain during his illness.

Year Published: 1886

Recommend? Yes, but you must have a high despair tolerance to read this one.

Toba Tek Singh - Saadat Hassan Manto

⭐⭐⭐

Manto is a bit of a controversial writer... depending on who you ask. He did not shy away from talking about societal ills and was neither diplomatic nor resort to using flowery language. Like Chuck Palahniuk, I was curious to see what my impression of him would be. His story captures the turmoil and uncertainty following news of partition between Pakistan and India and about a mental asylum center in Lahore exchanging its patients with those from an Indian counterpart. Most of the story revolves around the patients' backstories.

Not all of them are truly cuckoo. Some of them are murderers trying to evade a death sentence and are faking being crazy. Some were forcefully sent to an asylum by their own family just to benefit from their wealth or land. I find realism around political events refreshing and a story set in the aftermath of an event as significant as partition was a good read, even funny at times.

Summary: About an exchange of mental asylum patients between two neighboring countries after partition.

Year Published: 1955

Recommend? Yes

Kalu Bhangi - Kirshan Chandar

⭐⭐⭐⭐

I really liked this one, thanks to the writer's moving prose. It's about a man recounting a hospital janitor from his childhood. The narrator is the son of a doctor and was used to the janitor go about his daily duties of cleaning, feeding the cattle and buying groceries for his family. He talks about feeling helpless when remembering someone vividly but only for a few qualities and not being so close to them to expound freely. Despite that, the picture he paints of the illiterate but friendly janitor is one that reminds you of how everyone arounds you carries a whole world within them.

Summary: A man tries to remember a janitor from his childhood.

Year Published: 1959

Recommend? Yes

Dhoop - Abdullah Hussain

⭐⭐

Yeah I actually didn't understand this one very well. Supposedly it's about a boy and his father and how close they were. The boy's father though not being very educated is street-smart and teaches his son lots of worldly wisdom with simple analogies. This inspires him to become a writer later on in his life. Halfway through the story, however, there is a big time jump after which it is a bit difficult to follow.

Summary: A boy's close relationship with his father inspires him to become a writer.

Year Published: ??

Recommend? No

The Artist At Work - Albert Camus

⭐⭐⭐

Jonas is an up-and-coming painter who lives a modest life with his wife and kids. He is visited at his home by lots of fans and admirers either looking to interpret his work or let him critique theirs. While his work is adored by art connoisseurs and casual admirers alike, at some point it stops commanding attention. Majority of the story follows Jonas trying to rationalize his existential crisis, what art means to him and how to make a living out of it, managing fan expectations, especially as they would repeatedly interrupt his focus and the privacy of his home.

Summary: Sometimes solitude is necessary to come back to life.

Year Published: 1957

Recommend? Yes

The Most Dangerous Game - Richard Connell

⭐⭐⭐

Connell's story rests around the theme of making a choice with morbid consequences. We meet Rainsford who seeks refuge on a Caribbean island after a small accident on the ship leaves him stranded. Rainsford is a big-game hunter and has written books on hunting so surviving in an unknown forest is not an unthinkable concept to him. Where things get murky is when he meets the inhabitant of a remote chateau in the forest occupied by a Cossack general and his servant. Rainsford has to make a choice if he wants to come out alive from that place and time is running out. It's a good one though I feel like I would've enjoyed it more as a 13 yr old.

Summary: Two hunters are hunting in a forest, one for sport and the other for survival.

Year Published: 1924

Recommend? Yes

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - Alice Munro

⭐⭐

I have a hunch that most people are only pretending to like Munro. I need yall to stop lying about how interesting someone is just because they have won a notable award in their field. The story follows the life of a Johanna, a spinster, and two girls who decide to play a practical joke on her. However, fate intervenes and Johanna, instead of feeling heartbroken and stuck, takes control and walks into a new chapter of her life. Munro's style is 180° to what I like making it hard to find anything memorable about her work.

Summary: A woman is the subject of a practical joke but things works out for her in the end.

Year Published: 2001

Recommend? No

The Pigeon - Patrick Süskind

⭐⭐

Jonathan Noel is a recluse. He has been living a fairly uneventful life working in Paris as a security guard at a bank and prefers the slow pace of life. That is until he comes across a pigeon one morning who is blocking his path in the hallway of the building. It would've been an inconsequential thing except that the encounter sends Noel in a downward spiral questioning everything from his life to committing blunders at work to renting out a hotel room for the night to even thinking if he should end his life.

The existential crisis in stories I can handle but I was somewhat annoyed at the novella sounding like a rambling bible of a man completely blowing it out of proportion. I'm not the best audience for this genre.

Summary: A man is having a long day at work following an incident with a pigeon.

Year Published: 1987

Recommend? No

Autoportrait - Édouard Levé

⭐⭐⭐

Get ready to read long walls of texts and sentences that have no logical link to their successors or predecessors. It's like one day a middle aged man sat down and wrote about everything under the sun that he likes and dislikes. I find the idea of journaling romantic even though I've never really picked it up as a habit. Like the author, I am convinced that writing about different phases of life would take longer than living them.

So what was it about this wall-of-text-galore that wasn't off-putting? I think it's because he is neither writing to come off as cool nor to appear as a painfully insightful, doomer, middle-aged person. He talks about women, his love life, his love for photography, the foods he like and dislikes, his travels, his bike and other miscellanea about his life in France and these details are scattered across 57-something pages. A good but strange conversational-style read.

Summary: It's like a literary version of Subway Takes 18 years before the web series came out.

Year Published: 2005

Recommend? Yes

The Hunting Gun - Yasushi Inoue

⭐⭐⭐

I watched Shōgun recently. The character of Mariko Sama is still very fresh in my mind. And so it wasn't surprising that the writing in this novella with its sensitive and poetic flair reminded me of the TV show. We find out through a series of letters about a daughter, her mother and the mother's affair with the husband of her best friend. Not all details are known, for example how the affair started, and why the POV of the man, who is central to the theme, is missing? I have mixed feelings about it, partly because I know that love is an irrational feeling but also because I felt badly for the abandoned wife. Once again props to the translator because even as a translated work that deals with a lot of grey areas and controversies, it manages to come out as poetic tragedy.

Summary: A story told via a series of letters written by three different women about love, the absence of it and the consequences of both.

Year Published: 1949

Recommend? Yes

Waiting for the Barbarians - J. M. Coetzee

⭐⭐⭐

It's beautifully written but ultimately a predictable story. The plot goes something like this: A Magistrate lives in a remote colonial outpost. His life is disrupted when a Colonel representing the Empire arrives in town and is convinced that the nomadic tribes in that area, 'the barbarians', are planning an uprising.

It doesn't take long for the Magistrate to question the morality behind the Empire's actions, thanks in part to the Colonel's torturing and interrogation methods and in part due to his complex relationship with a 'barbarian girl' who was left partially blind because of the interrogation techniques. The Magistrate decides to return the girl to her people, an act that results in his own imprisonment and torture.

Shrewd readers would already be able to predict some of the obvious themes: the "othering" of people to justify violence, the unchecked power and corruption of the Empire, whether an equal relation can exist between the torturer and the tortured, the importance of individual conscience and how it can sprout within those who are part of the Empire. What would have been more interesting is if the author did a 180 and tried to make a case for the Empire, something that is a hybrid of Colonel Miles Quatrich (from Avatar) and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas story.

Summary: Of an empowered man who becomes disillusioned with the Empire's oppressive policies and chooses to defy it.

Year Published: 1980

Recommend? Yes

What kind of jobs (if any) did these authors have while they wrote stories?

I've thought about this since writing has not been a historically lucrative career and most people did not have a benefactor. Turns out many but not all writers held office jobs while writing. Franz Kafka worked for an insurance company, Ted Chiang was as a technical writer, and T.S. Eliot worked as a bank clerk. Ernest Hemingway was a war correspondent, Anton Chekov a doctor, and Stephen King made ends meet by working as an English teacher. Small details like these always humanizes the authors for me.

And you? Do you look for extra details when interacting with someone's literary, musical, artistic, scientific or technical work? Let me know.

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