Short Story

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A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

23 May 2009 in Collection, Short Story | 2 comments

By Ursula K. Le Guin.
Begun 09 May 2009; finished 11 May.
For ‘10 Books From My Library’ reading challenge.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Ursula Le Guin’s short stories (also her novels, but especially short stories) need to be read slowly, ruminated, pondered and mulled over. Reading A Fisherman of the Inland Sea at my usual speed — and thinking about it on the fly — nearly caused my brain to implode. Like munching on peppercorns. No-oo. Must take time, chew each paragraph thoroughly, taste all the implications, roll the ideas around in my mind prior to internalizing their consequences. That’s the best (safest?) way to read a Le Guin short story.

So I can only give you an overview of this collection of short stories right now, as I haven’t fully digested it yet. There are seven stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, all fantastical and speculative. Read the rest of this entry »

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Secret Lives

10 May 2009 in Collection, Short Story | No comments

By Jeff VanderMeer.
Read on 01 May 2009.

Jeff VanderMeer is establishing himself as one of my favourite authors of short fiction. Secret Lives is a collection of “biographical” vignettes about real people that VanderMeer has met and knows relatively well. But instead of writing real biographies, he has imagined “secret lives” for all these people that are as varied as their real professions. And since VanderMeer is a writer of weird fiction, the secret lives are appropriately weird. They range from the merely off-beat to the completely fantastical.

Some randomly-selected examples of secret lives from the collection:

  • one character learns how to arrange his attire and attitude such that he becomes invisible to the eye;
  • another exploits hidden passages between our world and others, as shortcuts to and from his destinations;
  • another discovers fragments of a mysterious nation, and becomes obsessive about finding it;
  • yet another attempts to “dance the human genome” in hopes of being recognized for his originality.

There are 36 vignettes in total, and all very imaginative; I never found them contrived or “weird for weird’s sake.” I read Secret Lives in one sitting the day I got it, and enjoyed it thoroughly. VanderMeer not only has a fertile imagination, he is also a versatile writer who’s delved into various modes of storytelling and narration. (Case in point: the varied stories in City of Saints and Madmen.) I’ve been following VanderMeer’s writing for some time, especially his short fiction, and I’m looking forward to reading what he has in store next… as well as getting down to his novels Veniss Underground, Shriek: An Afterword and Finch.

I bought Secret Lives directly from VanderMeer himself (a worthwhile addition to my library!). At the time of writing, I believe he’s still selling copies via this page.

Seize the Day

11 January 2009 in Short Story | No comments

By Saul Bellow.
Begun 09 Nov 2008; finished 11 Nov.
Review written 24 Dec 2008.
Read for the Author A-Z Challenge.

Seize the Day, by Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, is a bite-sized modernist novella set in the 1920s. The story is about Tommy Wilhelm, a down-and-outer, second-rate actor and salesman (now unemployed). He is desperate for a break out of his downward spiral, so he naively goes into the stock-market speculation to try and make some money. The novel tracks a single day of Tommy’s life: the people that he meets (including his arrogantly proud father), ruminations about his past failures, and the anxiety, paranoia, guilt and dissolution he goes through as he is humiliated, swindled, and ultimately ruined.

Seize the Day was a succinct, stark picture of a man’s breakdown in a ruthless, cutthroat, uncaring society. Tommy’s existential crisis and emotional breakdown was described nakedly and dispassionately; Bellow did not mince any words, and we are confronted by the nightmare of a man’s dissolution. Indeed, the story made me very uncomfortable, because who wants to face the reality of how cruel and selfish human beings can be? It was a very effective criticism of the heartless, ambitious, and greedy spirit of the 1920s — or at least, portrayed the zeitgeist without frills or excuses, allowing us readers to come to our own conclusions.

I thought Seize the Day was an excellent, short, punchy snapshot of Tommy’s ruined life. It was also a modernist story; not really my kind of thing, but worth reading nevertheless as an introduction to Saul Bellow’s oeuvre. Still deciding whether to read his other books - maybe Herzog or Henderson the Rain King will be next.

(I just realized that I read this at a time when the world economy was in freefall. Interesting coincidence!)

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The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

10 January 2009 in Collection, Short Story | No comments

By Ursula K. Le Guin.
Begun 01 Oct 2008; finished 05 Oct.
Review written 26 Oct 2008.

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is a farrago of Ursula Le Guin’s earliest short fiction: a handful of the most hard/’technical’ science fiction that she would ever write (that nevertheless also have their sociological commentary), the seminal stories that eventually developed into the Earthsea and Hainish series, and the rest, all psychomyths in SF, modern or historical setting, which ruminate over various aspects of human nature and our relationship with each other and with technology. Several of her short stories are also platforms for Le Guin’s political and social ideologies, preludes of her novels which discuss ideology in greater depth.

This is the first book in my quest to read all of Le Guin’s short fiction. All the stories in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters already display Le Guin’s characteristic writing voice: sober, contemplative, sometimes whimsical, sometimes dryly humourous, melancholy but not pessimistic. This collection gives a fine overview of Le Guin’s versatility and imagination, and I enjoyed many of them. My favourites:

  • Semley’s Necklace is one of the most sorrowful tales I’ve ever read. How I wish it had a happy ending!
  • April in Paris is a light-hearted and moving story about time travel;
  • I first read Nine Lives in another anthology (and it was my first encounter with Le Guin), and it remains a masterful story about loneliness and connecting with people;
  • The Stars Below is a moving tale about an astronomer-in-hiding who learns to use his skills to live and navigate underground;
  • Direction of the Road is a whimsical and very clever story about relativity from a tree’s perspective;
  • The Field of Vision isn’t one of my favourites, but it’s worth mentioning because it was a mystery-of-sorts, and had an astonishing conclusion - one that you’d not typically see in a SF story.

One collection down, many more stories to go!

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Five Letters From An Eastern Empire

14 February 2008 in Short Story | No comments

By Alasdair Gray.
Begun and finished 07 Nov 2007.

This is a very tiny novella of speculative fiction or fantastical fiction. Five Letters From An Eastern Empire is essentially comprised of five letters written by a certain poet hailing from an imaginary land reminiscent of a mystic Cathay or other Oriental empire, replete with exotic customs and mysterious rituals.

A simple plot is revealed in the letters: the poet is tasked by the emperor to write a poem exalting himself, but the poet’s work takes a difficult turn when he discovers the full extent of the emperor’s tyranny and cruelty. On the whole though, the novella is more about the exotic land and the thoughts of this imperial poet. There’s a strong thread of absurdity and tongue-in-cheek hilarity in the letters that brings a perverse lightness to what could be an otherwise visceral, sensual and brutal depiction of a fantasy world.

There’s not much else to say about this novella. It’s mostly atmosphere and world-building, with a little “story” substance. The author does a neat little job of creating a believable and brilliantly painted world in five short letters.

Bought from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s book sale.

Orsinian Tales

20 October 2007 in Collection, Short Story | No comments

By Ursula K. Le Guin.
Begun 08 Sep 2007; finished 14 Sep.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
–Jessamyn West

Ursula K. Le Guin would rank alongside Ray Bradbury and Jorge Luis Borges as a “everyday magic” storyteller, and alongside Lord Dunsany and J.R.R. Tolkien as myth-spinner (further discussed in the review of A Wizard of Earthsea). I fell in love with the fantastical worlds of Changing Planes (also my first Le Guin), and love her short stories even more after reading Orsinian Tales.

The world of Orsinian Tales is our own, and has all appearances of being set in some Central or East European nation, but the details are never clear. There is no magic or clearly “fantasy” element in any story; some of them are practically about ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Yet there is an atmosphere of the fantastic, the otherworldly, the timeless in those stories. (Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is just the same.) In them, colours appear a little more luscious and vibrant, ordinary sounds contain a bit of music, and the most insignificant or passing moments take on great significance and specialness. Bradbury and Le Guin have this amazing ability to see beauty and wonder in the smallest, most mundane event — this is the “everyday magic” that I speak of.

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The Pearl

20 October 2007 in Short Story | No comments

By John Steinbeck.
Begun and finished 31 Aug 2007.

The Pearl is John Steinbeck’s short story about the discovery of a pearl of great value, and the impact and consequences of this discovery on its discoverer and his family. It is the shortest of all the Steinbeck I’ve read (namely, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath); I read it in about two hours.

This story is a moral tale about how sudden wealth impacts a family, and how this also changes their relationship with the community around them. Naturally, the matter is not that simple, for wealth brings both hope for the future, and suspicion and a defensive posture towards the external world. Steinbeck skillfully uses vivid imagery and metaphor to play off both sides of this struggle taking place in the protagonist’s mind.

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The Book of Imaginary Beings and The Book of Sand

2 June 2007 in Collection, Short Story | No comments

By Jorge Luis Borges.
The Book of Imaginary Beings: begun 05 May 2007; finished 08 May.
The Book of Sand: begun 16 May 2007; finished 18 May.

The Book of Imaginary Beings and The Book of Sand: latest conquests in my crusade to read every single short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

The Book of Imaginary Beings is an almanac of fantastical creatures found in the mythologies of numerous cultures and civilizations, with even a few fictional ones scattered here and there. Civilizations/cultures represented were Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, Norse, Indian, Persian, and South-east Asian, amongst others. Fantastical creatures from the writings of C.S. Lewis and Franz Kafka also featured. This is a delightful overview of mythological creatures and beings, both ubiquitous and unique, and I gained a greater appreciation for the rich mythologies of human civilizations. Borges cites a number of sacred and religious texts, which I intend to find out more about, and perhaps read as well.

The Book of Sand is, like Labyrinths and The Aleph and other stories which I’ve read, a collection of Borges’ various tales. Numerous metaphysical topics are investigated in these tales: the twin/doppelgänger, infinity in both directions (the infinitely large and infinitely small), logical improbabilities, the motivation behind a person’s actions, and progression and looping of time. Some stories which I enjoyed: Ulrike is a romance taking place in a loop in time; The Congress is a secret society whose vision becomes far-reaching that they eventually encompass all existence; Undr is a quest for a magical word; The Disk is about a futile search for a natural impossibility. My two favourite stories are the title story The Book of Sand, about an infinite book (and the consequences of possessing one); and Utopia of a Tired Man, which confirms to me that the humanist vision of Utopia is an undesirable and even horrific vision. In all, the ideas that Borges presents in these stories are thought-provoking and hugely imaginative.

Goes without saying that I adored The Book of Sand as much as the previous two collections. One day I will own all of Borges’ short stories: they are beautiful little gems, small and exquisitely crafted to shine the most brilliant rays of knowledge and a glimpse of a magnificent vision into one’s mind.

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